The Thing Remastered Review – Review
Night Dive Studios, my favorite purveyor of remastered relics from my salad days, is back again, this time with a project that’s targeting me personally. They have aimed their particular talents at The Thing, a 2002 sequel to the seminal 1982 John Carpenter film of the same name. That film, a masterwork of practical effects led by Kurt Russell’s magnificent beard, was released just a few months prior to my own birth. I preach the gospel of The Thing to anybody who will listen, so you can imagine my excitement when I read, in the pages of EGM (if memory serves) of a Carpenter-endorsed adaptation by Computer Artworks. It was released in 2002, a banner year already packed with Wind Waker, Metroid Prime, and Super Mario Sunshine, but I managed to play The Thing on my neglected PS2 and enjoyed it, though I never beat it. Going forward in this review, when I refer to The Thing by name, I mean the video game. If I want to refer to the 1982 movie, I’ll specify.
The Thing is a unique take on the “squad-based shooter” genre, which was still in its infancy in 2002. There is no multiplayer here: only your character (Blake) and a handful of AI-controlled buddies. These squadmates are categorized into three jobs: Engineers, Soldiers, and Medics. Each of them is good at one thing: Engineers can fix electrical problems, Soldiers are handy with the steel, and Medics can heal other people but, oddly, not themselves. As in the film, trust is at a premium, and taking certain actions can increase or reduce a squad members’ trust in Blake, which will determine their behavior. If they distrust Blake enough, a squadmate will try to kill him, believing Blake is a Thing.
There’s also a fear system, where squadmates become traumatized by disturbing sights over time and might go crazy, killing themselves, shooting their squadmates, or having a heart attack. Further, every time one of your squadmates comes in direct contact with a Thing enemy (of which there are many), there’s a chance they, too, will become a Thing. If they are, it means they will, at some point, transform into a humanoid Thing monster for you to kill.
All of these systems weave together to create a tenuous relationship with you AI-controlled teammates. You have to watch their status screen constantly and try to manage their state of mind, because without them (Engineers in particular), you can’t progress through the game. I’ll get to the practical effects of this later in the review.
The Thing is, as far as I’m aware, Night Dive’s first PS2-era remaster. I find that those games have aged poorly in the graphics department, and while Night Dive has done an admirable job of cleaning up the models, improving the textures, and redoing the game’s text logs and various icons to make them more legible, The Thing will not be on any “best looking PS2 games” lists anytime soon. I don’t remember if the original game didn’t have a score, but this remaster sure doesn’t. The lack of music is almost distracting at times, because the film’s score (by Carpenter and Ennio Morricone) is such a critical component of the vibe. The voice acting is fine, but your various teammates only have a few lines of dialogue apiece.
But what do you actually do in The Thing? You always have a specific mission, like “find the comms room,” but almost no other direction. You’re often left to your own devices, which usually means wandering aimlessly through buildings you’ve already explored or outside in the snow, where it’s apparently -40℉ and if you stay out there too long, your health will rapidly decline. So it’s weird that J.F. Blake would forego a hat. On occasion, you’ll have to survive several waves of enemies. And, just as often, you’ll be asked to complete a task before an NPC will let you progress or join your team. And this is where the problems emerge.
Your teammates are, to put it diplomatically, bad at their jobs. They will blow through ammunition with surprising speed but cannot carry their own spare ammo, and so will constantly ask you for more. They won’t just do their jobs automatically, you have to tell them to do things. They will wander into your line of fire with reckless abandon–especially if you’re torching the alien scourge with the game’s most effective weapon–the flamethrower. Merely walking into a room covered in blood or corpses will cause many men to lose their cool. Being attacked by Things can also cause your boys to go batty, but scripted events, where it can’t be helped, seem to damage their fragile psyches less than random corpses. You can help your colleagues by giving them guns or ammo, and/or moving to another room.
If things are looking truly dire, you can inject them with adrenaline (if you have any) which will quickly lower their fear level. Distrust is, oddly, less of a concern, but if people refuse to follow your orders or try to shoot you, you can give them new weapons or ammo or self-administer a blood test to prove that Blake is human, which will bring their trust rating up. But, as I said, the overall effect of the trust/fear system is that you spend a lot of time micromanaging your partners, sometimes to no avail (they’re often predestined to turn into Things as the story requires), and you begin to wonder if this journey wouldn’t be easier by your lonesome (it would).
Well, surely the story must be pretty good if it was endorsed by John Carpenter himself, right? I did not find it particularly compelling, mostly because it implies a military conspiracy that is wholly inconsistent with the film but also requires some bizarre leaps of logic for the villain. But the demands of the plot also put you against gun-toting grunts long before the game’s climax.
I appreciate that Night Dive chose this game to remaster because I’ve held it in such high regard for so long. Despite all my complaints, it was fun to revisit this 2002 game in part because I came to appreciate how far squad-based shooters have come in the 22 years (good lord) since. There is one more nice feature worth bringing up: you can access a bundle of concept art from the main menu, which is fun to peruse. And like I said in my Shadow Man review, I’m glad Night Dive didn’t “fix” the game. It was a great game in 2002, and, like so many games of that era, was a product of its time. And that’s how it should be experienced.
