Review: The Thing: Remastered – Destructoid

I remember reading a preview for The Thing in a magazine back before its release. The game, I mean, not the movie. It’s certainly a game that sounds interesting on paper. So, it’s been stuck in the back of my mind for decades, but I never really made the move to play it.

Why would I? I hadn’t watched the movie, and reviews at the time of launch were lukewarm. I knew it developed something of a cult following since then, but even among fans, I heard the same thing: The whole psychological element was too ambitious and didn’t actually work very well. I’ve been left to imagine its failings.

But I rarely miss a remaster from Nightdive Studios, and since they’ve taken on the task of polishing up The Thing, then the stars have certainly aligned. I even went and watched the movie while running a fever and cuddling with my dog, just to make things memorable and a little awkward. But you don’t necessarily need to have watched the movie to understand what’s going on in the game. I think you should, though, because then you will truly appreciate how completely daft this game is.

The Thing: Remastered (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch)
Developer: Nightdive Studios, Computer Artworks
Publisher: Nightdive Studios
Released: December 5, 2024
MSRP: $29.99

The end of The Thing: The Movie was left pretty ambiguous. I don’t really want to spoil it for you beyond that. It’s a great movie. And since its ending was left so open, a narrative follow-up had a lot of room to breathe. A story could be really delicate with things and even heighten the mystery of the original. That’s not what The Thing: The Game does, however. It stomps right up to the movie and starts breathing down its shirt. The only mystery it heightens is how this wrecking ball got here.

This was 2002, and the standards for video game storytelling couldn’t get much closer to the floor. This is especially true for shooters. It was a time when Half-Life was still naively hailed as having spun a tale rivaling Citizen Kane. So, I probably shouldn’t have expected much, but The Thing: The Game has the sort of narrative I would come up with off-the-cuff if I was trying to make fun of the concept of a sequel to The Thing: The Movie.

You play as Captain J.F. Blake who sounds so much like Kyle Travers from Final Fight: Streetwise, I actually had to look up the voice actors to convince myself it wasn’t. It takes place right after the movie, so it’s still the 1980s, but he has one of the most popular hairstyles of the late ‘90s, right down to the spiked-up bangs. He’s Special Forces, and that’s all there is to him. He’s the only competent person in the universe, and he knows it. There isn’t an ounce of humanity to the guy; he’s just a brick. A big, grumbly block who wears forest camo pants in Antarctica but won’t put on a hat because it would mush down his hairdo.

It starts off interestingly enough. Blake’s Team arrives at U.S. Outpost 31 from the movie and start sorting through the wreckage. It’s a very understated time in the game, as it mostly just introduces you to the concepts of the game while allowing you to visit set pieces from the movie. It’s kind of quiet and tense, which is so uncharacteristically restrained for the game in hindsight.

The team did consider what made the movie great when they came up with the design. The one thing they added that I think works well in the game and doesn’t get enough credit is the fact that you can’t linger outside for long. It’s winter in Antarctica and nobody brought a toque. You’ll freeze if you don’t find shelter. This gets squandered when 80% of the game is in tight concrete corridors, but the hostility of the open air is a nice touch.

What gets the most marketing hype is the trust/fear system, which is just… I get why they’d focus on it in advertisements, because it’s something that makes the game unique, but it’s so poorly implemented that it might as well not be there at all. The Thing: The Game is a squad-based third-person shooter, and the idea is that you need to keep your squad from freaking out when any one of them could be a thing in disguise. The idea is that you, as a player, don’t know who to trust.

The fear aspect works the best, but it’s not very impactful. Your squadmates start getting nervous when they’re around gore and dead bodies, but the problem is that the areas you traverse are absolutely lousy with corpses, so it’s hard to tell when you’re in a fear zone. It usually only becomes a bit of a problem if you stand around in a room with a mess on the floor. Once (and only once), I had to physically push a squadmate out of a room so he could get a breather and get a grip. So, it kind of works; it’s just really clumsy.

When I completed the game, I got an achievement that said I never let a single squad member reach maximum fear level. That means I actually don’t know if something cool happens when they completely lose it because I was apparently a really soothing presence for those around me. Maybe it’s because I constantly live in fear and anxiety, so I know how to empathize with others feeling it.

The trust system is completely pointless, though. Sure, some dudes will refuse to follow you because they think you might have a thing in your pants, but getting them to come around is just a matter of shoving ammo into their pockets. Their trust is only between you and them; squadmates always trust each other unless it’s for story reasons. They don’t need to kiss and trade ammo. For that matter, it’s hard for them to distrust you once you’ve loaded them up. They’ll only start feeling iffy again if you keep shooting them. They don’t seem to think it’s weird that you obsessively check every notepad and carry an armory on their back. Ammo is the only thing they trust.

The whole idea that any one of them could be a thing is the least meaningful layer. It’s true, some of them will sprout tentacles. You can do a blood test to see who’s human, but it doesn’t really work. Like, at all. Dudes you already tested might turn out to be full of things anyway. That doesn’t matter though, because the moment they start to change, all your teammates will suddenly snap and start shooting at them before they’re even done transforming. Even if they didn’t, the friend-things aren’t any tougher than any normal thing. They aren’t a threat. So, who cares if you can trust them?

That’s the biggest problem with The Thing: The Game’s superfluous systems; it doesn’t try for tension. You play as some generic good guy. Practically a super-hero. At the best of times, The Thing: The Game is a dumb shooter. It smells like the early ‘00s. It’s not really a horror game; it just has some gross bad guys.

Your squad isn’t consistent, either. They get swapped out at almost every loading screen. They don’t have charming personalities to get attached to. It doesn’t matter if Simmons exposes his thing. Simmons wasn’t special. There’s an identical dude down the hallway.

It’s a good remaster, though. Absolutely solid. You can tell the tech folks at Nightdive had fun working on a post-millennium game since they loaded it up with all kinds of fancy lighting effects. True to their M.O., they kept it looking like something you’d expect from the era, but it’s not hard to see and appreciate the glow-up. It also ran flawlessly on my PC.

There isn’t as much in terms of extra material as a few of their previous releases. You can view the game’s original trailer and there’s some concept art, but not a whole lot that’s insightful. I was kind of hoping that a game that looks to have fallen apart in production would have more of a story to tell, but if it does, it won’t be found here.

They clearly couldn’t do anything about the game’s weaknesses. That would take more than a remaster. It’s not just that the fear/trust/infection systems were buggy or weren’t fully implemented. No, the original developers had some high-concept ideas and tried to put them into a dumb shooter, and they didn’t fit. The dumb shooter was the prevailing force, and there’s no undoing that.

I also ran into a lot of glitches. I’m not sure which ones were already there and which were introduced in the remaster. I’m also not certain which ones will be fixed by the time you’re reading this since I got to touch The Thing early for this review. And really, the glitches I ran into were mostly just hilarious. I did have to load a recent save to undo a bug a couple of times, but more often, they were just funny, benign things.

The best one happened early. Your squadmates will sometimes throw up when they’re in a bad situation. I can relate; anxiety makes me throw up, too. However, one dude apparently started the puking process right as a cutscene started. The camera snapped back to show the two of us walking into frame, he continued the process of throwing up, but it wouldn’t interrupt the animation. Instead, it played the retching noise, and all the vomit came out from between his legs, so it looked like he was violently evacuating his bowels onto the floor. I laughed so hard. I still giggle whenever I think about it. I caught it in my gameplay capture, and I keep watching it.

Really, as much as I think The Thing: The Game is kind of terrible, I did find it entertaining. The story is just so braindead and full of cliches that I wanted to see more to find out if it was going to be so obvious the whole way through. It definitely has reverence for the source material, but it wasn’t exactly gentle when it came to building on it. To be fair, I would have been surprised if it had even come close to matching the movie in terms of storytelling, so it’s maybe what I should have expected from a 2002 licensed title.

I still applaud Nightdive for this remaster. They’re the only ones with the guts. Regardless of how I feel about the game itself, they gave it the same loving attention that they normally do. More importantly, it’s a licensed game, and those tend to be the most unlikely candidates for a re-release.

Part of me wishes their effort was spent on a better game, but the other part is happy that I got to experience the absolute mess that is The Thing. I know it sounds weird to hear, “This is a mess; you should totally check it out,” but that’s what I’m saying. The Thing is a fascinating cluster of missteps, and a completely unconvincing facsimile of its source material. But it’s hard to look away when it turns itself inside out.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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