One of my favorite winter movies is John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). I’m not sure if it actually takes place in winter, but that’s not the point. It’s the icy white landscape as far as you can see (which, given the constant snowstorm, isn’t very far), surrounding the isolated Arctic research post that makes me feel all nice and cozy during wintertime (only works if constant dread and paranoia are good feelings for you). Turns out that in 2002 a sequel in the form of a video game was made. I have to admit I had never heard of the third-person survival horror shooter until the announcement of The Thing: Remastered, developed by Computer Artworks alongside Nightdive Studios, who are also the publishers.
The Thing: Remastered takes place pretty shortly after the movie, as Captain Blake, a member of a U.S. Special Forces team, is sent to the remote research outpost from John Carpenter’s film, with the task to figure out what happened there. Of course we know exactly what happened there, and so it doesn’t take long for them to find a crashed UFO underground, and just a little while later we come across the first human that isn’t a human at all.
Given how vital the mistrust between the personnel is to the movie, they had to find a way to keep this intact for the game too, and the solution they found is rather interesting. While The Thing: Remastered is a single-player game, most levels will feature companion characters. And when this system is first introduced, it sounds pretty complex. There are three different classes of companions, soldier, medic, and engineer, that can do different things. They also need to be convinced to trust you before tagging along, and depending on what you do, what they might see in the environment, or what happens to them, they might get scared and stop acting how they’re supposed to. And if you’re unlucky, you might find one of your companions turning out to be an alien monster that will attack you all of a sudden.
All of this is a pretty ingenious way to keep the inherent paranoia of the nature of the titular thing alive; it’s too bad then that none of this matters a whole lot. The moment you get a companion, you just slap a weapon on them so they can defend themselves and have enough trust to follow you around, and then you’re set for the most part. Any more than that and you’re really going out of your way for something that won’t lead to much better results. Even the blood test item that you can use on a companion to check if they’re human or not, which is a really neat idea, has no real use for most of the game.
And that’s the overall experience of playing The Thing: Remastered in a nutshell. At first it seems pretty interesting with some neat mechanics, like slowly freezing to death if you’re outside for too long, or enemies that need to first be shot with bullets and then scorched with a flamethrower to die, but sooner or later you come to realize that this is a pretty standard third-person shooter, whose additional mechanics are cute but don’t add much to the experience.
It does look good, though; the steely interiors and exteriors with endless snowstorms that obscure anything in your sight with the exception of blue pylon lights and red flares evoke the same kind of atmosphere I earlier described from the movie. It also just makes for a very nice color palette of a white and silver dominating most of the screen with the occasional blue and red highlights. The camera movements during cutscenes are also surprisingly effective. The cutscenes are short and simple, but the dramatic camera movements lend a layer of dynamism and focus to them.
The Thing: Remastered is a solid remaster of a decent game based on an incredible movie (I could go a few layers further with this, but let’s stop it here). It has interesting ideas, but none of them really matter a whole lot, unfortunately, and so what you end up with is a serviceable third-person shooter set in the subzero world of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).
Nairon played The Thing: Remastered on PC with a review code.
