I’ve always had a soft spot for earnest ‘B’ games. Games that clearly had aims of being a top-tier product that just couldn’t quite get there. Typically they fall short for reasons of time and budget, but often also for being burdened with an overly ambitious vision to begin with. By all rights Computer Artworks’ 2002 The Thing is a game that should’ve been dead, buried, and forgotten forever. It was never praised especially highly in its day, and licensed game adaptations of its ilk and calibre were a dime a dozen in the early 2000s to boot. Yet now here we are, twenty-two years later with a lovingly crafted remaster on our hands.

Wild.

Anyway, here’s where I am personally at with The Thing: I adore the Carpenter movie and have seen it many times, and I’ve owned a copy of the PS2 version of this game for years but never got around to playing it. 

So! How is The Thing: Remastered? Well, it’s about as good as one could reasonably expect it to be really. It still plays supremely like a 3rd-person shooter from 2002, just with butter-smooth stability and a visual overhaul. In its bones, it feels dated in a way that many 3D action games of its era do, but I’m old enough to have found that factor nostalgically charming more than archaically frustrating.

Upon its original release, The Thing, (video game), was marketed heavily around its innovative squad mechanics, and Nightdive has leaned on that angle again in selling its remaster. Soldiers, engineers, and medics you meet on missions can join up with you as allies and are able to be given rudimentary orders. In order to be convinced to do so though, they have to trust you first, and they also have to have their fear and emotional stability maintained to stay trusting of you.

The Thing infection itself can supposedly be spread to any NPC companion at random when they make physical contact with a monster also, adding an extra layer of tension and distrust on the player’s part into the mix. By all accounts, none of this stuff actually worked terribly well in the original release, and these systems were highlighted as being a key thing that the Nightdive team were determined to go in and correct. 

The companion systems must have been spectacularly busted in their original forms because even after the work Nightdive has put in with The Thing: Remastered, they still don’t really work as you’d hope. If you give a gun and a bunch of ammo to almost anyone you encounter you’ll raise their trust level to maximum instantly, and NPC companions are so comically lethal with them that even if one member of the crew does suddenly turn, they’ll be mowed down by their former buddies before you the player even fully realise what has happened.

That was the thing, (heh), that surprised me the most really; just how much of a breezy action game The Thing: Remastered is.

It bears all the trappings of a survival horror game of the era while absolutely drowning you in so much firepower and equipment that it ultimately plays more like 3rd-person Doom than it does a Resident Evil. The gunplay is so wonky that running towards enemies while firing at them is often the most ammo-efficient way to play, which also feels directly counter to the tone and atmosphere the game seems to be aiming for.