Of all the remasters of old games we were expecting, The Thing would have been one of our least predicted. Upon release on the PS2 and Xbox it garnered a warm reception from both press and gamers alike with it capturing the tone ands tyle of the John Carpenter’s movie well though so it’s not an unpleasant revisit.
The basic premise is that the game acts as a sequel to the
1982 movie with teams sent in to investigate what has happened at a remote
outpost in the Arctic. You lead a team of four people, each of which has different
talents such as medic or engineer and move through the facility carrying out
various missions. The big gimmick for the time is that you don’t just have to
worry about health but also the temperature of the environment and the sanity
of your team.
Whenever you are caught outside a temperature gauge will
drop. If it reaches zero, then you start to take damage from the extreme cold.
On top of this when your teammates encounter weird phenomena they start to
react in different ways. Sometimes they will begin to freak out and you’ll need
to calm them down. The further in you get the more suspicious they will become
when they see strange things and might start accusing other teammates of being
infected. It adds a layer of tension to what is already a tight survival horror
experience and it’s something different from most other games in the genre.
The Thing was never the best-looking game to begin with so
it’s fair to say you are going to have to either forgive or get used to the
look of it now. The textures have been cleaned up a bit but the game is pretty
barren in terms of colour palette and much of the time you are in a snowstorm,
the dark or a fairly generic looking polar base. It doesn’t really matter though
as it matches the look of its source material and adds to the creepiness of the
whole thing.
While fun and trying new things, the game always had a fair
few flaws. The controls are somewhat awkward at best and when this is combined
with the tight spaces it can make combat more frustrating than it needs to be.
This is of course a trope of survival horror, but it doesn’t quite work as intended.
Also, your squad AI is generally rubbish. A lot of the time you’ll just end up leaving
them somewhere and trying to move forward on your own. It’s a nice idea which
adds the suspicion element but if they were just a touch less annoying it would
be much welcomed. The first time one of them mutates into a horrific monster you’ll
still likely jump though.
There are other quality of life issues we would have loved to
have seen added as well. A map or radar of some kind would have been most
welcome. Even in mission one we had issues working out where we needed to go near
the end to plant C4 charges. This isn’t helped buy the dim lighting and we must
have spent over an hour looking for one of the bomb plant points as it was
barely visible. The game also descends into to a bit of a meat grinder blastathon
by the end as well, changing too much from the creeping dread of the early levels.
Overall, The Thing is an interesting game that works well
enough to still be fun for survival horror fans. It does get a bit repetitive but
remains one of the most original takes on the genre. It does the 1982 movie a good
service as well so fans of that will find much to enjoy here. We would like to
see a few more quality of life adjustments in future releases though. There’s
nothing wrong with map after all.
Overall 7/10
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