Night dive, you did well. The Thing: Remastered is an incredibly piercing and commendable update to a game that history will remember as “actually a pretty good pick at Choices when you actually just popped in to get some Revels but felt embarrassed when the checkout attendant said “is this everything?” in that tone could they were neutral but the same could were a damning indictment of your character.”
Of course, I’m being a bit facetious here. History actually remembers Computer Artworks’ 2002 horror shooter for how incredibly ambitious and conceptually inventive its proto-sus social team system was. In homage to the body-snatching alien paranoia of Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic, The Thing is tasked with not only gathering and directing the team, but also keeping them from breaking down or turning against you – for fear of you hosting the titular molecular stowaway.
I’m cheerful for you, story, but I played the game Nowand I will say this: in hindsight, the most remarkable thing about The Thing is how it predicted the entire Dead Space trilogy in miniature. And by “in miniature” I mean the overwhelming importance of this part where someone decided to throw in state-of-the-art military elements and blow the whole thing up.
Let me repeat: Nightdive created a fantastic remake. Every instance of a 2002 audio engineer playing a Nokia recording of a cat growling is crisp and clear, and every face emerging from an armpit hanging from a stem is vibrant. The controls and menus are state-of-the-art and intuitive, and the only change I made to the default settings was to enable “old school aiming”. I had one recurring crash where an engineer would die in one level, otherwise everything ran as polished as the nose of a Swedish forest cat. Sorry. Norwegian.
So the question is whether you’ll actually want to play it, which is like asking whether you want to spend a weekend at a museum. Lots of live crabs covered in rotting meat. And you are the janitor. And you’re not allowed to leave until you’ve cleaned up all the crabs. With a faulty electric toothbrush. But! It is still a museum, so it has exhibits that are both enriching and educational in how they contextualize the current state of pressing a button AND keep older ideas about how you can press a button.
In compact: it’s an intriguing game! It’s almost a really good horror movie, but it turns into a bad action game pretty early on and basically stays that way for the rest of the game’s runtime.
However, it starts very strongly. You play as Captain JF Blake, a cocktail of several different military-type guest archetypes, sent to investigate the fallout from the events of the film. A sort of Kurt Russell with six degrees of character separation manifests itself here in that Blake is actually Solid Snake, minus all the camp, wit, goofy wisdom and self-reflection, and basically all the charm and charisma. Still! when he asks what that noise was, he asks with his whole ass. The video is no more required than usual, which means: yes, you need to watch it, even if you don’t plan on playing it. Even if you watched it last week. Go watch The Thing again.
The game’s notable oddity comes not from any of the countless unfinished ideas in the void, but from the sheer number of half-baked ideas it contains. You’ll apply torches and flares to illuminate darkened areas, fire extinguishers to reach areas that were previously on fire, and syringes to tranquil panicked teammates. There are thousands of weapons in each level, but give most of them to the same team members, along with ammunition. You’ll take over security cameras to reveal door codes, and sometimes you’ll go through a tower section. Sometimes you’ll lead your panicked team on a nice jog outside to tranquil them down, making sure you don’t stay too long in case your “it’s cold!” the meter depletes and you start taking damage to your health.
You can even, in most things the Thing does, take samples of your own blood and hold them up in front of your squad to convince them that you haven’t been taken over. Each team member has a specialization, a health bar, and a trust rating. Medics heal your team, engineers can repair elaborate fuse boxes, and so on. Accidentally shooting them causes your trust to drop, healing them and giving them weapons causes it to escalate, as does the “look at my blood” mentioned above! trick. That this is perhaps the only case in which waving a vial of your own blood at a stranger can logically result in increased positive vibrations is a testament to the enduring brilliance of this premise.
So at first you walk slowly through corridors and dimly lit research stations. Perhaps one of your teammates sees a friend’s dead body, vomits on the floor, and won’t continue until you comfort him. You make sure that everyone is stocked with ammunition and that you don’t accidentally shoot anyone. The whole thing seems sluggish, thoughtful and atmospheric. You continue like this for about an hour, and then the game simply runs out of ideas and starts throwing dozens of the smallest, fastest, creepiest enemies at you every five minutes. There’s an occasional bit of lively tension when you have to throw a flamethrower at one of the larger monsters without boiling your team in a tight environment, but there’s also so much ammo and so much destitute shooting that it starts to choke everything else things. We are all very tired. But it’s okay. We have about 10 billion shotgun shells.
Then, just when you feel like it could go either way, the game doubles down on its commitment to ignoring the best parts of its own premise by throwing countless dudes with guns at you. This isn’t a problem that needs to be dealt with – have armed companions and they will shoot anything within 30 meters of you more or less instantly. However, their frequency begins to take away from the flavor of the game, until all the previously echoing, dreary corridors start to resemble insipid boxes. Sometime after your second boss, the game responds to the clear opportunity to introduce a fresh type of monster by saying “ah, but what if we gave the guys flamethrowers now?”
Like I said, it’s got that Dead Space trilogy speedrun feel: balanced and effective horror giving way to action horror before being drowned out by several buckets of armed men. Sometimes things get intriguing in terms of setting. The mission in which you escape from a lab unarmed, trapping enemies behind doors and ordering teammates through security lasers is downright inspired, and the earlier submarine expedition represents the claustrophobic horror of this game at its best. But even early on, it’s straightforward to say that the worst part is the shooting – it’s made intriguing by context and other stressors – so as soon as the game doubles in, it really falls apart.
Which, to clarify again, is no shade for Nightdive. The thing remains intriguing in its quirks, even if it doesn’t come close to entertaining. And actually, I don’t regret the time I spent with him. It’s worth preserving amber, even if I don’t necessarily want to touch the insect inside, if I can lend a hand it.
