Finally closed the book on
The Thing: Remastered, and yeah...vintage-era Spoony certainly wasn't lying about how bad this game was.
Where to begin on this thing...well, let's certainly get one thing out of the way: this game just fundamentally doesn't understand John Carpenter's The Thing, which is why it's kind of bizarre that this game had his personal blessing and for a long time was considered an official sequel.
The movie is about paranoia and body horror, never knowing who the characters can trust and who is a Thing in disguise just biding its time before it pounces and makes them one of its own. The game is a generic early 2000s squad shooter where you spend the vast majority of your time running around generic gray & blue hallways shooting Half Life head crabs and trying not to led your AI teammates' awful pathing drive you mad. Yes, at exactly ONE point in the movie, a Thing's head came off, grew spider legs, and scampered off. There are hundreds of the damn things in this game, not to mention scorpion Things that spit acid and who knows where The Thing found those in the antarctic.
As you progress, you'll occasionally run into soldier; engineer, and medic survivors and that's where the game's much-hyped "Trust" system comes in. Many survivors start off with their Trust in the yellow, and you need to raise that Trust to green in order to get them to follow you. Unfortunately, this system is just way too easy to negate. Doing a blood test in front of a survivor or giving them a spare weapon is all it ever takes to win their complete Trust, and you can gain additional Trust by using a med kit on them or killing Things in front of them. And that's literally all there is to the Trust system. Allegedly, you can lose trust by leaving your squad behind and going solo for a while, but I never saw any evidence of that. Any time a Thing hits one of your squad, there's apparently a dice roll in the background on whether they become infected and turn on you, but I only ever saw that when an entire mob of Thing head crabs swarmed a squad member and took them down. You CAN use a blood test on a squad member you suspect of being a Thing, but I never saw that actually expose them and there's no point to it anyway because even if they were a Thing you'd just gun them down then instead of gunning them down later.
It's strange how this system works because there are frequent moments where you have to repair these wall-mounted junction boxes (what Spoony memorably referred to as "Fuse Boxes"), and every time you do it the camera goes to an over-the-shoulder angle showing the area behind you as if something was MEANT to potentially happen there. Like, maybe it was meant for any infected squadmates to attack you here? As it stands, it just lets you see any enemies that spawned to attack you while you're holding the button down to complete the repair. I just don't understand the point of the Trust system if you never have to worry about Things in disguise ambushing you. 9 times out of 10, any weird behavior on the part of your squadmates is just due to them getting stuck on doors or getting stuck on a particular spot on the floor until you push them to a new spot that reboots their terrible AI.
There are 2 aspects of the squad system that do work as intended, though: First, you definitely want to make sure your entire squad is armed, because their aim is uncanny. They are WAY better at shooting jittering, bouncing head crabs than you will ever be, ESPECIALLY with the shotgun. 2 AI party members can clear out an entire room without issue. The only enemies that give them trouble are the human-sized things that you have to damage to a particular point and then burn to finish them off. Second, there is a Fear system in place for your squad when it comes to gore. They don't like hanging around it, which causes their stress levels to raise until they snap and go crazy (if left unchecked, they'll even kill themselves after trying to kill you), which is why it's especially annoying when AI teammates plant their feet and refuse to move in rooms with gore until you go over and force their bugged AI to repath.
Speaking of bugs, this game is full of them, and this is supposed to be the "fixed" version of the game. Ammo containers will just refuse to open at times until you close the game entirely and reload from scratch. Sometimes, the game will just spontaneously decide that an AI character that's not with you and you have to keep alive is dead now, forcing an instant game over. Saw that one quite a few times, actually. And I had to play the entire game twice because the game didn't unlock the last collectable trophy despite me following a checklist the entire game where I KNEW I'd used all the save points in the game. The only thing worse than playing a bad game is playing it twice. At least the game is very short.
On its own merits, this game has some real environmental design issues. Your "Objectives" tell you basically nothing useful, and levels make absolutely no attempt at indicating where you should go. I got really stuck at one point in a late-game level because I didn't realize there was a man-sized vent in the back of a dark cell I could shoot and crouch walk through to get to where I needed to go. Not only could I barely see the vent, but I'd tried to crouch walk through similar vents earlier in the level and hit invisible walls. Again, this is the Night Dive "fixed version." Auto saves are incredibly random, including there not always being one at the start of every level. Several times I would hit one of those auto-game overs for no apparent reason, only to load my last auto-save near the end of the previous level.
The game also has absolutely no musical score whatsoever outside a few cutscenes, which is just weird.
In Night Dive's defense, I have seen footage of how this game originally looked and played, and this is easily the most playable this game has ever been. Night Dive added enemy health indicators to your targeting reticule so you could tell whether your shots were doing any damage, as well as an indicator on larger Things for when you need to use the flamethrower to finish them off. They also added D-pad shortcuts for using medkits on yourself and to pull up the flamethrower. Very useful, both of those. They also updated the health and trust indicators in the squad menu to make it more clear exactly how close to death or psychosis your squad is. They also apparently tried to fix the Trust system, because in the original game squad members would sometimes trigger scripted Thing transformations regardless of their actual infected state. And squad members no longer riverdance by panicking in place, as Spoony memorably showed in his video.
And yes, the game looks fine for its age, so the actual graphical remaster was a good job overall. In fact, the game seems to have fairly advanced fire tech for its time, as flames from explosions or your flamethrower frequently spread from the original point of impact and require an extinguisher to put out.
Overall, this is fairly playable, but buggy, remaster of a bad game that can be quite boring at times. I think it was just too early for video games to really do this property justice, as I could see a modern game doing a really Alien Isolation-take on the concept and leaning into the tone of the movie.
Topic: Shocktober 7: NWR 3D (Read 6078 times)
