The Thing: Remastered
Released: December 5th, 2024
Developer: Computer Artworks (original), Nightdive Studios (remaster)
Publisher: Nightdive Studios
Systems: PC, PS5, Switch (reviewed), Xbox X/S
I must confess my surprise at seeing a remaster of 2002’s The Thing in December of 2024. The release coincides with no anniversary, neither for the game nor the John Carpenter film of which I’m a huge fan. Maybe it’s considered a traditional Christmas game. There’s a lot of snow, after all.
As far as retro games go, it’s quite a pull. While it had some neat ideas, The Thing didn’t go down in history as a beloved classic. It had mixed reviews at launch and deserved some stick for being mildly yet consistently broken. One of its core premises, in fact, was busted to all buggery.
Hell, it wasn’t even a horror game.
For all its issues, however, The Thing did have a lot of janky charm that undoubtedly inspired Nightdive to pursue the remaster as a passion project. Their passion is abundantly evident since they’ve gone above and beyond the call of sanity to fix a whole heap of nonsense.
The Thing: Remastered doesn’t fix all of the original’s problems, some of which are so baked in that only a full remake could extricate them. Bless them though, if the developers didn’t try their hardest.
The Thing is very much an action game, dedicated to the shooting of squealing bug monsters with an incredibly cheesy tone. Armed with a standard set of videogame firearms, you run around killing stuff, unlocking doors, staying out of the cold, and doing lots more killing. So much killing.
Smaller creatures die to regular blasting, but larger ones must be weakened via bullets and then burned with either a blowtorch, incendiary grenade, or flamethrower. To The Thing’s credit, flame weapons are easy to use with only minor risk of injury to self. Of all the games to not make flamethrowers suck, this glitchy old clunker nails it.
Gameplay has squad-based elements. I hesitate to call it an actual squad game since teammates are transient in nature and entirely absent for significant stretches. You do regularly bump into potential allies though, and managing them involves some cute gimmicks.
What said management doesn’t involve, however, is the deep psychological mastery this game hilariously claims to display. One of the most entertaining aspects of The Thing 2002 is its tutorial text boxes, which take self-aggrandizement to embarrassing new heights. If you believe the game, ally AI is so advanced as to be just like you!
It isn’t. NPCs can barely navigate flights of stairs, let alone act with independent intelligence. That doesn’t stop tutorial boxes from audaciously bragging, at one point trying to pass off idle animations as an advanced example of NPCs displaying emergent boredom.
Some major credit is due, however. While far more rudimentary than it arrogantly claims, the mechanics for squad behavior were nonetheless impressive in 2002. Games these days love their sanity meters, but The Thing was well ahead of the curve with its team psychology management.
Squadmates become stressed when encountering monsters or witnessing gruesome scenes. They can throw up if they see gore and fear lowers their shot accuracy. When panicking, heads wobble around in the character portraits, which I point out only because it’s really funny, like if Jacob’s Ladder was a budget cartoon.
You use basic stay/follow commands to navigate allies around the carnage, making sure not to linger anywhere gross. If they do have a catatonic or violent breakdown, you’ve got adrenaline shots and stun guns at your disposal - the latter tool coming with the downside of lowering ally trust.
The NPC trust meter is an incredibly simple system. If it’s green they’ll follow commands, if it’s orange they won’t go along with you, and if it’s red they’re hostile. Trust is earned almost entirely by giving someone a gun and ammo, and it’s lost via friendly fire. If there are other ways to move the needle, they basically never come up.
Well, there’s one other aspect to the trust system, and it’s the obligatory paranoia that comes with a shapeshifting monster. Some NPCs won’t believe you’re safe until you use a blood test kit in front of them, the clearance of which shows you’re human. You can also use this item on your squad mates because in theory anybody could be a Thing, and you may uncover a monster in your midst…
In theory.
But we’ll get to my ranting about how broken that shit is. I have a manifesto coming.
Another aspect for which The Thing deserves credit is the dependability of companions during a fight. They more than hold their own with any gun they’re given, able to not just defend themselves but cover the player’s ass too. Medic characters autonomously maintain the health of a team that’s honestly better at keeping out of each other’s way than I am.
They’re not quite as good at using or avoiding fire, but even if they decide to stand in the middle of a conflagration they’ll likely move after taking a little damage. I never felt particularly worried about using my flamethrower around them, which I couldn’t say about many other games. When it comes to friendly AI and combat, The Thing puts many contemporary shooters to shame.
You’ll notice I’m specifically talking about how these characters behave in a fight. As soon as the shooting’s over, your pals stop being John Rambo and start acting like Goombas from the live-action Mario film. They get lost, randomly stop following orders, get confused by corners, and just generally suck at anything that isn’t killing. Also, only a few meters’ distance will flag them as no longer in your squad, and it’s annoying.
The Thing’s clunky, visually buggy charms have been largely preserved, for good and ill both, but Nightdive went hard - harder than anyone should reasonably want to - in the name of pulling up whatever latent potential this archaic software had. Yes, it’s still a bit of a mess and there’s little that can be done about how tedious the campaign’s back half gets, but The Thing: Remastered is brimming with enthusiastic effort.
While the original graphics haven’t been completely reworked and look hilariously rubbish in places, they benefit from vastly improved lighting that’s added loads of environmental atmosphere. There’s a greater level of detail overall, and I’m impressed by the previously unused assets being implemented for increased enemy variety.
One of The Thing’s biggest issues was a litany of massive difficulty spikes ranging from bullshit to fucking bullshit - some levels even had the potential to be outright unwinnable. Once again, this is not something a studio could 100% reverse without a full remake, but this version feels significantly more balanced, and there are even difficulty settings this time - what a treat!
For me, the best new feature has been the addition of third-person shooting. In the original, you had to enter a first-person mode in order to fight, which not only disabled movement but was pretty damn unwieldy. While that mode is still fully present, you can now run and gun without it, which just feels better.
If I’m honest, one major reason I like the added perspective is that it comes with an adjustable aim-assist. Cranking that up to its most generous really helps to offset how clunky combat is, especially when it comes to targeting all the tiny skittering nuisances that make up the vast majority of opposition. Trying to fight the old fashioned way with Joy-Cons especially is almost intolerable.
Right… let’s get to the upside-down head in the room, shall we?
Remember when I said that your squad members might be secret Things and you could root them out with blood tests in theory? Yeah. In practice, the 2002 game was an abject fucking liar.
So many Thingifications were predetermined that testing didn’t mean shit. The game would override test results, transforming proven humans into Thingies simply because the script called for it - which it did a lot. Test kits were presented as crucial rarities but they were little more than useless joke items. To simply call them unreliable would do a disservice to their detrimental impact.
Forced Thingification was either an honest oversight or an active deception, but it’s objectively bad game design either way. It discredited an entire gameplay system, made a liar of the already dubious tutorials, and kinda shat on the movie’s brilliant blood test scene. I realize I’m grinding an axe of over eighteen years at this point, but I’m still legitimately angry at how The Thing scuttled itself for exactly zero payoff.
Scripted transformations weren’t even scripted well. They were underwhelming events that blended into the overall chaos, occurring with an almost matter-of-fact casualness that was easily upstaged by basic combat encounters. An entire game’s credibility was traded in for a comprehensive fucking dud.
So… did The Thing: Remastered fix this horrendous shit? There’s no straightforward answer to that. I know Nightdive made changes for a fact, but I spent most of my playthrough believing nothing had been altered at all.
While it seems that proven humans cannot suddenly Thingify in scripted instances, they can be infected on enemy contact with such ease, immediacy, and repeatability that I can’t see a functional difference. Basically, all it seems to take is for a monster to brush against a human for him to go Full Cronenberg in less than a second.
Funnily enough, every single time I’ve cleared a teammate, he’s nonetheless turned into a monster minutes later.
This has happened with no interaction or visual cue indicating he’d been infected in any way. A fight starts, monsters do nothing explicit, and my guy turns inside out like a minge full of dynamite. Meanwhile, those I hadn’t tested could be swarmed by beasties and come away just fine. Not only do blood tests feel useless as ever, it seems like proving someone isn’t a Thing now guarantees they’ll become a Thing.
A single piece of evidence stops me thinking transformations are still predetermined. I was once able to reload a save and prevent a guy from turning. It was only one time, as prior attempts at saving people hadn’t worked, but I know it’s possible.
That knowledge simply isn’t enough, however, to redeem The Thing’s most broken element. All the effort put into fixing this utterly flawed system seems to have mostly demonstrated just how beyond fixing it really is, but I can at least say the effort was damned valiant.
The Thing was always a game of surprising positives and infuriating negatives. It was clever, yet it oversold the cleverness beyond a credulous point. It gave you squad members that were at once amazingly capable and dumber than cauliflower. It had moments of silly fun tempered by periods of crushing boredom. At once, The Thing was ahead of its time and rather dated. Oh, and the whole campaign still goes to shit as soon as human soldiers become the main antagonists, just like every game that pulls that garbage.
To lavish this much attention on a 2002 non-classic takes a feverish level of fondness, and I don’t mean it patronizingly when I say that’s adorable. The Thing: Remastered works overtime, not just upping the visuals but digging into the old guts and overhauling as much as it realistically ever could.
If one were to judge it purely on a remastering job, The Thing is one of the most impressive games released this year. To preserve the feel of the original while enhancing so much about it is an incredible feat performed to an astounding degree. It’s a game of the year contender for as long as we don’t look at what the game is.
Sadly, we have to, and that game is The Thing.
Sod it, let’s just slap an inoffensive 7/10 on it. S’only a game, innit?
7/10
