Review: The Thing: Remastered

In a surprising turn of events, more than twenty-two years after its original release, we’ve now received a rebuilt and remastered version of 2002’s video game based on the iconic 1982 John Carpenter film, The Thing, entitled The Thing: Remastered.This is something I truly never expected to see, given how complicated the rights usually are to re-release licensed properties in the video game world.

This is my first time replaying it since it’s original release, so I’ll be reassessing the game to see how it’s held up. I’ll also be evaluating how well the remastered elements of this new release help to bridge that gap of the gaming technology over the last two decades.

Story

The story of The Thing game essentially acts as a sequel to the 1982 film, where you play as a team sent to investigate what happened after the events of the film. In it, you’ll explore the same Antarctic bases that you see in the film, and even encounter some of the characters (or remnants of them) as you explore.

Overall, the narrative sticks very close to the events of the film in some ways and rehashes many of the same story beats, but it’s different enough that it feels just like another installment in a somewhat formulaic franchise. It’s nothing that’ll blow you away, even though you do find out the ultimate fates of some of the film’s characters, if this game is to be considered “canon.”

There’s a decent soundtrack that repeats a lot of the basic themes and style from Carpenter’s film soundtrack, but it’s used very sparingly, since much of the game focuses on the quiet or environmental noise instead.

There’s lots of corny military dialogue and tough guy exchanges with some pretty terrible voice acting to go with it, and some silly characters, including a character that looks just like John Carpenter himself, but at the end of the day, it’s mostly just periphery to drive the gameplay forward and not terribly important to the experience.

Gameplay

The Thing is essentially a horror-themed third-person shooting game, and a good amount of what you experience here is still very much a product of its time. This includes some relatively rigid character models and animations. Despite these things being improved on for the remaster, you’ll definitely feel the age of the game and its engine once you start playing.

Despite feeling somewhat primitive in its engine and technical presentation, it still has a handful of gameplay features that make it stand out from the crowd to some extent, and that have held up decently with time. The gameplay manifests as a sort of squad-based shooter, complete with different classes, each with their own specialties, and while the mechanics aren’t terribly deep, it’s not too common to see this element in a single-player experience.

You’ll have to manage your team as you go through the game, with certain character classes being needed to progress the story in certain parts or to access specific areas that you can’t do alone, and you’ll actively need to manage several aspects of each character. This includes their health, ammo, fear/sanity, and trust relationships that hinge on different factors. Many of these are pretty basic overall and only have 2 or 3 aspects or actions that can affect them, but they still need to be managed, either way.

Some of the shortcomings of the game design tend to step on the toes of the team management elements in a negative way, especially since teammates will come and go throughout your journey, some because you let them get killed, and others are scripted to leave or die at certain points. Unfortunately, any equipment you gave to your teammates will need to be re-collected after their death, otherwise you can get stuck without some critical weapons at certain points, and sometimes those weapons will even glitch out or go to a place that’s unreachable, causing some major issues.

These team dynamics can make for some unique gameplay situations, but can also be a burden at times, so it’s a divisive thing to assess, overall. It mostly balances out, but there will be times of frustration guaranteed for most players when managing these elements.

Another aspect to mention in this section is the general game navigation, and the fact that the game does very little to guide you in the right direction when it comes to finding objectives or where to progress, with only some vague text objective descriptions in your pause menu to figure these things out. Some of the cutscenes will have conversations that also vaguely tell or show you where you should be going, but they can be a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of situation if you’re not paying a ton of attention to the relatively boring dialogue scenes.

There’s also no map whatsoever, so you’ll usually have to do some meticulous trial-and-error when trying to find your next objective and how to accomplish it. While this does cause the game to feel more complex in a certain way, as this can almost qualify as a meta-puzzle in itself, it gets tiresome at some of the more obtuse objectives.

The next major part of the gameplay is the combat, which is generally quite basic and clunky third-person shooting combat, with auto-aim always active unless in the first-person aiming mode, and it’s usually a struggle of juggling many different aspects during the combat. For instance, if you have team members at the time, you’ll need to avoid accidentally shooting your teammates, which not only kills them, but also ruins your trust relationship with them, and since fire is needed to kill a good amount of the game’s enemies (and fire also remains on screen for a long time before disappearing and it hurts everyone,) combat will quickly become chaos, especially in tight spaces.

Healing and dispersing ammo to teammates during combat adds another layer of complexity and frustration, and if a teammate is killed, they also turn into a pretty strong enemy at that point as well, just adding more to the chaos. While all these aspects to make the combat and gameplay pretty unique, they also feel like a double edged sword of more stuff to worry about and get frustrated by. Many of the combat encounters involve fighting enemies in large groups, creating horde-like scenarios that you’ll need to survive to move on, so the combat also gets fairly repetitive at a certain point, especially with the small enemies.

Technical/Presentation

On the technical side, The Thing: Remastered is a bit of a mixed bag, since the new visuals and performance in general are quite an upgrade from the original, with new models, animations, textures, and lighting effects, and these things make the game look and play a bit better than its original version, but it does come with some down sides as well. As mentioned before, the engine the game was built on shows its age in general when playing through a modern lens, even though it’s still quite playable overall.

The controls do feel improved, and there’s lots of customization with key and controller bindings, which is a nice touch, even though they’ll still feel slightly clunky just due to the engine itself. This especially manifests in managing your teammates, where the controls get awkward and you’ll usually have to navigate through several menus just to accurately give them commands or help them out.

Unfortunately, there’s also a handful of bugs and glitches that I encountered during my playthrough, from the weapons and items glitching through floors or objects, enemy or teammate AI getting broken or stuck, character models disappearing, and other little things here and there. It was nothing terribly game-breaking, and thankfully the game has auto-saves after most major events, but having to reload checkpoints because of glitches is never fun. There’s also just a general level of hit detection and collision being a little off, as it was in the original game, with only marginal improvements in this department.

Conclusion

The Thing: Remastered is a nice repackaging and facelift for a curious game based on an iconic horror film. There’s a lot to like here, especially for fans of the film, but it still has a lot of the same rough edges that it had back in 2002, even if some things have been improved.

It’s a relatively short adventure at around 5-7 hours on a first playthrough with not a lot of replay value, but the relatively low price of this remaster makes it an easier sell. It’ll probably be a tough pill to swallow for players who aren’t experienced with games from this era or the films, but it’s still nice to have a more accessible way to experience the game on modern platforms.

(7 / 10)

Good

Rely on Horror Review Score Guide

A review code for the Xbox Series X version was provided by the publisher.