The Thing: Remastered review: a fantastic remaster of a game best observed from a distance

Nightdive, you done good. The Thing: Remastered is an ultra-sharp and commendably playable update to a game that history will remember as ‘actually a pretty good pick at Choices when you really just popped in to get some Revels but got embarrassed when the till staffer said “is that everything?” in a tone that could have been neutral but equally could have been a damning indictment of your character’.

I’m being slightly facetious here, of course. History actually remembers Computer Artworks’s 2002 shooty horror game for how incredibly ambitious and conceptually inventive its proto-sus social squad system was. In homage to the body-snatching alien paranoia of Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic, The Thing tasks you with not just assembling and directing a squad, but keeping them from breaking down or turning on you – in fear you might be hosting the titular molecular stowaway.

I’m happy for you, history, but I have played the game now, and I say this: the most remarkable feature of The Thing, in retrospect, is how it predicted the entire Dead Space trilogy in miniature. And by ‘in miniature’ I mean with overwhelming weight given to the part where someone decided to throw in modern military elements and bollocks the whole thing up.

Again: Nightdive have delivered a fantastic remake. Every instance of a 2002 sound engineer pitching down a Nokia recording of their cat growling is crisp and distinct, and every face coming out an armpit hanging from a stalk is vivid. Controls and menus feel modern and intuitive, and the only change I made to the default settings was to turn on ‘old school aiming’. I had one recurring crash when an engineer kept dying on one level, otherwise, things went as smooth as the nose of a Swedish forest cat. Sorry. Norwegian.

The question, then, is whether you’ll actually want to play it, which is sort of like asking if you want to spend your weekend at a museum. Full of live crabs covered in rotting meat. And you’re the janitor. And you’re not allowed to leave until you’ve cleaned all the crabs. With a malfunctioning electric toothbrush. But! It’s still a museum, and so contains exhibits both enriching and educational in how they contextualize the present state of button pushing and preserve older ideas on how button pushing could be done.

In short: It’s an interesting game! It’s almost a really good horror game, but then it becomes a bad action game quite early on and basically stays that way for the rest of its runtime.

It starts very strong, though. You play as Captain J.F. Blake, a pint tray runoff cocktail of several different military-type dude archetypes, sent to investigate the fallout of the film’s events. A kind of Kurt Russel six degrees of character separation manifests here in the fact that Blake is effectively Solid Snake, minus all the camp and wit and doofy wisdom and self reflection and basically all charm or charisma. Still! when he asks what a noise was, he asks it with his entire ass. The film isn’t required watching any more so than normal, which is to say: yes, it’s required watching even if you don’t plan to play this. Even if you watched it last week. Go watch The Thing again.

The game’s noteworthy peculiarity comes not from any of its myriad half-baked ideas in a vacuum, but the sheer number of half-baked ideas it has. You’ll use torches and flares to light darkened areas, fire extinguishers to access previously very on-fire areas, and syringes to calm panicking squadmates. You’ll find a thousand weapons per level, but give most of them to those same squadmates, alongside ammo. You’ll hijack security cameras to reveal door codes and occasionally do a turret section. Sometimes, you’ll lead your panicked squad for a nice jog outside to calm them down, making sure not to stay too long in case your ‘it’s cold!’ meter drains and you start taking health damage.

You can even, in the most The Thingly thing The Thing does, take samples of your own blood to hold aloft in front of your squad to convince them you haven’t been taken over. Each squad member has a specialisation, a health bar, and a trust meter. Medics heals your squad, engineers can fix tricky fuse boxes, and so on. Accidentally shooting them makes trust go down, healing them and giving them guns makes it go up, as does the aforementioned “look at my blood!” trick. That this is maybe the only instance that waving a vial of your own blood at a stranger might logically result in increased good vibes is a testament to the premise’s enduring brilliance.

So, early on, you walk slowly through corridors and dimly-lit research stations. Maybe one of your squadmates will see a corpse of a colleague, puke on the floor, and refuse to press on until you comfort them. You take care to keep everyone stocked on ammo and to not accidentally shoot anyone. It feels slow, deliberate, and atmospheric. You go on like this for about an hour, after which the game just runs out of ideas and starts chucking dozens upon dozens of the smallest, speediest, crawliest enemies at you every five minutes. There’s the occasional bit of lively tension when you have to flamethrower one of the bigger monsters without also cooking your squad in tight environs, but there’s also just so much ammo and so much bad shooting that it starts to smother all the other stuff. We’re all very tired. But it’s fine. We have like, 10 billion shotgun shells.

Then, just when you feel it can go either way, the game doubles down on its commitment to ignoring the best parts of its own premise by throwing umpteen dudes with guns at you. They’re not an issue to deal with – keep your squadmates armed and they’ll snipe anything that comes within 100 feet of you more or less instantly. But their frequency does start to leech away the game’s flavour until all the previously echoing, dismal hallways just start to resemble bland boxes. Sometime after your second boss, the game responds to a clear opportunity to introduce a new type of monster with “ah, but, what if we gave the gun dudes flamethrowers now?”.

As I said, it’s that Dead Space trilogy speedrun feeling: measured and effective horror giving way to action horror before being drowned out by several buckets of gun-having men. Occasionally, things get interesting in terms of stage design. A mission that sees you escape from a lab with no weapons, trapping enemies behind doors and ordering squadmates past security lasers feels downright inspired, and an earlier submarine jaunt represents that game’s claustrophobic horror at its best. But even early on, it’s easy to tell that shooting is the worst part – made interesting through context and other stressors – so as soon as the game doubles down on it, it really does fall apart.

Which, to make clear once again, is absolutely no shade to Nightdive. The Thing stays interesting in its foibles even when it’s nowhere close to entertaining. And, on balance, I don’t regret my time with it. It’s a worthwhile bit of in-amber preservation, even if I don’t necessarily want to touch the insect inside if I can help it.