The Thing: Remastered review – more than just a touch-up

The masters of the remaster have done it again.

The Thing: Remastered / NIGHTDIVE STUDIOS

There’s a creature out there that can wear your face. It can wrap itself in your skin like a fleshy onesie, nestling against your organs. Anyone you meet could be the beast, such is its skill at taking on their very essence. Some say it makes you even better. The beast’s name? Nightdive Studios.

The masters of the remaster have done it again.

The Thing: Remastered is an excellent touch-up of a flawed classic with ideas ahead of its time. Taking the Aliens approach to a sequel story, the 2002 squad-based shooter begins a short time after the movie, with you taking control of a team of marines picking through the remains of an Antarctic compound filled with shapeshifting aliens.

The Thing: Remastered / NIGHTDIVE STUDIOS

It’s a survival horror game with an action slant – more Resident Evil 4 than Resident Evil – with plentiful ammo and set pieces. But what makes The Thing great is its pervading sense of paranoia. Anyone in your AI-controlled squad can become a meat puppet for the Thing, and as far as they’re concerned, so could you.

Accidentally tag a squadmate with a stray bullet, be stingy with supplies, linger too long around corpses, and they’ll start to question your judgment. Soon enough, they’ll stop taking orders. Eventually, they could decide to fire on you, and you’ll be forced to either prod them with a stun stick or put them out of their misery.

The Thing: Remastered / NIGHTDIVE STUDIOS

You get access to testing kits, which you can use on yourself to reassure your teammates or on your teammates to make sure they’re not secretly a mass of tentacles piloting a man mech. The original game undermined this trust system by scripting it for certain scenes, but Nightdive has made some brilliant changes in this remaster to get across the original vision.

“The infection system was implemented and available in the original game, but there were a few places where squadmates would become infected and burst out for no reason, which players really disliked,” Nightdive’s Samuel “Kaiser” Villarreal told me. “We removed those, so now squadmates may only become infected by direct contact with a Thing beast.”

The Thing: Remastered / NIGHTDIVE STUDIOS

The longer an NPC is in your squad, the more they come into contact with alien creatures, the higher their infection chance becomes. In theory, no two playthroughs should be exactly the same.

It’s still a product of its time, of course. For starters, it’s unbelievably cheesy. Zooming in on a man’s face as he says “a UFO” levels of cheese. You almost expect the “bam bam bam” reveal jingle. I love it. But the ideas still stand the test of time, as do the quick camera cuts, which made me jolt in my seat.

The Thing: Remastered / NIGHTDIVE STUDIOS

Outside of the infection mechanics, I appreciate how The Thing handles combat. Sure, you can just shoot the scuttling heads that jump for your face, but the bigger enemies must be killed with fire. The fire spreads and sticks around, attaching to wooden boxes and doors. You can use it to create firewalls to block off entrances, and it can get out of control if you’re not careful,but you also have a fire extinguisher if things get too dicey.

You can also close most doors, as well as open them. When you’re under siege, you can use fire, grenades, and doors to block off entrances and create killboxes. It’s smarter than it has any right to be for a movie-licensed game of the early 2000s.

The Thing: Remastered / NIGHTDIVE STUDIOS

Nightdive has simply made it look nicer on modern screens, run at approximately a bajillion frames per second, and updated the controls so they don’t make the modern player’s brain fall out of their head. Lovely stuff. I hope Nightdive keeps wearing other game studios’ skins.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PC