The Thing: Remastered Steam Charts & Stats

Good to go an adventure on memory lane and how we see things differently with eyes 20 years older! The game is exactly as it was when I played it 20 years ago, when times were more simple! This deserves a more complex remake or sequel. If you catch it on a sale I recomend buying it, great game! Oh and it has remarks from the original movie!

In a The Thing-less world, this is a nice blast from the past. Totally playable, sometimes a little buggy, but nothing major. Fun, short game. This monster begs for a new movie or a game, but this is the best we can get right now.

Classic game. Pretty short. Took just under 6 hours to beat the game, with dying a few times here and there. Didn't run into any game-breaking issues. Graphics are dated, but that's not why we play this game. We play this game to get some extra context / content in the IP universe of the greatest movie of all time, John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). In that venture, I definitely recommend it.

Felt like I was playing a Resident Evil game. I got so invested in the game I completed it within 5 hours. I doubt there will be one but I hope this game gets a remake. I would recommend. 8 out of 10.

i only had one crash my entire play through on launch, the game was enhanced in some aspects but felt period correct or needed it. This is simply the experience that should have been on the original launch date.

[h1]Every Nightdive Remaster has been awesome so far, but to be honest, The Thing is one of the laziest of them all.[/h1] This officially canonical continuation of John Carpenter's classic Sci-Fi-Horror flick (one of the best films of the 80s, I might add!) flew a bit under the radar back in the day. The original PC port found it's way into my collection somehow for reasons i can't even remember, but I do remember actually enjoying it quite a bit. It's as great as it is unexpected that Nightdive Studios would properly remaster this game, but "properly remastered" is admittedly debatable this time around. While it is always awesome when Nightdive pimps the visuals a bit and makes those forgotten games accessible on Steam and playable on modern systems, The Thing got the absolutely bare minimum of the "Remaster"-treatment and misses a lot of opportunities to significantly improve the original and smooth out some more of it's many rough edges. But oh well, most of them are so deeply rooted in the gameplay mechanics and story that it's basically impossible to get rid of them anyways. For starters, there is the story: It sets off right after the end of the movie and the atmosphere during the first handful of levels is actually amazing, building up quite a strong tension arc similar to that of the movie. It's the writing and pacing of the plot, that feels so radically off and makes it a bit hard to get invested in the story. The first few levels are full of random events and characters, that get no further explanation or characterization at all and just vanish from the story as quickly as they appear. Even the main character Blake remains shallow, bland and uninteresting as f*ck and he is basically just there to deliver a couple of cliché oneliners. It just doesn't make sense. The movie took place in this one small remote research base in Antarctica that was barely more than a few huts and tents, but suddendly there are all those huge underground hi-tech research labs and sh*t. Now where did those come from all of a sudden? Dafuq? This barrage of random and completely replaceable squadmates, researchers and soldiers basically just serves as fodder for the main gameplay selling-point of The Thing: The Trust/Mistrust-system. Since the Thing can identically mimic any person it infects, the game wants to leave you clueless about "who's a thingy and who's not" and if you want your teammates to follow your orders, you have to earn and maintain their trust in you by giving them weapons and ammo, testing yourself with "Thing"-tests to prove that you are not infected and make sure they won't loose their sh*t when they see some especially f*cked-up things like dark rooms full of maimed corpses. But this gameplay mechanic sounds so much more interesting than it really turns out to be in the end, because it is almost completely scripted which ones of your comrades turn into things and which don't. Even if they are not destined to turn into a horrible abomination, they either die some other unheroic scripted death or just vanish without any further logical explanation as soon as you reach the next loading screen. So yeah, the leveldesign leaves a lot to be desired in some spots, too. Bottom of the line is, you can't save a single one of them, and since they get exchanged like underwear and literally just exist to open the next door for you, you couldn't care less about all the NPCs. The squad mechanics are generally more annoying than anything else, due to some fiddly controls and wonky pathfinding AI, which to my impression even worsened compared to the original. However, the biggest flaw is still that The Thing is ridiculously short: If you don't set the difficulty too high and know what you are doing, you can finish the game in much less than four hours. Like already mentioned, those flaws are all rooted so deeply in the basic design of the game, that you can't fault the remaster for not fixing them. The "lazy" treatment of the overall presentation is a whole other thing though. Besides the bare minimum of visual improvement (higher resolutions, sharper textures, slightly better shadow- and lighting effects, some more advanced facial animations), there is nothing here at all. There is still an inexcusable lack of Ennio Morricone's awesome original movie score, which is just the very definition of wasted potential and despite having some well-known voice actors like the german voice of Bruce Willis for main character Blake, the german voice acting is "eh" at absolute best. The one thing I did notice about the presentation was, how heavily censored the german version was back in the day. There is a lot more blood and gore here now for my fellow germans, points for that! Propbably the biggest welcome though are the slightly refined and finetuned controls which finally add a shortcut button for quickly switching back and forth between your primary weapon and your flamethrower and give you a bit more precision and control over the mouse- and autoaim. This slight improvement gives the combat a much faster and more fluid pace, which is great because it always felt a bit cumbersome and unsatisfying in the original. Despite this, the controls still feel a bit clunky and unwieldy overall, something that definitely shouldn't happen in a proper remaster. If you compare The Thing to Nightdive Studios' recent System Shock 2 remaster, which is about three times as long, has a ton of replay value and a bit more noticeable "remastering effort" put into it, the full price of almost 30 Euros for this seems quite baffling: The Thing is highly scripted and linear, ridiculously short and has almost zero replay value and even the remaster is unforgivably dated and unrefinded in some aspects. But for a Playstation 2 port from the very early 2000s it is still an insanely fun and atmospheric Third-Person-Shooter/Survival-Horror-hybrid overall, with huge amounts of fan service remarkably close to it's source material. I seriously believe that not only Retro-gamers and fans of the movies will enjoy this, so if you know and love this game, you might want to spend full price and be okay with it, for everyone else 25% discount is a perfectly safe bet. _________________________________________________________________________________ THE THING (REMASTERED) Genre: Third-Person-Shooter / Survival-Horror Release: Q3 2002 (Original) / Q4 2024 (Remaster) ( ) 0/8 Simply one of the worst games ever made. Don't waste any money on this. ( ) 1/8 Bad. Seriously flawed with barely any redeeming qualities. Worth a couple of Cents at best, if at all. ( ) 2/8 Sub-par. Only for hardcore-fans of respective genre / series. Don't pay more than 5 bucks. ( ) 3/8 Meh-diocre. It‘s okay. Don't pay more than 10 bucks. ( ) 4/8 Decent, but not for everybody. Don't pay more than 15 bucks. (X) 5/8 Good game, Must-play for genre- / series-fans. Worth 20 to 25 bucks max, if you are not a fan. ( ) 6/8 Great game, universal recommendation. 30 bucks would be a steal for this. ( ) 7/8 Outstanding game, a milestone of it‘s respective genre. Definitely worth its full prize. ( ) 8/8 Simply one of the best games ever made. Get this, the prize doesn't matter.

This remaster is very impressive for having taken a game that targeted the original XBOX, and turned it into something that wouldn't have looked out of place on the XBOX's successor The added lighting effects, real time shadows and glistening, unsettling and fittingly repulsive character models really feel like they have always been part of the game from the very beginning, to the point where you have to look at footage from the original XBOX version before you realise just how much the visuals have been upgraded. Nightdive's unofficial motto seems to be something like "if we've done our job properly, then it should feel like we haven't done anything at all", and that is exactly what they have done here, a perfect upgrade to a classic that truly enhances the source material without taking anything away from it.

I only bought it for nostalgia. It was a good game back in the early 2000's for the playstation 2 but it's not worth the £25. Not by a long shot.

I never played the original, but I saw Jerma play it and that was pretty funny. Ever since I heard there was going to be a remaster, I really wanted to try it out for myself. Overall, I had a very enjoyable experience and the game is very reminiscent to the original. I really recommend this game if you're a fan of the movie.

I was so desperate for a horror shooter that i bought this game...wait for it to be half price - not worth full price!