The Thing

released on Aug 20, 2002

While investigating the enigmatic deaths of American scientists in the Antarctic, a military rescue team encounters a strange shape-shifting alien life-form that assumes the appearance of the people it kills. As the team leader, you must forget everything you ever learned about obliterating aliens simply with a barrage of violent ammunition--this monster is difficult to see, hard to kill, and seemingly impossible to evade. In the midst of this lurking terror, you must convince your squad to cooperate and complete tasks essential to both the success of the mission and your own survival.


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Saliva plays during the credits. So that's pretty cool.

Eu, no le daba ni dos pesos. Tiene mecánicas medio del culo, pero dada la época, se le perdona. Qué fruta noble los juegos que continúan grandes películas. Y también va para vos, Alien isolation.

This review contains spoilers

The Thing (2002) is a “Who Goes There Among Us?” simulator/action survival horror game developed by Computer Artworks as a video game sequel to The Thing, a horror movie created by John Carpenter as an adaptation of another book/movie (named The Thing from Another World) in the 1980s that while reviled in it’s time became critically re-evaluated as a masterpiece in recent memory. The origins of this game came about from a game that Computer Artworks created named Evolva, a game (which you can get on Steam, link below) that involved creatures that could evolve and change in many different ways and shapes. This had caught the attention of rights holders Universal Interactive Studios who decided they could possibly create a third person action game with one of their own IP, mainly The Thing. A demo was created and having created a presentation involving re-skinned Evolva characters fighting a Thing at Outpost 31, they were signed on to create the game. Eventually they would go on to release the game, which gave out generally positive reviews, with some criticism marked off in certain areas but would end up selling over 1 million units worldwide.

My experience with The Thing as a game is something that’s been very short. Before playing this game on my Xbox Original, I’d heard about it here and there and had been potentially interested in giving it a shot but I just didn’t really. I had picked up the game somewhere, probably at the local retro game store and had it in my giant Xbox OG backlog for the longest time. I had watched a review by popular Youtubist Grimbeard (review linked below) and had enjoyed that retrospective on the game, but hadn’t really played it until a friend of mine recently elected that I stream it for her as a part of a long list of games. However, I did watch the John Carpenter adaptation of The Thing along with its prequel movie...also named The Thing. I loved my time with the original movie, and while it had a lot of backlash back then I’m genuinely surprised and baffled about how anyone could find that movie to be bad. As for the prequel? Yeah, it had flaws, a lot of it being the CGI (which funny enough was originally practical effects until it was replaced during the editing process) but I still came out of that movie enjoying my time with it and also kind of baffled that people thought that was a bad movie? I don’t know, so far to me personally it was 2 for 2, so I went into this game wondering if it was going to be a 3 for 3.

The game starts out with two guys inside of a cold and abandoned kitchen in one of the facilities before they’re presumably slayed and assimilated by one of the Things. The actual plot starts out however three months after the events of the John Carpenter film. A group of Special Forces (named the Arctic Special Forces here), led by Captain Blake are sent in to investigate two separate outposts: both are from the main movies. Blake and his squad are sent to investigate the remains of U.S. Outpost 31 on the orders of his boss Colonel Whitely while another team is sent to investigate the remains of the nearby Norwegian Camp. Investigating U.S. Outpost 31 is full of fan service which I think is the perfect introduction, and whilst Blake and his team investigates they both introduce themselves and their roles (the medic, the engineer and the extra proficient soldier) as well as find the remains from the previous film (like R.J. Macready’s audio tape, Child’s dead body and the remains of the small UFO created by the Blair-Thing). Whitely orders Blake and his men to plant C4 all over the place and destroy the entire outpost. While Blake’s squad (Beta Team) gets airlifted back to base, Blake decides to go gung-ho against Whitely’s orders and investigate the disappearance of Alpha Squad over at the Norwegian campsite. The results are gruesome, and it’s revealed that the squad has been kind of picked off one by one with barely anyone on site. You’ll see more fan service remains of the Norwegian site from the original Thing movie as well, especially with the giant ice slab where the original Thing came out of. Eventually after exploring the camp site, Blake finds the Alpha squad leader Pierce and after gaining his trust with a version of the famous blood test from the movie, decides to re-establish comms with their boss Whitely though this doesn’t exactly go to plan. With the radio missing, Blake tracks it to a nearby warehouse though he encounters Pierce who believes himself infected. Not wanting to take any chances, Pierce gives himself a .45 Caliber one way ticket to heaven and Blake pushes on into the warehouse.

After saving an engineer and shooting his way through a horde of Things, he chases the mysterious figure with the radio down into the basement. However, he’s revealed to be the Norwegian Radio Operator (who is revealed to be one of the two people from the intro cutscene) and then turns into a giant Thing himself. After a painful boss battle which involves shooting and burning it in an incredibly small room, Blake finally kills the Operator-Thing and takes the radio before going deeper into the warehouse. Underneath Blake finds a massive facility, nicknamed the Pyron Sub-Facility. Established by Gen Inc., a biotechnology corporation whose research includes breeding and researching these “things”. Blake goes deeper into the facility and encounters (along with other survivors) Dr. Shaun Faraday, the head researcher of the team in charge of the research (cameoed by The Thing director John Carpenter). Blake escapes with Faraday, only to encounter Colonel Whitely with a unique group of Black Ops hanging out inside of the warehouse. Blake is shot with a tranquilizer dart and everyone travels to a facility south of the Norwegian outpost. It’s here where Blake learns that SOMEHOW, Blake has a sort of resistance to being infected by the Things. Here is where I’m going to stop and roll my eyes really quickly and comment: I’ve always felt that throughout the original movie and even the prequel that the Things aren’t virus based. They’re predators who pick people off one by one while assimilating them in an attempt to “cull the herd” so to speak. I never felt that it was a virus as much as an organism that functions beyond human comprehension other than painful assimilation, so the idea that Blake is immune to some sort of infection akin to Resident Evil feels a bit uncharacteristic to me. Nonetheless this was 2002 and my opinion means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme so whatever the case. Whitely attempts to have his cohort Faraday test himself with a strain of this “virus' ' named Cloud Virus B4, however Faraday turns him down due “instabilities” not making the Colonel the right subject for testing. This hypothesis is denied however and Faraday gets his statement shot down, literally filled with bullets and the John Carpenter cameo passes on into the afterlife. Turns out, Whitely has terminal cancer and was hoping that this Thing research could perhaps be a cure for this as well as hoping to turn this virus into a sort of biological warfare weapon to perhaps be sold on the black market (because that’s always a good idea).

Blake escapes his prison cell and mows numerous Black Ops soldiers as well as Things down before he learns that Whitely intends to distribute and infect the entire world with the Thing Virus, dampening any motion of mine to perhaps be sold as a black market weapon. Regardless Blake doesn’t like this, and proceeds to make his way to the military hangers to grab nearby C4, proceeding to blow up the cargo planes and halting Whitely’s plans for Thing-induced world domination. Fighting through numerous more facilities and blowing up a Weapons Research Lab underneath the airport hangers, Blake eventually chases his old boss topside where he encounters rigorous snowstorms and even more black ops groups before confronting his old boss at a Dome nearby. Setting Whitely on fire, this does absolutely nothing to him even though Things are allergic to fire because…why not? I don’t know, I guess it’s scary that now a Thing is immune to fire but also it feels kind of weird and again goes against the whole concept of The Thing. Regardless, Whitely gloats about how the plans were only delayed and that once an airlift team picks him up, the world is doomed to global exposure. Blake chases him down even further to the original excavation site where the UFO was originally discovered by the Norweigans. It’s at this point that Whitely finally transforms into a monolithic Thing boss, and Blake spots a helicopter landing nearby with a large machine gun strapped to the side. Blake tells the helicopter pilot to start flying so he can take down this monstrous bastard, and does so in a surprising turret section boss fight and blows up a bunch of nearby fuel drums which finally incinerates the Whitely-Thing into a crisp. The day is saved for now, with Blake and the helicopter pilot making small talk. Asking who the helicopter pilot is, he responds with “MacReady, R.J. MacReady. U.S. Outpost 31” and they both fly away into the proverbial sunset.

My thoughts on the plot for this game is as follows: I love the fan service for the game, the smaller scaled first half leading up to the secret warehouse base and I feel like this is pretty effective and cool smaller scale action horror. However, once you escape from the base and you get kidnapped it starts to turn into this weird mismatch of Resident Evil tropes involving evil corporations, taking over the world, “viruses' ' which AGAIN go against the lore of The Thing and feel sort of out of place. Like I’m not opposed to the whole corporation idea, but it doesn’t feel like it fits here. Other plot devices include “why would Whitely send his own military squads to these places' ' to begin with, like what was he trying to do? What’s the inciting plot here? He literally could’ve done nothing and his plan might have worked? It kind of feels like Blake was sent to discover the plot itself and not inadvertently running into the plot and though maybe I missed something and I’m dumb, I don’t feel like it was explained really well. How did MacReady survive? I read up somewhere that it’s possible that he got kidnapped by Gen Inc. and only recently escaped but how did he get a fucking helicopter? If he got captured why wouldn’t Whitely just burn down the base then? I assume Whitely got involved with the project to produce a cancer cure but when did this world domination plan take hold? Was this spur of the moment? In fact, how did the motherfucker shrug off fire towards the end when The Thing has always been notoriously weak to fire. One could say that he evolved due to this Cloud Virus stuff but there’s a lot of stuff that either hasn’t been explained or hasn’t been explained well enough and while a lot of the ideas that form around the game itself are pretty cool with some amazing set pieces, half the time I’m trying to figure out the plot the only thing I can think of is to ask more questions. Maybe you could get some answers reading up the computers you’ll find scattered around the game to give you bits of backstory but most of the time they never really added anything of note to the lore. Maybe I shouldn’t be looking into it too deeply but I feel like the plot could’ve used a major re-working, or maybe if some of these questions were answered I need to do more research and/or watch a “Video Game Explained” Youtube video? Who knows, it’s not the worst plot I ever witnessed but by god does it contradict the base movies and produce plot holes that are head scratching to begin with.

The atmosphere of this game is cold and unwavering in its hostility, quite literally as it takes place in Antarctica and figuratively as the vibes that it gives off is almost as good as the John Carpenter movie that it takes inspiration from. The feeling of running around in the dark, a giant snowstorm covering every inch of space that could be taken up on screen with the only thing that you can see involves light sticks stuck into the ground, the shape of other humans and/or things and the outline/light of nearby buildings are some of the best this game gets to a near perfect environmental mood, mixed in with exploring these abandoned facilities and questioning whether certain survivors are humans or mere imposters. This smaller scale that covers the first half or so of the game helps make this game a unique feeling experience…at least up until John Carpenter’s cameo. Once you get out of there, the whole switch to a military conspiracy and the focus on having human enemies really bring the game’s peg down a whole lot to what feels to be a standard third person shooter with horror elements. I’ll address this more on the gameplay section but it’s significant here because any sense of isolationist horror kind of goes out the window once you encounter the “generic madman wants to spread disease all over the world” plot that doesn’t really feel like it should be a Thing title and while it sometimes captures that old feeling in certain spots latter half, it struggles to recapture the essence of what the original movie was truly about despite a John Carpenter co-sign. That and it doesn’t help that the Thing transformations are scripted to an extent that when you go through the game once, you kind of know what’ll happen in new playthroughs IF you decide to play this game again. Overall I feel like it works, but I feel that a lot of the time it crumbles under it’s own weight to the point it feels like a semi-different game.

So how is the game graphically? The game is fine, it’s 2002 and I played it on the Xbox Original so of course it’s going to have 2002 styled graphics but honestly I can’t really complain about this. The models look pretty solid for the most part, especially the creature designs getting a freaky look that helps work in the game’s favor. In fact, the Thing designs are pretty intimidating for the most part and it translates the designs from the original movies into the game world pretty well. Whether it’s the little spider fuckers (which the wiki calls The Scuttlers) and the giant fleshy brain-looking masses they spit out of or the creatures that imitate humans (though you can tell they’re imitations if they only stare at you for a while), they’re certainly grotesque in nature and fit right into their universe. Fighting these things can actually be scary, especially if you’re surrounded and are the main saving grace to the horror aspect of the game whenever they actually show up.

The sound design to the game is actually pretty decent too, and contribute to the overall package for the most part. The voice acting, the sounds of gunfire and flames, the blood-curdling sounds of the Things themselves, the pattering of your feet on the snow; all of them are fantastic and immersed me into the game’s world despite the military cliche bullshit. Again, all the weapons sound amazing from the standard machine gun to the shotgun, the flamethrower and even the pistol sounding like they actually pack a punch with my favorite honestly being the shotgun. Again the pattering of the feet, the shouting of the wind as you run against it into nearby shelter, truthfully if there’s something that this game really excels at then I feel like it’s the sound design, with my favorite being those FUCKING KEYBOARD CLACKS BY GOD THEY SOUND SO GOOOD. Honestly, I have a weakness for keyboard clacking, especially from old ass computers and the shit is like ASMR to me. I don’t have anything bad to say about this and I’m not sure I could really ever say anything about this. To quote Todd Howard: “It just works' ', and normally this is also where I would go into the soundtrack and perhaps give the music some thoughts. Honestly, there is none and if you play it without music (though it might have some ambient stingers here and there) it makes everything a whole lot more intense when you’re playing, though if you want to put on your own music you rightfully could since again there isn’t really anything in the way of music except some song called After Me by Saliva, which in itself is a fine Nu-Metal song even if that’s not necessarily my genre. In all honesty, I find the inclusion of this song to be pretty funny all considering that it’s very much a song from the time period and it makes me chuckle a bit.

How’s the voice acting then? According to IMDB, the most memorable voice acting inclusions are John Carpenter himself as Doctor Faraday (NOTE: Apparently he didn’t voice his own character? I put an article down in the links section but my bad on this then) along with William B. Davis as the main antagonist, Colonel Whitley. This latter cameo I didn’t even notice until I saw him for the first time in game, and when it finally clicked I yelled out “Holy shit it’s the Cigarette Smoking Man from X-Files!” which funnily enough took inspiration from the original Thing movie twice for different episodes and a series movie. William Davis’s voice is iconic, and truth be told I can’t complain about his performance at all because he always knocks shady government types out of the park even if he’s a stereotypical bad guy. As for some of the other actors, apparently Jim Ward is in here? I mostly know him as Rodney Betters from F.E.A.R. but other than that I don’t know. HOWEVER, even though I haven’t heard him at all before or after this game, Per Solli does a pretty good job playing this no-nonsense and gravelly badass soldier guy that he instills in Blake. Don’t get me wrong, it’s generic action movie hero cliche stuff but I feel like he pulls it off extremely well to where I can excuse it for the most part. Everyone else sinks into the background and helps immerse you and there’s no bad link in the cast that I can point out so that’s all an A+ from me.

The final question to ask here is how does the gameplay fare up in the long run? Does it accurately feel like a portrayal of what a Thing game should be like? I’ll go over how the game generally runs on Xbox first and then give you my honest thoughts towards the end. When you click to start a new game, there’s a difficulty selection that lets you choose how strong or weak your auto aim is with a flashlight radius. I like that aesthetically as a difficulty slider and I believe you can change in game (don’t quote me) though my honest recommendation is to go with easier settings. The actual in game controls are a bit more archaic compared to other games but I got used to them semi-quickly for the most part. The main things I remember are that the Joysticks are used to move, and I mean both of them with one used to move up and down and the other used for left and right. Luckily you can change this in your settings on the go if you’re not feeling the base controls they gave you but overall I felt like I was able to handle it, though I still had struggle switching through weapons and items which required certain buttons on the D-Pad that I both honestly don’t remember as well as felt a tad bit unintuitive. You can also crouch and go into first person shooter mode where you can’t move out of your spot except peeking out left or right (great for ganking turrets and soldiers later on) that are essential for burning and finishing off Things.

As for the gameplay itself: the game is a third person shooter where you run around completing objectives in a small-ish map while micromanaging a squad, conserving ammo and medkits, picking up items such as flares, flashlights and other items while fighting/burning things and eventually taking down monsters. The most important thing here in essence would be micro-managing this squad, of which there are three classes: Medic, Soldier and Engineers. Medics have an unlimited amount of health packs, the Engineers have the ability to repair pretty much basically anything that the main player can’t and the soldiers (which I don’t remember encountering that much to be honest) just have more health and are generally good for backup, though I’d say that the soldier class lacked in the wayside to the other two classes with nothing else in the way of special abilities. It’s not to say they’re useless, it’s just they don’t do anything extra that would make them memorable to me. These NPCs have their own moods, their own trust gauges and in concept could turn at any moment. Ways to build trust are to lead them out of the area, giving them weapons and ammo, healing them and using portable blood tests to show them that you’re not a Thing. A lot of them react to their environment as well, mostly in a bad way if they see scarier versions of Things, trapped in dark places or witness dead bodies, all of which messes with them negatively and if you don’t get them out of the area while they’re in the middle of a panic attack (which you can tell by how their body shakes in the squad menu) they could snap at any minute. I remember one time that I didn’t even know that something was happening, and a squad member turned and it got bad enough to the point where my last squad member shot himself, leaving me all alone. In cases like this, you could also give him an adrenaline shot and that’ll keep him calm in the moment for you to get him out of there or change the mood considerably. There’s also the trust meter: the more they trust you the more they’ll follow orders, and if they don’t trust you at all then they’re more than willing to try to kill you thinking that you’re one of the creatures. You can order them to do stuff like wait, follow, repair stuff (as engineer) and order to give you their weapon at the cost of some trust.

Of course, the thing (heh) about The Thing is that oftentimes it’s a game about paranoia. In concept, the game encourages you to keep tabs on your squad and see if any of them are Things while proving yourself to not be a Thing. It’s a game based on trust, but oftentimes it’s not very effective and it doesn’t matter. It’s been well known if you do your research and not go in blind that a lot of the game’s moments are scripted, and that no matter what there will be certain times where certain squad mates will turn into Things. While looking it up on the Wiki, there’s apparently a system where you can tell whether or not certain NPCs you encounter are full Imitations such as wearing outfits belonging to a class they don’t belong to or not speaking at all. They’re also supposed to follow around and go along with certain actions before eventually revealing themselves to be a monster. The problem is that if you know they’re scripted and you already play through the game then the surprise is done. I’ve seen and heard reports of people doing blood tests on certain characters mere seconds before they turn and the blood test comes back negative before OOOOH IMMA THING I’M HERE TO KILL YOU. That stuff is kind of lame though understandable due to technical limitations. My feelings on it is that this aspect is cool in concept though not totally realized, and the only encounter where I legitimately felt was an organic moment was the aforementioned suicide, and this was located near the warehouse in the Norweigan Base Camp near halfway towards the game. I left that building kind of shook and was surprised at how effective this was. I don’t know if this was scripted, and truth is I don’t want to know because if it wasn’t then essentially I didn’t have an organic moment at all through my entire playthrough. All the Thing-Imitations revealed themselves immediately to me even if they looked human, most of the time I didn’t even need to use blood tests and just gave them weapons and ammo and healed them, and only used adrenaline once or twice with the rarity you get them in game. It has some good moments that I can clearly see, though I wish it delivered more. Also keep in mind to be careful of giving your teammates too much because once or twice I brought them to the end of a level, gage them health and then went to the next but they either died due to explosion (thanks tunnels) or didn’t go with me at all.

So how does fighting these Things work? There are several different classes ranging from skittery little spider things (which you can just shoot to kill) versus every other Thing class. The strategy is basically always the same: shoot it repeatedly and bring their health from green to red before finishing them off with something fire related. Honestly the strategy is a pretty good one and I never got stale with it, oftentimes finishing them off with a grenade, a nearby placed explosive or a flamethrower that I acquired somehow. My main thing is I never gave my NPCs a flamethrower because they’ll just automatically use it and I’m not sure if Things are weak to fire to begin with or you HAVE to riddle them with bullets before finishing them off in game and it’s better not to waste any precious resources you have. Also another annoying thing, the main reason that I died in this game is due to getting burned alive, and a lot of those times it’s due to the close proximity of the environment. You’ll often be fighting Things in close quarters and so when you finish them off, you have to be careful or else you’ll end up burning yourself and your squad alive and I’d be lying if I said while realistic it can get frustrating trying to juggle all of that in a small space. Luckily you can pick up fire extinguishers to take out any fires though admittedly the range that they work can sometimes be hit or miss with most of the time working effectively. However, the range of the fire can sometimes be fucky, especially towards the latter half of the game. In the secret base where you get locked up, once you get out into an area where you have to burn a room full of Things so your squad can get passed I remember passing by the area like 5 feet and I still got burned through thick glass which was annoying as hell. Another random side tangent, some save stations you have to go to a nearby power node and repair it in order to power up a tape recorder. I don’t know if that makes sense or if it needs to be plugged in to work but I don’t feel like that makes any sense.

In fact, let me just go on record and say this now: the latter half of the game falters greatly compared to the first half. When they start introducing Black Ops soldiers it starts to suck from set pieces around them to the combat itself. The Black Ops guys never have Things among them, they can get into combat with them but you don’t see it often, there’s an overabundance of them and can get whittled down quickly if you’re not careful. Hell, the whole set piece where you’re breaking into a weapons factory underneath the airfield while dodging steam pipes and dealing with turret sections are the most frustrating thing going on with the game. Getting out is even worse having to constantly slow walk so you don’t get burned alive and even then sometimes the hitscanning gets you and your health goes down anyways. By the time I escaped the mineshaft and was chasing after Whitely in the snow I had absolutely NO health and had died multiple times trying to figure out a strategy to move pass before finally hitting up a small cave and getting around five medpacks. The only way to save is with the aforementioned save points and the only one before it was before the base exploding and the only one after it is when you finally confront Whitely in the dome which took place for me like a half-hour to an hour later. It started feeling less like a Thing game and more like a shooting gallery, and when I finally got to the final boss where I didn’t have to deal with instant kill sniper attacks and instead dealt with a turret section for a final boss I was so relieved because honestly it was painfully easy to do and figure out that it felt like a bit of an anti-climax to me. Speaking of frustrating sections: every single one of the boss battles barring the very last one sucks dick. Literally you’re stuck in a small ass room where you have to constantly move, shoot at everyTHING around you and then eventually finish it with fire. My main problems with this were that no matter what it felt like 75% of the time that you’d always get hit with the attacks anyways and with it being such a small room? Any time I tried finishing it off with a grenade I had to finagle it in such a way that I don’t get blown up in the blast radius which happened a decent bit. I can only repeat a boss battle so many times like this before I eventually just smack myself in the head out of sheer frustration and confusion. Also every time I’d die to these instead of reloading from previous save I’d have “restart level” or “main menu” so instead I’d have to go to main menu and reload the previous save from there, that’s annoying as hell and there should’ve been a continue from last save point option at least.

So my personal feelings on The Thing are as follows: It’s a fun game, and has a lot of promise as a sort of building block foundation for something even greater in the future. In fact, I’d say that the first half of the game was some of the most fun I’ve had in a survival horror game in recent memory. However, once it gets into the latter half with the military bases and the human enemies it starts to turn into a bit of a slog, one of which I was hoping to kind of get over as early as humanly possible. In fact, the finale of the game made the ranking slowly bog down from a 4 out of 5 to a 3.5 out of 5 due to the fact that the emphasis on the action instead of the horror just kind of killed it for me? That and the painfully obvious structure to the “Who’s the Thing” system felt kind of obvious, though that didn’t really detract too much from the game for me. Overall, to answer my question from earlier: is this game going to be a 3 for 3? I’d sadly say a 2.5 for 3 due to the fact that the action portions of the game, the structured reveal system, the explosion fire labs, the plot that felt like it could've come from Resident Evil, and the awful boss fights. It just didn’t do it for me once the first boss fight hit, but what I can answer is the old question: is this game worth playing? I’d say yes, but be patient with both the controls and the trial and error feeling segments of the latter half of the game. The call-backs to the original, the thrilling gameplay, fighting the Things while managing a squad, all of these things actually felt fun to me and made me want more of the first half of the game into its own title. It has so much potential for a grander sequel (and another attempt at a Thing game by Crackdown 2 developer Ruffian Games which link down below), which funny enough was actually in development before it was shuttered.

Bringing it full circle to what happened after the release of this game, Computer Artworks had attempted to develop a full on sequel to this game. The game would’ve had Blake and RJ Macready fly to a nearby refinery base in what could be described as a more “horror” based experience and would’ve included more Thing types, new locations which included an oil rig and an aircraft carrier, and a less structured way for The Things to reveal itself waiting to ambush. However, it seems it didn’t go past the pitching stage due to a giant workload such as this game and a title in the Alone in the Dark series and the game didn’t get past a proof of concept demo before being shuttered. It’s a shame because we haven’t seen much “Thing" content other than a canceled mini-series, a prequel movie and a re-release of an alternate version of Who Goes There? on Kickstarter which I contributed to a while back. Otherwise I haven’t seen much and that’s a shame, which didn’t help when Computer Artworks themselves went into Receivership and was forced to shut down. The sequel wouldn’t ever be picked up, but since then there’s been a few games that have sort of picked up the concept and ran with it. In fact, the best comparison I can find to a modern adaptation of The Thing isn’t really based in lore but in gameplay concepts, mainly Among Us. I’m surprised no one has attempted to run with it and create a Thing adaptation based on the modern Among Us formula, but I’m sure there’ve been other games and movies that took inspiration from the original movie for their own creations. Regardless, The Thing as a game I feel stands on its own as a decent movie tie-in game in a land full of games based on film IP that are horrible and while this game is flawed, it’s still a gem worth looking into.

Links:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/771430/Evolva/

https://www.gamerstemple.com/vg/games/000309/000309g109.asp

https://thething.fandom.com/wiki/The_Thing_II_(video_game)

https://thething.fandom.com/wiki/Gen_Inc

https://thething.fandom.com/wiki/Shaun_Faraday

https://thething.fandom.com/wiki/Thule_Station

https://thething.fandom.com/wiki/Return_of_the_Thing_(mini-series)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UkXxARRls0&ab_channel=GrimBeard

https://www.eurogamer.net/the-making-of-the-thing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(1982_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(video_game)

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/computer-artworks-goes-into-receivership

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335473/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv

https://thething.fandom.com/wiki/The_Thing_(video_game)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5424308/

https://steamcommunity.com/app/242760/discussions/0/5208960061405876499/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w4W77VVTuk0

https://thething.fandom.com/wiki/Imitation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylq3EJJVhlA&ab_channel=Cavador

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/the-thing-video-game-designer-artist-programmer-retrospective

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRDK8p2nN90&ab_channel=BadGhosts (Plug for my buddy Ghosts who did a mini-review on it, good stuff)

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TheThing2002

This is an interesting game built upon smoke and mirrors. Every instance of a unique, dynamic mechanic or event happening in the game is scripted to happen that way every time. It invalidates the idea of things like having to test your allies to see if they're an alien or not. Even if the test says they aren't, they will suddenly turn into a monster when they hit the point where they are scripted to do so.

Cool concept, bad execution. I don't think any of the decisions I made ever mattered since all of the characters would die off VERY quickly. For most of the game I played without any team cause they kept dropping like flies, either cause they suck or because the game forces them to die at points. No matter what you do or how hard you try, your team will INNEVITABLY thingify, even if you never see them touch a thing creature. Also, game is incredibly difficult.

Just the right amount of fan service, and a great continuation of the film it's based on. Greatly underappreciated for its time.