‘The Thing’ Video Game: Expanding on The Ultimate in Alien Terror [Monster Mania]
Monster Mania is a monthly column celebrating the unique and varied monster designs in horror gaming.
“The ultimate in alien terror” perfectly describes John Carpenter‘s 1982 body horror masterpiece, The Thing. The film’s tag encapsulates the film’s ominous aura while revealing little of what that extraterrestrial terror entails. There is nothing more terrifying than the unknown. Given that The Thing itself is an indecipherable entity that can morph into infinite abominable forms, this is more than fitting. Within the context of the 109-minute film, we see a handful of grotesque forms that the Thing can take on. But within the context of a roughly seven-hour game adaptation, how does a developer retain the terror and fear of the Thing for that length?
Fortunately, developer Computer Artworks mostly answered this question in 2002, when they did the impossible and adapted Carpenter’s film into a video game. To this day, few gaming subgenres remain as vilified as the movie tie-in. While a trend of yesteryear, these tie-ins often felt like limp cash grabs, failing to mimic the magic of their silver screen counterparts. However, with most generalizations, outliers existed due to a few developers smartly utilizing source materials’ unique properties. Few tie-ins were as successful in doing right by the lineage associated with the source material as was the case with The Thing.
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Until 2024, The Thing was essentially unplayable as it was out of print and unavailable in digital stores. Until the patron of saints of revitalizing classic titles, Night Dive Studios, decided to remaster the game for current-generation consoles, exposing an entirely new crop of gamers to the ultimate in alien terror. But how would a studio even adapt one of the greatest films ever?
You naturally start with where the film ended.
The Thing game picks up where Carpenter’s film ended. Playing as a United States Special Forces Captain Blake, the player arrives at the Antarctic Outpost #31 to investigate the research team’s disappearance. As should be expected of all cosmic shape-shifting entities thought to have died, the Thing lives, and Blake and the survivors must grapple with the paranoia-inducing threat of who is a friend and who is a foe.
Paranoia has always been one of the most interesting thematics of The Thing, which was established by the short story “Who Goes There?” By John W. Campbell, from which the film is adapted. To no surprise, this theme is also one of the most interesting aspects of the game. The insidious nature of the Thing is that it can infect and replicate its victims in the blink of an eye, often without others noticing. This is recreated in the game, as Blake periodically encounters survivors who may or may not be infected.
Also Read: Dissecting the Thing: The Premake’s Road to John Carpenter’s Vision
Players are frequently approached by survivors scattered throughout the arctic tundra and must determine whether they are who they say they are. Some survivors will be human or immediately transform before the player’s eyes, morphing into a monstrous permutation of their former selves. There were even a few instances where an infected squadmate waited to transform, only in the middle of a firefight that tossed kerosene onto an already treacherous combat encounter. To further channel the film, the player does have a blood test device that they can use on survivors to either confirm or deny that they are a Thing in disguise. This, in theory, is great. But when squadmates can become infected through direct contact with enemies during combat, this can be an easily forgotten precautionary measure.
Generally speaking, the narrative additions to Carpenter’s film are generic mad scientist tropes at best, but the game’s facilitating this theme of paranoia fuels The Thing’s approach to monster design. Enemies come in three flavors of body horror terror. “Scuttlers” are small and agile appendages that leap and swarm the player, not unlike Norris’ head spider. “Walkers” are more significant, lumbering forms that compensate for their lack of speed with devastatingly powerful attacks. Finally, there are bosses, which resemble a smorgasbord of meat offshoots from the final abomination of the film. While the game certainly lacks much enemy variety, how The Thing deploys its monsters makes for an experience that shines in its front half.
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Despite the relative ease with which scuttlers can be killed, their speed allows them to swarm Blake and his squad, causing disarray and increasing the potential for infecting allies. Typically, various walkers will be thrown into the mix, bursting from a research tank or crashing through a wall while the player is mopping up scuttlers. Given their strength, Walkers would be a suitable enough threat if they were just a bullet sponge-type enemy. But once again, Computer Artworks does right by the source material.
The depiction of “Walkers” is accurate to Carpenter’s film, as they can be slowed but not killed with traditional firearms. To destroy a walker, the player must use a more encompassing means of destruction: one of two fire-based weapons in their arsenal. Once set ablaze with a torch or flamethrower, the walkers take increased damage from traditional weapons and ensure they stay dead. It’s a seemingly straightforward aspect of combat that ratchets up the difficulty of even the most manageable seeming encounters, forcing players to prioritize these threats at a moment’s notice.
Despite a strong start, the back half of The Thing is not nearly as entertaining or memorable as its promising start. The game devolves into an underwhelming third-person shooter with the befuddling addition of human enemies. The fear and tension once associated with the paranoia theme have grown predictable. That being said, Computer Artworks did a commendable job of utilizing the source material to create what is the best-case scenario for a “Did we really need this?” movie tie-in game.
Categorized:Editorials
