On paper, the original, 2002 version of The Thing videogame was a great idea. Officially sanctioned by John Carpenter himself, it served as a direct sequel to the 1982 movie, and combined the claustrophobic scares of Resident Evil with a psychological element that wouldn’t look out of place in modern multiplayer horror games. As the leader of a search party sent to find MacReady and co., any time you wanted, you could administer blood tests on your teammates to see if they had been replaced by a Thing doppelganger. It made for a terrific, slow-burn tension. Or at least it would have if the system wasn’t completely broken. Nightdive, the studio behind System Shock Remake and remasters of Doom 64 and Turok, knows this is a problem. Its upcoming The Thing Remastered has a super-smart solution.
So, you would give your squadmates the blood test and it would come back negative, indicating that they weren’t a Thing. But then a short while later, even if you hadn’t come into contact with any monsters, that person you just tested would inexplicably transform, completely breaking the whole system and the game’s central premise. The Thing Remastered is going to fix this. Made in collaboration with developers from the 2002 original, the new version of the horror game sounds a lot more cohesive.
Scripted transformations are gone. Now, if the story calls for a team member to be ‘killed,’ rather than mutate into a Thing, they will have an emotional breakdown, meaning they’re no longer part of the squad. You can test them, the blood test will be negative, but if the script demands that they’re a goner, they’ll collapse from trauma.
“Scripted burst-outs of previously uninfected NPCs were one of the biggest complaints in the original game,” Mark Atkinson, director and programmer on the original 2002 Thing game, and advisor on the remastered version, tells SyFy. “In The Thing Remastered, we removed them entirely and instead make some NPCs more prone to infection, and if they still survive, they are so traumatized they cower down and ‘crack up.’”
“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 software engineer Josh Dowell says. “We removed those, so now squadmates may only become infected by direct contact with a Thing beast.”
If all goes to plan, it should make The Thing Remastered a much more convincing and compelling survival game, where the blood tests actually have meaning. We’re still waiting on a specific release date, but The Thing Remastered is slated for launch in late 2024.
In the meantime, check out some of the other best single-player games, or maybe revisit some past classics with the best old games still playable today.
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