The Thing Remastered Gets New Update for February 2025

Nightdive Studios has released a jam-packed update for The Thing: Remastered, deploying a host of console improvements and bug fixes that were surely eradicated by R.J. MacReady’s flamethrower. Nightdive is an American developer doing good deeds for gamers by obtaining the rights to abandonware video games and remastering them for modern consoles. Since its 2012 formation, Nightdive’s portfolio includes enhanced versions of Turok, Doom, Quake, and Shadow Man, to name a few, and The Thing: Remastered is paving the way for more exciting restorations to come.

Originally released in 2002 on the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox by Computer Artworks, The Thing mixed squad-based shooter gameplay with survival horror elements, based on John Carpenter’s iconic 1982 film of the same name. After the remaster’s December 2024 release, The Thing: Remastered became a huge success and cemented its feat as Nightdive’s fastest-selling launch title in the studio’s history. The premise serves as a sequel to Carpenter’s movie, following Captain Blake, a member of the United States Army Special Forces team, tasked with investigating what happened to the original Antarctic outpost crew after an alien life form wreaked havoc.

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Nightdive posted Patch 1.1 on February 11, 2025, available to console users, joining the studio’s updated System Shock remake from last year. Key takeaways from the update include fixed crashes that would occur when quitting the game or when fighting Thing beasts, amended display items to correct the depth of field effect, and more importantly, providing Whitley with new trousers. The Steam Deck’s frame rate is no longer locked to half the screen refresh rate while using the Vulkan renderer, and the Nintendo Switch received optimized performance in addition.

Retro gamers agreed The Thing: Remastered fixed the most annoying part of the original 2002 game, and the horror community was warmly receptive to the recent update. Additionally, one Twitter user asked Nightdive if there were any plans for a physical release of the remaster, and the studio confirmed more details on that topic would arrive later this year.

Continuing Nightdive’s impressive streak, The Thing fans want to see the studio tackle another cult classic next. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, the 2005 survival horror by Headfirst Productions, excelled at adapting H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and became a well-received title by gamers of a darker, grittier persuasion despite being a commercial failure. Nightdive’s mission to resurrect forgotten gems is an admirable, ongoing project backed by the nostalgic, and the gaming community’s wish list for remasters grows in tandem.

The Thing: Remastered Patch Notes for February 2025 Update

General

• Fixed the Conspiracy Theorist achievement. Old saved games are retroactively fixed!
• Fixed a softlock where Stolls would stop running to the black tech lab door.
• Fixed a crash after detonating the C4 on the airstrip level.
• Fixed a rare intermittent crash when fighting Thing beasts.
• Added a “Most Recent” button to the load game menu, so it’s easier to load your latest save.
• Autosaves now contain the name of the level they were saved on, instead of just “Autosave”.
• Fixed a bug where characters would sometimes become unable to step up onto higher surfaces after falling off of the curbs in the roadway tunnel.
• Fixed a crash when quitting the game.
• Fixed a bug where bindings would be missing from the input options on first launch.
• Fixed a crash in Strata Medibay when Fisk dies before telling you the code.
• Fixed Blake’s hand clipping with his sleeve in the first cutscene with Faraday.
• Fixed a bug where the second camera angle would fail to activate during the weather station cutscene, allowing you to interrupt it and recruit yourself.
• Improved performance when querying dynamic game options.
• Moved the game version information to the options menu, off of the interstitial screen.
• Decreased the visibility of the game version information so it is less intrusive.
• Reimplemented the pan upwards when the game over screen is visible.
• Updated Colin’s Fate achievement description.

Gameplay

• Fixed an oversight where weapon firing rates were not properly respected when mashing the fire button. Excluding the pistol.
• Ammo and health dispensers now dispense fewer clips and medipacks depending on the difficulty. This can be changed at any time during gameplay.
• Marked some grenades as “volatile” so that they explode when damaged, like the original game, to fix a quirk where grenades placed for cinematic purposes would not explode.
• Changed the direction Blake faces after ending the cutscene in the weather station level.

Levels

• Fixed an oversight where an explosive barrel would explode when passing through the tripwire of an already exploded tripmine charge in the penultimate level.
• Hid the out of bounds “Back Door Key” item that looked like a document in the submersible level.
• Fixed innacurate collision in the first level, where characters would appear to sink into the snow.
• Fixed collision in the watchtower on the third level where you could get stuck in the handrail.
• Renamed Carter in the Strata Medibay level to Hawk, to utilise a set of unused voice lines.
• Added the missing green light to a save terminal in the third level.
• Fixed two computers in the weather station level that did not have an ID set for the Conspiracy Theorist achievement (given automatically to old saves).
• Shimmied a medipack dispenser down in the level following Strata Medibay that was WAY too high up.
• Fixed bad collision on the external stairs in the weather station.
• Flipped a few ammo boxes which were facing the wrong direction.
• Fixed several collision bugs in the Norwegian outpost where you could fall off of the world and walk underneath the building.
• Fixed sounds across several levels that would duplicate forever, causing the game to eventually fall silent.

Display

• Fixed the depth of field effect sometimes creating bright flickering pixels.
• Fixed the glass on the doors in the submersible being opaque.
• Improved normal maps on many posters and boards.
• Gave Whitley new trousers.

Sound

• Fixed a bug where speech audio would sometimes not follow the speaker.

PC

• Changed the on-screen watermark in the editor build, so it doesn’t confuse people.
• Added support for autoexec.cfg, allowing users to customise console variables not usually marked as saved to kexEngine.cfg.
• Performance improvements when using the D3D11 renderer.

Steam Deck

• Fixed the framerate being locked to half the screen refresh rate while using the Vulkan renderer, when launched outside of the Steam client.

All Consoles

• Fixed a bug where Blake’s head and legs would sometimes disappear after leaving first-person mode.
• Fixed a light flickering very, very fast in the Norwegian base.

Nintendo Switch

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Horror

Third-Person Shooter

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Released

December 5, 2024

ESRB

M For Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Language, Violence