John Carpenter’s The Thing is one of my favourite movies of all time, it is a example of horror movie tropes mixed in with mystery and paranoia inducing elements. We have a perfect closed circle mystery, with a group of researchers who are based at an Antarctic research facility, with poor connections to the outside world. An alien creature infiltrates their facility and can mimic organic matter. Part of the joy in this film is trying to follow the creature’s movements through the facility as it slowly assimilates more and more people, so when we start to hit the climax, we can say to ourselves “Wait… They were infected as well?!”. Now, you might be thinking, “why are you talking about this cinematic masterpiece, and not games, like you usually do?” We need context, because there was a game made, as a sequel to The Thing, in 2002, on PS2. Sweet lord, help us all.
The Thing on PS2 is possibly the epitome of being too ambitious and under delivering on so many elements, and they did this before Fable or Spore! The game was billed as a squad-based shooter, okay, I see where we are going we have a squad because one of them might actually be a weird space mutant, hell bent on surviving, who will be trying manipulate situations so you distrust your actual human colleagues and get you alone with them, so they can assimilate you too. Hmmm, are you noticing something, that sounds a bit way outside the scope of a game developed in 2002. I wouldn’t say that this would be impossible for the time, but it seems very ambitious. Something like this would probably work best as a Visual Novel of sorts. But the problem is, the game wanted to really push this idea of not trusting anyone but simultaneously relying on their skills (Read as one skill, one particular NPC skill is required to beat this game) to help you survive.
In the game you have 3 different classes of squad mates, Engineers who can repair electrical boxes that are deemed too complicated for the main character to fix, Medics who can heal you with a never-ending supply of health kits and Soldiers who can shoot things good… Apparently. I don’t recall encountering a 2nd soldier squad mate after the first one you find after the opening mission, so I can’t account for their efficacy. The Medics and Engineers are pretty good at shooting though, much more competent than I was, but that is because the game utilises a rather atrocious auto aim system. The auto aim works, I suppose that isn’t the real problem. The real problem is more that sometimes your weapon doesn’t want to fire normally. The automatic rifle will seemingly fire a few bullets and occasionally take a break before resuming normally scheduled firing. It is difficult to put into words, but it feels so weird and wrong. But even with the auto aim, you’d be lucky if you hit your targets sometimes, wasting large amounts of ammo on enemies that only take a few bullets to deal with. Perhaps the strategy is to give more of your ammo to your squad mates, they seem significantly more accurate.
But before we talk more about ammo management, let’s go back to the squad mates a little bit. Throughout the game, there will be broken electrical fuse boxes, some of these you can fix yourself but holding the Circle button and waiting about 5 seconds per one. It’s a pain in the butt, because there are very few instances where there is any tension when fixing these boxes. However, there are numerous boxes that require the expertise of the Engineer to fix, and these boxes are required to fix to progress, meaning the game is a glorified escort mission for chunks of it. If your engineers die before they have fixed the box they need to, it is game over, you need to restart the level or return to the main menu, no load game button on the game over menu for some reason, that’s just mind bogglingly infuriating. Thankfully jumping back to the main menu takes literal seconds. Minor digression over. Because the Engineers are essentially mandatory, we can assume most of them are not evil shape shifting monsters, until they outlive their usefulness and turn on you anyway. Allies mutating into Thing monsters seems to happen at pre-defined points, like, you pass a line on the map and they are now free game to transform, even if you tested them a little before that moment. Yeah, you can do blood tests in this game, it’s supposed to evoke that moment in the movie, where they test the blood and use that to reveal The Thing. It does make the blood test kits a bit pointless, I suppose you can use them on yourself to demonstrate you are still human for people, which might be something that can boost trust, not that I considered that when playing the game. Trust is an “important” mechanic, because whenever you meet new NPCs who can join you, they will most likely not trust you, refusing to go with you. So, you need some way to get them to trust you, the easiest way, just give them a gun and some ammo, at no point does this ever backfire you, because if they do mutate, they will drop the gun and all unused ammo.
So, ammo management can be annoying in this game, firstly because of the aforementioned auto aim just helping you burn through ammo. You can manually aim, which I feel in games like this is always a trap, because you need to stand still for it and standing still is just a bad idea in any kind of shooter. But you also have a limited stockpile of ammo, usually in the region of 9 clips per weapon, but you also want to give your allies ammo, not only to trust you, but because they are seemingly more effective at shooting than you are. But even they will burn through ammo because the game loves to throw enemies at you. For a super intelligent creature capable of careful and calculated subterfuge, it does seem to favour swarm tactics. Swarm tactics of forms of itself that can be dealt with by using small arms fire, heck the pistol in this game is not a terrible weapon. I bring this up because anything larger than the head crab enemies, that the game throws at you in droves, requires you to use a flamethrower to finish off. The flamethrower is, interesting. Besides being used to finish off the larger Thing monsters, it can be used to cause them to flee from you, or give you space, but when you use it, you spew fire about two feet in front of you, meaning that if you are not careful, you will just burn yourself, draining your health unnecessarily. It’s a frustrating tool to use, but you must use it. I suppose you could give it to an NPC, but there are plenty of instances in this game where you are on fending larger monsters off on your own.
The Thing on PS2 is, ultimately, a very disappointing experience. If we take it away from the Thing license for a second, and pretend it has nothing to do with the movie, it is just a rather dull shooting game that borders on frustrating in numerous spaces. The moment the Thing monsters start appearing, it feels like they just keep appearing, the larger monsters aren’t that much of a threat in the grand scheme of things, and they are, for the most part, pretty easy to outmanoeuvre. This game would probably benefit highly from being a bit more like Alien Isolation, where the Xenomorph is an unkillable machine that you fear and must run from. An encounter with the Thing should have impact, it should take you by surprise, it should have the potential to effortlessly kill you, then when you meet new NPCs, you should immediately be worried that they are trying to mislead you or make your lower your guard. Probably the only positives I can think of for the game, the atmosphere and ambience can be pretty good and the some of the monster designs really capture some of the body horror elements from the film.
I seemingly have a penchant for dissatisfaction, even the allure of RetroAchievements and claiming a mastery on this game just doesn’t bring me any joy. I think part of it is because I knew this was a bad game, compared to Extermination, Cold Fear and Kuon, where I went in with middling expectations and no previous knowledge on the game at all. There is also my cult-like level of devotion to the source material and dreaming of the potential of what a The Thing game could be. Honestly, the sad thing is, games like Among Us capture the idea of The Thing much better than this game, but those games rely on a human element, something that would be hard to replicate in a single player only experience. A more open-ended experience, with branching paths and possibly a hint of randomisation would probably work best, though adding randomness to, effectively, a visual novel would probably cause a lot of frustration. But now I am getting sidetracked.
Games with some kind of book or film license are a tricky one, because, chances are, your chief consumers are going to be the people who are fans if the source material and they are also going to be the most pedantic critics. At least that is where I am with it, my expectations would be insurmountable regardless of when this game was made. Nightdive has a remaster of this game which apparently fixes some issues, but I honestly think it needs to be burnt down to the ground and built from the ashes.
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