The Thing

The key to John Carpenter's 1982 scare flick, The Thing, was its incredibly effective build up of paranoia. Sure, it had the goop and gore scattered throughout, especially once "The Thing" really started to spread its, er, substance around. But it was Kurt Russell's performance when he was dictating a message into a tape recorder -- one he hoped would be found by a rescue party if no one survived -- that really conveyed the pure fear. You can never go to sleep. You can never ease that grip on your weapon. You can't stand close to the people who only hours before had been your comrades. And there is absolutely no end in sight.

Just 20 short years after the film was released, Universal Interactive has seen fit to bestow us with a game tie-in. This sort of thing usually sets off alarm bells with gamers early given the track record of titles based on movie licenses. However, unlike some movies, The Thing is perfectly suited to a creepy, action-adventure game. Set in an isolated Antarctic outpost, this game has the potential to scare you not with what you see, but when you don't see anything and yet you know the real danger could be standing right next to you with a gun in his hand.

The good news is that The Thing for PC lives up to a good amount of that promise. Its first smart decision is beginning the story soon after where the film left off instead of doing a predictable remake of the same plot. You play Blake, commander of a military team that has been sent in to investigate the disappearance of the scientific expedition - sounds a bit like another infamous sequel about a nameless "Alien", doesn't it? The Thing, for those who don't know, is an alien creature that has the ability to transform into a replica of whatever it touches, but it does so in a process a whole lot more gooey than the T-1000 Terminator.

The Thing's interface is actually not quite as self-explanatory as you'd first imagine for a third-person action-adventure. To help you out, rather lengthy tutorial tips pop up throughout the game whenever you need to be taught about a new device or action; jarring at first, these become infrequent soon enough, and you'll be thankful once you've learned the interface.

Movement is the standard keyboard/mouse configuration, although for no apparent reason (other than it being developed simultaneously for console platforms), your free-look is limited to the horizontal axis. That is, unless you toggle first person mode, which in turn prevents you from moving. Strange, but at least the game's design has taken into account that you won't be looking up or down too often, so it doesn't put much of interest anywhere but on eye level. PC gamers will feel this title screams to be first-person by default, for immersion purposes if nothing else.

The thing that sets The Thing -- sorry! -- apart from other games in this genre is having the ability to command up to four members of your squad, or as is usually the case, any persons you happen across that are willing to go with you. The same trust/fear mechanic that was prominent in the film plays a relatively large role in the game, too. Everyone has a trust meter that needs to be at least halfway filled for them to follow you around; gaining trust from someone is often a simple matter of giving them a gun, although some secondary missions require you to prove you're human by killing a certain number of Things. Later in the game, you can also perform a blood test on yourself to gain trust - The Thing is made up of millions of individual living cells, so Thing blood reacts violently to just about any aggravating chemical you could throw on it.

The gameplay itself is a compelling mix of survival horror games like Resident Evil, with simple adventure elements and puzzles and your bog standard fast paced shooter. The pacing has been tuned well, starting slowly, keeping all the aliens out of sight, then slowly revealing the carnage as you explore further, until you eventually come under attack on a regular basis. The Thing itself comes in two basic forms; little spider-like crawlers that are dispatched with one quick shotgun blast, and bloody humanoid monstrosities with varying amounts of misshapen heads and claws and tentacles. The latter kind takes multiple hits, and as in the movie, need to be burned to kill off permanently.

Team members also have various uses other than just being another target for evisceration. Some have the ability to heal you and other team-mates, and others are engineer class and can fix various power boxes and override door locks. You're required to interact with the environment often, accessing logs and codes on computer terminals, picking up notes and even controlling CCTV cams hunting for clues.

Visually, The Thing excels. The attention to detail in all the environments is extremely high, textures are sharp and the people are hugely realistic, with fluid animation and lip-synced voices. They also react to things around them - point a gun at their head and they'll retort with a lewd hand gesture. If they see something particularly grotesque, they'll even lose whatever meal they last ingested. You know how far we've come in bringing games into the cultural mainstream when non-essential characters start puking without any contribution to advancing the plot. Hey, it spelled success for every gross-out comedy since There's Something About Mary. Audio also matches the high visual production values, creeping you out with all sorts of ambient effects.

The Thing falls short of greatness in two areas. One, it's seriously short. Even taking into account the scattered save points and consequent replay times -- another console annoyance, which can actually be fixed with a registry edit -- you should still be done with this in under eight hours, and there's no multiplayer mode to prolong its life.

Second, while the whole fear/trust element was an admirably innovative attempt at recreating the film's tension, it falls short because it's both quirky and ultimately pointless. There are times where a team member can come up clear in a blood test but only moments later transform into a Thing due to some trigger in the game's script. Generally, everyone ends up becoming a Thing or dying beforehand, so you feel no real loss and the only time it matters is when you can't complete a level because you needed that one engineer alive. There's also no real tension because even if someone is a Thing, once they reveal themselves, you can take 'em down in a matter of seconds.

The game also suffers from a rather nasty bug that remained unfixed in a recent patch. On some machines, including ours, all voice audio was muted during cutscenes, and the only way to fix it was by unarchiving a .pak file in the game's data directory, adding about 300mb to the install size - ouch!

The Thing on its own stands as a slightly flawed, yet atmospheric and alluring action-adventure. Hardcore fans of the film, however, will have fewer complaints and appreciate the touches added by the developer who obviously cared greatly about making a worthy follow-up to Carpenter's thriller. Coming across the actual tape recorded by MacReady and finding out where Childs ended up was a simple, yet brilliant idea to connect the two stories. For an alien that's 100,000 years old, The Thing can definitely hold its own against any other scary creature -- from a game or movie -- that you can throw at it.

Review By GamesDomain