The Thing: Remastered (PC) review "Man is the lukewarmest place to hide"

A question posed by someone on the internet, I'm sure: Why is there a “Cat Distribution System,” but no “Dog Distribution System?”

Answer: Have you ever seen John Carpenter's 1982 film “The Thing?”

The movie begins with a team of researchers in Antarctica doing everyday team-of-researchers stuff when a husky sprints into their outpost. A Norwegian man warns then not to go near the animal, except none of them speak Norwegian. The dude attempts to shoot the dog, but ends up taking a fatal bullet for his troubles. Believe me, he got off easy. The dog seems cute and cuddly enough until the crew puts him in a pen with the other huskies, and there he reveals himself to be a shape-changing alien life form with the ability to devour animals, assimilate their flesh into its own, and then imitate anything it scarfs down.

Wilford Brimley, having eaten his Quaker oatmeal and checked his blood sugar, performed an autopsy on the beast—which our heroes vanquished via flame thrower—and made the aforementioned discovery. Of course, this bred paranoia amongst the crew, and rightly so. Multiple men had been “infected” and turned out to be Things emulating them. Kurt Russell and Keith David both team up to ensure the creature never leaves the camp, else it infect the entire world and turn us all into Things.

I won't spoil the ending for you entirely, but obviously not all of the affairs tidied up neatly or else there wouldn't be a sequel. Here's the thing, though: “part 2” isn't a film, but a third-person shooter game developed by Computer Artworks. No, the original wasn't an action film, but someone apparently thought turning Carpenter's classic into a squad-based gunner was better than copying Resident Evil again.



Fun fact: I bought The Thing on PS2 ages ago and never played it. I couldn't muster the desire to commit to it because I had a nasty habit at the time of rage quitting survival-horror games. Thanks to developer Nightdive Studios releasing a remaster of the console title on Steam, I now feel like an idiot because nothing about the experience spoke of rage-quit levels of difficulty... On one hand, this puts me at a disadvantage because I can't compare the port to the original. I can say that the visuals look more cleaned up than your average PS2 offering, with improved animation and antialiasing that makes the game feel like less of a fossil. On the other hand, I can play this one without that pesky nostalgia creeping in and telling me that this dusty piece should receive praise because warm feelings.

You kick things off months after the previous story, with Captain Blake and his squad checking out what remains of Outpost 31. Here, the game shows you the ropes as any title does with its primary stage. You avoid exposure to the forbidding cold by getting indoors, task your teammates with repairing damaged machinery or healing you, and deal with their fragile mental states as they see gruesome sights that drive them insane. Of course, you resolve this with some adrenaline, eventually engage in the blood test seen in the film, and determine that a couple of guys who teamed with you are, in fact, Things.

For the first few segments, you explore various facilities, fight off walking heads and disembodied stomachs that shoot digestive fluid, and recruit frightened allies. You walk up to one, hand him a gun, give him some ammo, and try to mind his sanity. Of course, sometimes you hand him a gun and he transforms and tries to kill you, and that's when you use the game's capable combat mechanics to first pump the dude full of lead, then torch him. Human-sized Things, like in the movie, don't perish with mere bullets. You've got to use fire to bring them down.



The game proves entertaining enough for quite some time. You slip into dark complexes, fight off hideous monsters, and even battle bosses composed of various human body parts, tentacles, nodes, and whatever horrific anatomy all strung together with no rhyme or reason. And really, that's where this game hits its high notes. Enemy designs are magnificent, and each monster moves erratically enough to keep you on your toes, working diligently to ensure your squad mates don't get infected or killed.

As with any third-person job, this one gives you the usual weaponry, from a handgun to a grenade launcher. However, the one twist is that you must consider how you're going to arm your troops. Giving a guy a shotgun helps take care of the small Things easily, but also puts you in danger of receiving inadvertent friendly fire. Of course, if the guy goes nuts and turns on you, then you'll have to contend with hefty firepower, where giving him a pistol would make it easier to lob a fire grenade at and berate him about losing his mind so easily as he burns to death placate him. Then again, a 9mm isn't going to do much more than sting anything larger than a terrier...

And no, don't worry about running out of ammo. It's everywhere, sometimes even stockpiled in boxes. Besides, this one doesn't operate like a traditional horror game where you're expected to conserve munitions and run past the opposition as often as possible. Feel free to make it rain lead and fire any time. You've earned it.



You have simple fun for a while with this one, only feeling a little more disgust as the plot unravels. Predictably, someone got it in their heads to weaponize the aliens, only for a megalomaniac to infect himself with an advanced strain of the life form and use it for world conquest. Where before we had a tale of distrust with “Red Scare” subtext, we now have the plot to virtually every shooter from the twenty-aughts, except with an extraterrestrial infection. Eventually, humans regularly become your targets, and that's where things start to go south...

The main antagonist sends his own squads against you. Unlike the Things you fight up to this point, they're quite boring and dumb. As you approach some of them, they respond by running away from you so they can reposition for an ideal shot, leaving themselves wide open. You toss a grenade and one of them runs away while one or two others chill out next to the explosive until they're reduced to bouncy, meaty chunks. In one stage, your opponents setup trip-laser explosives, which they detonate themselves. Even when they don't run past a red line, you can still force a bomb to explode with a well-placed shot and tear apart the enemies stupidly standing right next to it.



Thankfully, dumb AI routines don't ruin the game, and some shootouts actually hit the spot just right. A few sections give you ample space to utilize a sniper rifle, and others hint at using stealth, but don't punish you for taking a “guns blazing” approach.

The Thing Remastered comes to a satisfying conclusion, but only after you've battled through its ups and downs. Its play control, mechanics, and scenarios prove to be entertaining enough, and are by no means “rage quit” difficult. This one is quite doable, even when its quality dips thanks to its cringe-inducing plot and brainless human foes. Ultimately, it's worth checking out, but it's nowhere near as cool as it should be.

And to think, all of this because of one dog and a team of scientists who couldn't speak Norwegian...

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (October 26, 2025) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.