The Thing
To me, it’s the great unasked question: “What would I do in that situation?” Survive, freak out, or become lunch? It’s a great premise, and one that should’ve made for a better game.
Universal Interactive’s The Thing is a third-person action/adventure semi-sequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 cult-classic movie of the same name. Picking up shortly after the film’s fiery conclusion, a military squad has descended upon the demolished Antarctic outpost to look for survivors and investigate what happened. As Captain Blake, you find research notes, dead bodies, and destruction.
Oh, and Things. Lots and lots of Things.
What sets the game apart from other “survival horror” fare is that your squad-mates (engineers, medics, and soldiers) will cooperate with you only if they trust you (i.e., don’t think you’re a Thing yourself). A squad-interaction screen gives you a readout on each man’s trust level, health, plus state of mind, ranging from calm to panicked. Divvying up weapons, administering blood tests, and fighting Things raises trust; inaction and hoarding lowers it.
The very best moments in The Thing take advantage of the game’s unique trust/fear system. Wearing its M rating like a badge of honor, it boasts one early standout scene in which I saw one of my medics spontaneously begin quaking and Thing-ing out. After killing him with a combination of shotgun fire and a torch, I watched my hysterical (and vomiting) engineer take his gun, stick it in his mouth, and paint the wall with his brains.
There are too few of these moments, though, and part of the problem is the game’s fundamental design. The small squad initially assigned to you leaves after the first mission. You meet new medics, engineers, and soldiers conveniently placed throughout the game’s subsequent missions, but they mostly help you open doors and fight against Things, and you feel no real empathy for any of the characters (unlike in the movie).
Overall, I got the feeling that there could be a truly amazing game here if only the developers had more time to polish it. Too many rough edges ruin an otherwise smooth production: clipping problems, unexplained mission objectives (Why am I searching a warehouse? Why am I blowing up planes with C4?), save points strategically placed to artificially raise the difficulty of certain missions, and an emphasis on scripting over substance. (I broke the game once by finishing one objective before another; even though the mission itself was successful, I was forced to load a saved game to continue.)
Graphicswise, The Thing isn’t for the squeamish. Blood and gore are thick as cake, and the ambience seeps dread. My only quibble here is with the unrelenting sameness in the monster design. I’d hoped that Things would reveal themselves in a variety of grotesque manifestations, but there are really only three — scuttlers, head-Things, and big Things — and their AI is straight out of The Big Book of Generic Game Monsters. NPCs might as well be turning into werewolves or zombies
.
Being a fan of the movie, I can’t help but be disappointed. The Thing tries to do the right thing; it just doesn’t do that thing as often as it should.