Halloween Havoc: The Thing (2002, PS2/PC/Xbox)

in #gaming5 years ago

Source: GameFAQs.com

Thirty-six years ago, John Carpenter's The Thing arrived in cinemas and suffered a critical lambasting. Critics and audiences alike had fallen in love earlier that year with the peaceful E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, who healed cuts and made flowers bloom with a touch of his glowing finger. When Carpenter's alien touched down in Antarctica two weeks later, spreading not peace and understanding but rather paranoia and violence, movie-goers were all too happy to label it exploitative, derivative, mean-spirited, and repulsive--and those were the nicer opinions. Alan Spencer, writing for Starlog magazine, opined Carpenter would be better off directing traffic accidents, public floggings, or train derailments than feature films. Vincent Canby referred to it as "instant junk" in the pages of The New York Times. Cinefantastique, a magazine devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and horror in cinema, put The Thing on its cover--but only to ask if it was the worst film of all time.

Carpenter was understandably disappointed when his film was compared to 1951's The Thing From Another World. His Thing wasn't meant to re-make the Christian Nyby film, but rather to make the movie it should have been in the first place by paying closer homage to John Campbell's short story, "Who Goes There?" upon which both movies are ostensibly based. The esteemed Roger Ebert wrote it off as an unnecessary remake, an excuse to display "barf bag" special effects played out against a selection of typecast actors in the dullest, drabbest setting imaginable.

And you thought it was bad when your mom neglected to 'Like' the picture you posted yesterday. Yeesh!

Thank goodness, then, for home video, where John Carpenter's The Thing earned a second life and a reputation as an undiscovered gem, a cult classic of science fiction horror, successfully mingling the paranoia of stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Puppet Masters with the gut-punching body horror of Alien and The Fly. It didn't happen overnight, but The Thing finally found its place as a well-loved, well-respected cinematic masterpiece which still holds up today.

The film ends with one of the classic unanswered questions of cinema. Two survivors sitting amidst the wreckage of the outpost in sub-freezing temperatures, with no shelter, no radio, no food, and no hope of rescue. Each wondering if the other is human or not. Each too exhausted to do anything but "just sit here for a little while," as the ice-cold darkness and snow close in around them.

Fade to black.

Roll credits.

What, if anything, survived?

It took twenty years, but Carpenter, with the help of Black Label and Vivendi Universal, gave us an answer with 2002's release of The Thing on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation 2.


The story picks up shortly after the destruction of Outpost 31 at the conclusion of the film. The game opens with a short cut-scene where the operator of a security video feed laughs to himself as he watches a pair of Norwegians get carved up by a grotesque monstrosity. From there, we shift to a rescue chopper dropping off a small group of men dressed for sub-zero operations. You play as Blake, leader of a team sent to figure out why nobody's heard from the scientists stationed there. Your first order of business is to recon the area and report back to Whitley, the guy heading up the operation from off-base.

The Thing opens with a gutsy maneuver for a horror game: the first level is completely devoid of monsters, though not devoid of things to creep you out. The team at Black Label took great pains to reproduce the actual film sets, and fans of the film will see plenty of familiar areas and elements while exploring the first area. One of the first discoveries made is a frozen body near the burnt-out remains of the dog kennels, which settles the story for what happened to one of the two people after the film ended, but leaves open another question.

After coming across other bits and bobs, like MacReady's hidden recording documenting some of the happenings at the base, and the remains of a cobbled-together spacecraft, Blake gets sent to rendezvous with another team which went to inspect the nearby Norwegian outpost. They haven't radioed in, and Blake's the only one in his squad who speaks Norwegian, so it's up to him to ask questions. What he and his team find there touches off a nightmare of gunfire, bloodshed, and paranoia as it becomes clear there's something alive but definitely not human roaming the grounds.


The Thing isn't as perfect or as polished as I would have liked it to be. Vivendi rushed the game's development so it could launch concurrent to the film's 20th anniversary. The result is a game which feels like two separate experiences: the first half is survival horror with some unique squad-based elements and a trust/paranoia system that sees members of Blake's team shaken, rattled, and sometimes scared into babbling incoherence or driven to attack the rest of the group or even take their own lives if they feel overwhelmed with no way out. There's a constant balancing act with the team, involving inventory management, weapons dispersal, and squad class behaviors which had never been tried before. Also included is a temperature mechanic. Even as dressed as they are for low-temp ops, Blake and his team can't stay outside in blizzard conditions forever. This adds an element of urgency to scenes of outdoor exploration and interior areas that have been exposed to the elements by way of a collapsed ceiling, shattered windows, and the like.

Unfortunately all of this is detached and thrown out for the second half of the game, which plays more like an action shooter than the creepy survival horror experience we'd seen up until that point. The mechanics are still there, they're just utilized much less, and instead of squad-based survival, it feels more like extended escort missions. We all know how awesome those are in video games, right class?

Graphically, The Thing looks quite good for the time period, with the Xbox and PC editions edging out the PS2 in fidelity. There's plenty of blood and gore to be seen, and on-screen transformations are brutal in their depictions. As befitting a game based on a film where no one knew quite what to make of such an adaptable adversary, you encounter incarnations of the Thing which bear no resemblance to what we saw in the movie, alongside monster types the audience should be more familiar with. The story too takes plenty of cues from the original film, not just in the look and feel of the American and Norwegian outposts, but also lines of dialog and even a couple of altered jokes that call back to scenes from Carpenter's movie.

Audio is a mixed bag. The sound effects are fine, but the voice acting is very hit-or-miss. Whitley, voiced by William B. "Cancer Man" Davis, is quite good, as is Per Solli who voices Blake. The rest of the cast ranges from "phoning it in" to "really trying". Carpenter himself has a cameo, both in face and voice, as the scientist Dr. Faraday, which was great to see. The main disappointment involves dialog from the original film, like the aforementioned MacReady recording. The studio lacked either the budget or the willingness to hire any of the original members of the film's cast, so don't expect to hear Kurt Russel's voice coming out of that tape.

The soundtrack is minimal, being completely silent in most areas, but you can't miss Morricone's iconic 'heartbeat' track kick in during times when things start getting weird. Don't expect to hear this often though--for the most part, you'll be accompanied in your adventure by the sounds of howling winds, the staccato of gunfire, the roar of a far-away Thing crashing around, and the occasional chatter of your teammates. Silence in this game is not golden: when you can't hear anything, expect the worst.

The biggest disappointment I have with The Thing is in the implementation of the NPC trust and paranoia mechanics. I get the feeling with more development time, Black Label Games could have worked this into something truly memorable. As it is though, the dictates of the story will often bulldoze right through your efforts to maintain control over who's human and who isn't. There were instances in my first playthrough where a team mate I'd had my eye on the whole time (and had, in fact, just tested with a blood serum kit to ensure he was human a room or two earlier) morphed into a Thing right in front of me when there was no possibility for infection. I guarantee the same will happen to you. This is supremely disappointing, since the devs pre-decided who gets infected before you boot it up instead of rewarding careful (and suitably paranoid) players for their vigilance in keeping track of their teammates.


So it's not perfect. That's no surprise. What is surprising is just how much fun it is anyway. The designers clearly had great respect for the source materials, and when it comes down to it, they did their best to ensure the look at feel of everything related back to the movie. Carpenter was quite pleased with the game, and gave it his stamp of approval--as far as he's concerned, this is what happened after the curtain came down on his picture, so it's one of the few licensed games that is canonical to the story.

Could it have been better? Absolutely. There's no denying the team had higher hopes for what they could accomplish, and they bit off more than they could chew. But I can't fault them for trying, and the mechanics they introduce for squad-based survival horror and the trust/paranoia system are both unique and worth exploring again. John Carpenter's film is a hard act for anyone to follow, as we saw with the 2011 prequel which tried and failed. This game is better than that movie, and for that reason deserves a spin this Halloween season.

If you can't play it but want to see it in action, YouTuber GirlGamerGab did a multi-part live-stream of it back in 2016. She's one of my favorite streamers, and I highly recommend her stuff--she tends to focus on horror-themed games, and she does on-the-fly translations of some Japanese stuff that never made it to the West, so she's exceptionally talented.

Check out her playlist for The Thing here, and leave a like if you enjoy it!

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.35
TRX 0.12
JST 0.040
BTC 70557.88
ETH 3560.83
USDT 1.00
SBD 4.75