The Thing: Remastered review for PC, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation

I get why some people may be very excited that The Thing: Remastered exists. It’s a PS2 remaster, for one thing, which means that lots of people who played it back when it first came out in 2002 are probably eager to see if it still holds up two decades later. On top of that, it was pretty ambitious for its time, taking your standard third-person squad-based shooter and adding in a fear/trust AI system that was a wholly new innovation. Take those things together, and, as I said, I get the appeal.

Unfortunately, unless you have an emotional, nostalgic connection to The Thing, I don’t think you’ll get much out of The Thing: Remastered. It’s a pretty barebones update, as remasters go. The game may boast of adding “antialiasing, Per Pixel Lighting, 4K Resolution and up to 144 FPS,” but it still looks pretty much exactly as you’d expect a slightly updated PS2 game to look. You’ll notice it, too – not only when you come across a cutscene and you see the game in all its sixth-gen glory, but during gameplay, too, thanks to the squad-based aspect. You need to keep a close eye on your squadmates’ mental states, and that’s conveyed via facial expressions that come off as a little overexpressive (to be kind), so you’ll see these blocky faces trying to show real emotion.

Really, though, I can handle middling graphics. What’s harder to wrap my head around is gameplay that very much feels like it’s missing more modern innovations like, say, maps and waypoints. This is a big deal, seeing as so much of The Thing: Remastered is built around you being told to carry out objectives with little clear explanation of where you’re supposed to go. Early on, for example, I was told to plant bombs in specific rooms and then go to an evac site; while I was able to figure out the rooms thanks to the fact that I hadn’t unlocked very many areas, finding the evac site was a lot harder, to the point that I was essentially just wandering around, hoping I’d eventually trigger a cutscene.

While the AI system holds up a little better, it would be a stretch to say that your squadmates feel like living, breathing people. At some points, I had some squadmates freak out on me for no clear reason, and I managed to calm them down without actually doing anything. Another time, I found myself completely at sea as to what I was supposed to be doing so I just started shooting, and even as some of my squadmates took it as a sign that I’d been infected and started shooting at me (which, to be fair, is a pretty neat feature), the medic on my team immediately ran towards me as my squadmates were shooting because he wanted to heal me from the gunshots. While the system may have felt innovative in 2002, it’s clearly less so now.

Does that mean that you should avoid The Thing: Remastered at all costs? Definitely not. It works as it should, which is always a plus (even if it’s a little baffling at times), and I have no doubt that if you sank a half-dozen hours or so into the game back in 2002, you should find that the game is probably the same now as it was then. I think that if you don’t have that sense of nostalgia you’ll probably find the game a little lacking, but as PS2 remasters go, you could probably do a lot worse.

Nightdive Studios provided us with a Thing: Remastered PC code for review purposes.