The Thing

A Video Game Review

by Mighty Doom

            One cannot properly review The Thing without first speaking at some length about the 1982 John Carpenter film upon which the game is based.  I fucking love the movie.  It’s one of Doom’s prestigious Top Ten, perhaps even Top Five, and remains one of the tensest, scariest movies ever made.  The film was in turn based upon John W. Campbell’s 1938 short novel Who Goes There?, which also spawned a far shittier film in 1951 entitled The Thing From Another World.  Carpenter’s remake is far more faithful to Campbell’s original than was the early-fifties adaptation by Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks (Jesus Christ, more name-dropping than Tolkein here), and featured Kurt Russell, Keith David and Wilford Brimley (WHERE’S MY OATMEAL?).

            The 1982 film finds a group of Antarctic researchers (positions and purpose never specified) trapped by an otherworldly beast with the power to assimilate living flesh and assume its shape.  Fear quickly escalates into distrust, and distrust into violence.  Before long the men, unable to distinguish human from alien, are pointing weapons at each other, running around in -40 degree weather and dying left and right as The Thing strikes again and again.  There are some truly amazing and gory special effects in this film – for instance, one of the crew apparently has a heart attack, and when he’s put on a hospital gurney his stomach turns into a giant toothy maw and bites off the doctor’s arms at the elbows.  There’s a lot of this going around, and hard as it may be to believe, you never see it coming.  This film will make you cringe and jump out of your seat.

            The film ends (spoiler ahead, for those of you who care) on a delightfully ambiguous note with MacReady and Childs (Russell and David), the only two apparent survivors, sharing a beer and watching the fires consume the destroyed research station.  They’re understandably suspicious of one another, but their fates are left untold – until now.  Black Label Games has designed a worthy successor to Carpenter’s film, incorporating trust, fear and, above all, a great deal of spent ammunition.  The game picks up precisely where the movie ended.  A rescue team has come to bail out MacReady and the others, but they arrive to find the base deserted but for a number of mutilated corpses – including Childs’.

            Blake, a fairly flat and uninteresting character, must find and gain the trust of the scattered members of his crew and find out what’s happening at the base and how to stop it.  He quickly realizes that not everyone is to be trusted – any of your teammates can turn into a Thing at any time and put you in a world of hurt – and that fire is the only effective means by which to dispatch the grotesqueries wandering the base and the surrounding facilities, which include the Norwegian base from the film and an underground lab where genetic and military testing are being conducted by one Colonel Whitely, voiced by William B. Davis, The X-Files’ Cigarette-Smoking Man.

            The Thing is generally action-oriented, with a touch of the tense psychology of Carpenter’s film.  If the game is afflicted with one significant flaw, it is that the fear/trust aspect is not utilized to its fullest extent.  You’ll generally have to kill a certain group of monsters or provide a weapon and ammunition before a new recruit will join your team, but after that they’re generally with you until they either die, turn into a Thing or crack up and commit suicide, which sometimes happens if the action becomes too hairy or the environment too stressful (a roomful of charred and mangled corpses will generally have a negative effect on your team).  Taking a weapon will decrease their trust in you, and they won’t always give it up willingly, in which case you’ll have to give them a shot with your stun gun and take it by force, which, naturally, increases fear and decreases trust.  On the other hand, if you’re able to gain a team member’s 100% trust, he’ll watch your back if the other members decide you’re a Thing and open fire, and he won’t question your own decisions to open fire on a team member you think is infected.  This is another flaw – there’s no indication as to whether your fellow man is a Thing or not until his arms pop off and he grows tentacles out of his ears.

            Despite the somewhat rough and unfinished nature of the fear/trust system, however, The Thing is a fun and fast-paced game with some scary moments and a hell of a lot of genuinely imaginative gore.  The difficulty may seem a little imbalanced – it’s generally easy going throughout the levels, and manageable even at its most difficult, but you’ll be lucky to survive five seconds when you run up against a boss – but it’s a minor flaw in a game that otherwise lives up to Doom’s expectations, which were quite high, given the quality of Carpenter’s film.  It’s not every day you play a game in which the first boss is a Norwegian with tentacles and a dog head for an arm.

THE GOOD: Fast-paced action, effective team-oriented combat, the characters all swear like sailors and it’s even got John Carpenter’s seal of approval.

THE BAD: The fear/trust system is innovative and often impressive, but seems unfinished.

THE UGLY: Plenty of mutilated bodies, slimy moving things and gunshot wounds to the head.

DOOM’S FINAL JUDGMENT: B+