Nobody trusts anybody – The Thing

Few juxtapositions in the timing of games’ success have been as flattering to a game as The Thing climbing to replace Conflict: Desert Storm at #1. Here is another third-person, squad-based game in which you shoot things, issue commands to up to three other squad members, and juggle inventory, while being led by the hand through specific required steps. Comparisons are natural. Instead of the Gulf War, though, this one takes the 1982 shapeshifting alien horror film of its title for inspiration, and introduces such novel concepts as atmosphere, purpose and human feeling.

The Thing the video game is set as a sequel to the film, and apparently came about from Universal Studios deciding to scour their history for potential lucrative games in 2000, upon which they decided this was one of the best possibilities. I’m guessing from the timelines that someone may have heard of the development of Extermination and decided that if there was evidence of demand for PS2 survival horror based on a terrible infectious threat in Antarctica, officially doing the most famous such story should be a sure bet.

It’s a choice of setting which goes much better than in Extermination, too. The Antarctica of The Thing is a barren and alien place. Its hostility is conveyed through a cold meter that runs down over your time outside, until it runs out and your health bar starts running down instead. It’s also conveyed more powerfully by the cold, dark palette, faint blue lights all you have to see by. Even before you start finding bodies and worse, it feels like anything could be out there. As you investigate abandoned bases, light is a precious resource, something you have to work hard to create or look after carefully. Playing The Thing not the first time I’ve found myself facing a lit room and walking backwards into a corridor as the only way to maintain a sense of where I was going (I came up with that one in Medal of Honor: Frontline) but it does feel particularly deliberate and effective.

All of that makes the frenzied alien attacks extra effective when they eventually come too, not necessarily in jumpscare terms but in the number of fearful unknowns that are still present as you fire away in the dark. Not least of which is whether they’ve infected your teammates (your main character turns out to have some genetic abnormality which makes him immune, a fact as disheartening as it is convenient). Which brings us to the most interesting thing that The Thing tries to do, even if it doesn’t wholeheartedly success, which is to properly reflect the themes of paranoia and distrust from the film.

The men that you are alongside are not the blank functionaries of Conflict: Desert Storm, there to ask ‘how high’ when you tell them to jump. The game’s mechanisms give them fear and mistrust. Which make sense in a place where any human they see might be the alien threat in disguise. You have to win some over before they will obey you, for example by giving them equipment. And if you get too close to too many bodily horrors, they may get progressively more afraid before losing it completely. You need to get them away from there or medically intervene. You also have to consider the fact that they may have been infected themselves, and consider whether distrust and fear might be appropriate responses too.

Now, pressing the triangle button to bring up the status screen and seeing one of the guys’ heads looking around anxiously, or looking at their trust gauge to see if it’s green, is not really a substitute for dialogue and development in terms of caring about a relationship. And the ultimate disposability of everyone, including the fact that some team members turn into the Thing at set points that are built into the narrative, means that they too often feel like human-looking wrappers barely concealing the calculation systems underneath. This game was the product of developers pleased with the ambiguity of the end of the film because it gave them the opportunity to make a sequel… and remove that ambiguity, in favour of an evil villain’s plan. Still, in its opening hours especially, The Thing feels like something new thinking new thoughts about what games can do and say.

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Top of the charts for week ending 28 September 2002:

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