A high price to pay for the sake of nostalgia.
First 𝚐𝚘𝚍𝚍𝚊𝚖𝚗 week of winter greeted us with a remaster of a 2002 classic delivered by non other than Nightdive Studios, masters of this craft. No complaints can be made about the technical part, it runs smooth like butter without any stutters, framerate drops or crashes. It's not oversized either, it looks like proper compression took place since size is around 5gb. Game never looked better too, a lot of improvements were made when it comes to visuals and even if you put a blind man in front of comparison screenshots, they'll say that this thing is hella good. I don't know how they did it, make sure to check their blood. That's what good remaster means, it's taking an already existing product that was collecting dust and polishing it to fit modern standards without removing the core. I sincerely thank Nightdive for making sure that classics are not lost in the flow of time.
Last time I played The Thing was more than a decade ago, back when I had my trusty PS2. When you are young, you tend to treat things differently. You don't notice problems with level design, difficulty, AI, pacing, voice acting, or where the story is taking you. You are shooting monsters with guns and flamethrowers, what else do you need? Obviously back then I wasn't familiar with the movie and what it's about. But time goes on, and now, after acknowledging the movie, watching it a few dozen times and understanding why it's considered a masterpiece I've heard that good old tie-in video game is being brought back. I was excited.
After playing it for a while it's clear that The Thing was and still is not that good of a video game to begin with. At first the pieces are there. The cold, unforgiving and isolated Antarctica, a group of people you are not sure can be trusted, cool references to the movie with tape from MacReady, dead body of Childs with good old J&B whiskey bottle near him and UFO sightings, the good stuff. Then it takes a massive hit trying to be like any other sci-fi horror media piece. It honestly turns into resident evil, and not in a good way. But at the same time it's kinda charming in a way. An "experimental" spin of the idea sort of speak. I don't hate it.
All the issues I listed above are still present in the remaster, except for the difficulty. Even playing on hard with low aim assist (you can't disable it) is a cakewalk, but I don't want to pump it up in case it turns into unbalanced mess. Full price purchase recommended only if you are a hardcore The Thing fan or want to support Nightdive with their endeavours.
After paying close attention to their other remasters, devs tend to release 1-2 patches for their products after games go public. Mostly fixing issues, maybe difficulty will be tweaked in the future. So why don't we just wait here for a little while, see what happens?