Horror-shooter The Thing is being remastered by Nightdive

The Thing: Remastered Announcement Trailer | Nightdive Studios - YouTube The Thing: Remastered Announcement Trailer | Nightdive Studios - YouTube
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Nightdive's next remaster of a classic game isn't an obvious one: It's The Thing, the 2002 combination of survival horror and squad shooter that was developer Computer Artworks' last game. Critically and commercially acclaimed at the time, it has been pretty hard to get on its original console platforms since—or required some technical wizardry to get running well on PC.

The Thing: Remastered is set after the events of the famous 1982 John Carpenter movie, showing a possible sequel where a military squad it sent to the abandoned outpost—naturally, the shape-shifting alien is very much still alive and ready to murder you all. 

The remaster will bring it up to modern performance, "including Antialiasing, Per Pixel Lighting, 4K Resolution and up to 144 FPS" and an implementation of "dynamic lighting, specular mapping, shadows, depth of field complemented by improved models, textures and environments to create a deep level of immersion."

The remaster will have everything from the original game, which presumably includes the cameo of a character played by movie director John Carpenter himself, plus some as-yet-unspecified quality of life improvements that I expect will seem very obvious to modern players, once revealed.

You can find a page for The Thing: Remastered on Steam. For my part, I'm pretty excited to get it. I wanted to try it back in 2002, but couldn't get my hands on a copy no matter how hard I tried at the time. I expect the same kind of curiosity will drive a lot of interested in this remaster.

Contributor

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.

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