The Thing

Hand a scared soldier a flamethrower and watch what happens. He might hold the corridor while you work a keypad, or he might panic, turn the nozzle on himself, and leave you one man short. Computer Artworks built its 2002 Antarctic horror around that gamble, and it remains the reason the game is still argued about two decades later.

It picks up after John Carpenter's film rather than retelling it, following a US special forces team sent to the burnt-out Norwegian and American outposts. What you find is corpses, spreading organic matter, and other survivors who need to be recruited before they are useful. Squadmates carry roles: medics patch you up, engineers restore power, soldiers shoot. They also carry two hidden meters, trust and fear, and both drain fast in the dark, near mutilated bodies, or when you fail to hand over ammunition. A frightened man is useless. A distrustful one may put a bullet in you. The blood test kit, drawn straight from the film's most famous scene, is your only way of proving you are human, and it works both ways.

The systems promised more than the engine could sustain. Infection is often scripted rather than genuinely emergent, so a teammate who has just passed a test can still burst open on cue at a doorway. Combat is stiff third-person shooting with fixed enemy tiers, and the middle chapters lean on generic military bases and human soldiers in a way that thins the paranoia badly. The cold mechanic, which forces you outdoors in short bursts before hypothermia sets in, does more consistent work than most of the horror set pieces.

What holds up is the tone. The whiteouts, the low hum of the generators, the way a shotgun blast in a cramped room sprays your own men with gore and drops their trust in you. Few games of the sixth generation tried to make AI companions a resource you could lose through carelessness rather than a scripted death.

It is a flawed adaptation with one genuinely original idea, and that idea has been borrowed more often than the game itself has been played.