Originally released in 2002, survival horror spin-off The Thing: Remastered is coming out incredibly soon – on the 5th December to be precise.
Update: Nightdive Studios has confirmed that The Thing: Remastered is now available for all platforms – those being PC, Xbox One, PS5 and Nintendo Switch.
The announcement emerged on the studio’s X/Twitter/Muskbooknightmare page, and was accompanied by a new launch trailer:
So there you have it: one of the spookiest, most tense games of the PS2 era really has gotten a surprise release in the run-up to Christmas. Given all the snow and people stuck together in a confined space, it’s the perfect yuletide game.
Our original story follows…
Videogames based on films aren’t often essential purchases, but The Thing – Computer Artworks’ 2002 third person shooter based on the John Carpenter classic of the same name – was surprisingly good.
So good, in fact, that Nightdive Studios has been busily making a remastered edition, logically called The Thing: Remastered. Announced in early 2024, the high-def upgrade has been given a release date – and assuming you didn’t read the headline, here it is again: the 5th December. At the time of writing, that’s tomorrow; if you’re reading it in the future, it could be today, yesterday, last week, last month, or even years ago. Isn’t time strange.
Like Carpenter’s original shocker, The Thing’s set in and around a remote Antarctic research outpost, where a frozen, seemingly dead creature thaws out and begins impersonating everyone it meets. The game leaned more heavily on shooty-shooty action than creeping dread, but there were still some tense moments in among all the gunplay – as always, you were never quite sure who was human or who wasn’t, at least until they started mutating into something hideous and, invariably, screaming.
Nightdive Studios has form when it comes to quality remakes and remasters. It previously remade the PC classic System Shock for a new generation of platforms, and the result was a sensitive handling of a famously tense first-person adventure game.
Word of The Thing: Remastered’s release first emerged on Xbox Wire (thanks Eurogamer), so barring some sort of cataloguing error, Xbox console owners should be able to download and play it tomorrow. It’s less clear when other platforms can expect to see it; its Steam page simply says ‘Coming Soon’, while the PlayStation Store also lacks a firm date. If things change, we’ll update this post accordingly.
Read more: The Thing | The story behind Drew Struzan’s iconic poster
