HIGH Original creature ideas, interesting blend of action/RTS, quality-of-life updates.

LOW Monotonous level design, bland color palette, awkward menus and dated animations.

WTF Guy who says “we’re screwed!” then “it’s alright, I’m OK” a second later.

20 years after the release of the 1982 cult classic film, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Computer Artworks’ eponymous videogame served as an example of what the medium can do to both honor the source material and expand on it with an immersive experience for fans as they confront the same ancient horror that stalked an isolated Antarctica lab onscreen. More than 20 years after that release, Nightdive Studios has put out a remastered version with modernized graphics and quality-of-life updates.

The gameplay is best described as a third-person squad shooter, allowing the player to order squadmates to hold positions and carry out tasks while blasting enemies with a diverse arsenal of weapons and items. Since the player controls the leader, their decisions and actions have consequences that affect others — in this case, their levels of fear and trust.

Early on, the player is taught this mechanic and given a stun gun to use on a NPC as an example of how characters will become distrusting whenever the player hits or shoots them. The player must also take the sanity of characters into account, which is most often affected by enemies, but also the sight of blood and gore. The only way to restore their sanity is to give them shots of adrenaline, which are few and far between.

My first impressions were good. I had just rewatched the film before I started playing the game, so I was more than ready to explore the now-familiar locales and various references while giving it space to stand on its own — and it did just that, albeit with mixed results.

It began with a cutscene of my character and his squadmates who were dropped in with orders to eliminate whatever caused the deaths of the scientists featured in the film. The dialogue was rife with expletives and manly-sounding voice actors, as if the writers were trying to impress teenage boys with raunchy asides and constant ribbing. However, this did feel consistent with the film, as well as countless other ‘80s action-horror flicks.

That said, much of the writing felt cliché to the point that I tuned out during almost every cutscene, even when a squadmate or NPC died. During play, I never learned anything about them as people, just that they were scared, crazed or both. Unfortunately, the psychological element of managing these aspects never amounted to much, so it all just became a nuisance.

The graphics mostly hold up thanks in part to Nightdive’s facelift — but speaking of faces, some of the animations (and the facial expressions of fear-stricken soldiers in particular) are downright comical. I understand that there’s only so much that can be done without remaking a game from the ground up, but I wish Nightdive had done more to improve the soldiers’ puttylike faces and hideous, flappy mouth animations.

The levels were consistently atmospheric, although there’s not a ton of variety. Scenes go between desolate outdoor areas (where the cold will eventually force the team to find shelter or suffer damage) and claustrophobic indoor areas. The viewpoint can be varied between third-person and first-person, although I saw no benefit to either beyond personal preference.

Ordering teammates to complete certain tasks reminded me of action-RTS games like Pikmin, but unlike others in this genre that mainly focus on giving orders, The Thing also asks the player to manage several things for each soldier including ammo and, as previously mentioned, their level of trust/fear and sanity. The wheel menus used to make teammates do things, assume different positions, swap weapons and use items feel clunky and unintuitive. There were also unnecessary submenus, like one just for using keys.

The Thing itself doesn’t appear for a while, which builds up suspense leading to the first encounter, and this tension is supported by worldbuilding like bodies scattered throughout the labs and seeing sections of the world that were devastated by events from the film.

Once the player reaches the part of the campaign that takes place in a new location, a Norwegian lab, things start to heat up and the team’s resolve will be truly tested as they start to get paranoid about their friends and comrades becoming the Thing due to the creature’s ability to mimic other life forms — one soldier goes so far as to make everyone take blood tests lest they get a taste of his flamethrower, just as Mac (Kurt Russell) did in the film.

As readers who have seen the film will know, the Thing was originally unearthed and researched by the Norwegian scientists, so it follows that it would have had more time to evolve there without needing to conceal itself. As a result, both the difficulty and volume of enemies increased considerably, but there were issues.

I didn’t try combat in first-person so I can only speak for third — it’s not the most fluid, but otherwise fairly standard for a shooter as the player has a reticle which can be controlled with the right stick while strafing with the left and wheel menus for weapons and items. On the plus side, the developers graciously allow the player to auto-lock as they lay into enemies with shotguns, SMGs and pistols. On the other hand, the devs seemed to have some blindspots in other areas.

For example, the pacing of enemy waves. In some areas enemies would stop coming for a while until, all of a sudden, the next wave would be triggered as soon as I went out and re-entered a room, almost like a switch flipping. Similarly, enemies would sometimes go completely still and I could easily pick them off until I moved toward them just a little, reactivating their enemy AI and triggering them to attack again.

Pacing and AI aside, I appreciated that whoever was responsible for creature design on the original development team didn’t just rely on the film for ideas. I encountered a plethora of horrifying enemies, the highlight of which was the fleshy, wet-looking Rupture boss. The fight itself was also a highlight for me, as the towering beast had a wide array of lightning-fast attacks that were difficult to evade, but I soon remembered that — just as in the film — it was especially vulnerable to fire.

However, after that high point I was disappointed to find that the next area was as visually indistinct as much of what came before — gray was the dominant color inside the labs, and outdoor areas were primarily blue and white. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem (it is set in Antarctica, after all) if it weren’t for the fact that many of the labs were structured in a similar way, leading me to ask myself: “Haven’t I been here before?“

Honestly, the most challenging about The Thing for me was knowing where to go, and it began to feel like a chore by the time I got further in… I was opening cookie-cutter doors in cookie-cutter areas only to find items that I didn’t need, eventually losing motivation to find a way forward.

Ultimately, The Thing: Remastered is mostly successful in recapturing the essence of the film, but it just didn’t give me good reasons to care about the characters, nor did it offer gameplay that was engaging enough for me to want to spend more time in such a dreary world without Kurt Russell there to fire things up. Even after being remastered, The Thing may have been better off left in the ice.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Disclosures: This game was developed by Nightdive Studios and Computer Artworks and published by Nightdive Studios. The game was obtained via publisher and it is currently available on PC, PS4/5 and XBO/X/S. It was obtained via publisher and reviewed for PC. Approximately 8 hours were devoted to the campaign mode. The game was not finished. There is no multiplayer mode.

Parents: This game is rated M by the ESRB for Blood and Gore, Language and Violence. The official description reads as follows: This is an action-adventure game in which players assume the role of a rescue team leader investigating the deaths of a science team in Antarctica. As players search for clues and survivors, they use machine guns, explosives, and flamethrowers to battle enemies (e.g., aliens, enemy soldiers). Combat is highlighted by realistic gunfire, explosions, screams of pain, and blood-splatter effects. Grenade blasts can result in enemies blowing up into chunks of flesh; some scenes depict mutilated corpses lying amid splatters of blood. One cutscene depicts a character shooting himself in the head. The words “sh*t” and “a*shole” appear in the game.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game features subtitles for dialogue during both cutscenes and gameplay, but there are no visual cues to accompany incoming enemy attacks. Therefore, it is ultimately not fully accessible.

Remappable controls: The controls can be remapped.

The post The Thing: Remastered Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Great premise!

LOW Feels too gamey and artificial — no emotional stakes.

WTF I really can’t get over these low obstacles?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review originally was originally published on September 2, 2002

*

With the dawning of online play for consoles this year, a big selling point is that players will get the chance to interact with live people for an increased human element in games. The idea has merit, but in my opinion videogames that take place offline haven’t done more than scratch the surface of offering similar experiences through simulation and programming. I don’t have anything against going online, nor am I a huge believer that A.I. can replace real people. That said, I don’t think that implementing a modem feature is the final answer to providing qualities that the vast majority of videogames lack, or even ignore altogether.  

Abstract feelings and concepts like companionship, love and trust are common everyday things that often don’t translate well into the electronic worlds gamers populate. Most RPGs (Role-Playing Games) make attempts with varying degrees of success, but very few games outside this genre even try to make social and emotional content a factor. It may not be an easy thing to convert into program language, but in my view it’s a frontier of videogames that has gone practically unexplored since the medium’s inception. The Thing, from Computer Artworks, makes an attempt at combining the human psyche with the framework of an Action hybrid, and the results are mixed.

With its source material taken from the 1982 John Carpenter film starring Kurt Russell, the videogame adaptation of The Thing takes the form of a third-person adventure that picks up right where the movie left off. Plunging the player into the heart of Antarctica, it’s your job to discover what happened to a missing science crew and take care of any situations that arise along the way.

In most respects, the game handles like a standard Action outing. There are items to pick up, weapons to find and equip and locked doors to get past. In fact, beside the fact that I was mildly disoriented by the world spinning around your character as you re-orient, this could just have easily been any one of a number of similar games. However, The Thing’s unique gameplay hook is the teammate system, which is what I’m going to spend the most time discussing.

In the film, the “Thing” was an alien that was capable of perfectly replicating another living creature. Because of this particular ability, the humans dealing with it were racked with paranoia and distrust for each other because it was almost impossible to tell the difference between real human and gruesome invader. The same elements of trust and fear are featured in the game, but this time in an interactive (and unsatisfying) fashion.

The game’s main character is a standard-issue action hero and must interact with three different classes of people: Engineers who fix electronics and unlock doors, Soldiers that possess good fighting skills and Medics, who are capable of fully healing any character except themselves. Each of these types has skills that are integral to your progress in the game. However, when you initially meet them, many will suspect that you of being alien and require some convincing before helping you.

The way you do this is based on a number of things, but the easiest and most common is to give them a gun and ammo as a token of goodwill, or to let them see you killing the monsters you encounter. Conversely, if you do things that seem questionable such as taking away their weapon or shooting humans (even on accident) during a firefight, their trust will drop. If they have faith in you, it’s smooth sailing. If they don’t, they won’t help you- and even worse, may even attack you. Fear is also a factor, and if a person in your party becomes overwhelmed with fright, they can go crazy and become ineffective.

This interesting system was the biggest draw for me, and at heart I think it’s great idea. However, the actual execution falls far short of the concept. The problem is that while the basic idea of “trust” is sound, the paper-thin characters are relegated to being little more than another set of implements for you to use. They lack any convincing level of human behavior and are found, killed, disappear and otherwise get replaced so often, it becomes less about maintaining a relationship and more about tool manipulation. The shallowness and obvious lack of any significant emotional content undercuts the game’s defining feature and ends up only hinting at its full potential.

When coming across a locked door, the only thing required to convince an Engineer to open it for you is to give him an item- despite how much he mistrusted you only seconds before. While something along these lines wouldn’t be so hard to swallow if it only happened sporadically, you’ll replay this little game of favorites far more often than is tolerable. Each time you go through this process, it becomes quite clear that it’s more an overused gameplay gimmick rather than being a significant part of the plot or narrative structure. There is simply no lasting or emotional impact.

Besides my disappointment in the handling of the psychological and relationship elements, the game suffers from a number of rough edges that only serve to further tarnish the overall experience.

As I said above, the game picks up right where the movie left off, and I mean this in the most literal sense. The game’s intro and beginning sequences felt like they were specifically made for someone who was already intimately familiar with the source material. In preparation for doing this review I had re-watched the DVD so it was fresh in my mind, but I imagine it would be hard for people to understand what was going on or to feel drawn in if they hadn’t seen it. Similarly, I found the direction, narrative and overall polish of the game to possess an off-putting “no-frills” quality. Things feel jerky with jump cuts and a lack of cohesive flow that are only magnified by the segmented progression through the areas and the large number of interchangeable teammates. It’s especially ironic that the storytelling here is so shaky since the film was a virtual horror masterpiece.

Another barrier to immersion was that the level of realism is inconsistent, and conveniently tossed aside when necessary. While trekking through a blizzard, you’re stopped in your tracks by a waist-high chain link fence that can’t be destroyed or climbed over. You can’t enter buildings except through the designated entrances even though there might be a gaping hole in the wall large enough to drive a snowcat through. At one point, my team was stopped by ankle-high rubble. These annoying choices combined with the shallow nature of the trust system did an effective job of never letting me forget that it was all just a game.

On a technical note, be aware that the game requires a massive amount of space on the PlayStation 2’s memory card. I actually had to delete four other save files before I had enough free space for just one file of The Thing. I’m no programmer, but it reeks of laziness or unfamiliarity with the hardware since there doesn’t seem to be an extraordinarily large amount of information to be saved.

Altogether, The Thing’s trust and interface system is an interesting kernel that I’d like to see plucked out and transplanted into something more fertile. If this core element was reworked into a new game that smoothed the rough edges and added more depth, I think Computer Artworks would probably have something unique enough to stand out from the crowd. As it is the game isn’t all bad, but with the promise of its sole standout feature being left mostly unfulfilled, it ends up being far too ordinary in the face of what looks to be an outstanding (and competitive) holiday season.

Final Score: 6.5

Developer: Computer Artworks
Publisher: Black Label Games
Platform: PlayStation 2

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review was written 22 years ago, we were not tracking accessibility information at that time and we no longer have access to the game in order to check. Apologies!!

The post The Thing (PS2) Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

The subject of this installment: the pinball tables available in the recent release Pinball M, developed and published by Zen Studios.

I already reviewed Pinball M as an entire package and highly recommend it. Since then, I have logged nearly twenty more hours, and wanted to highlight a few things about each individual table.

*

Wrath of the Elder Gods — Director’s Cut: Themed around Lovecraftian horror, this is an updated version of the Pinball FX table of the same name — this time with more blood and madness! It features one of the easiest starting skill shots I’ve ever come across, and multiple in-game events make regular lanes and ramps easy pathways to racking up million-point shots. This table comes free when downloading Pinball M and is an excellent place for players to start without any financial commitment.

*

Chucky’s Killer Pinball: Themed around the incredibly long-lived horror franchise Child’s Play, this table is the one that has grown on me the most. The table is well-themed, which I would likely appreciate more if I was a fan of the source material, as it includes references to all the films in the series. I found the sound bites in Chucky’s Killer Pinball to be the least repetitive of the entire bunch, which is a plus since one of my overall complaints in Pinball M was the repetitive dialogue. Also, a couple of the paths were difficult to hit consistently, but others allowed me to amass huge scores while engaged in multi-ball mode. While not my favorite table, this one is by no means a dud.

*

The Thing Pinball: Based on John Carpenter’s classic sci-fi horror film, The Thing quickly became one of my most frequently-played tables. Sound and movie clips make it an excellent homage, though the quotes quickly become repetitive. Activating the in-game events and modes is relatively easy, tasking the player with completing scenes from the film like dealing with the assimilated dog. It also has a unique event where a blizzard hits the table and creates wind that impacts the ball’s movement. I’m not completely sold on this weather mode, but I do appreciate the effort and novelty.

*

Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball: If there was an award for capturing the essence of its source material, this table would win. Based on Duke Nukem 3D, this table mimics the look of the classic FPS to near-perfection. Activating one mode puts players behind Duke’s firearms — flippers are used to turn left and right, while the plunger button shoots the alien invaders. This looks so much like it’s out of the original, it’s uncanny. The Duke one-liners become stale quickly and I can’t hit the opening skill shot to save my life, but the table is still enjoyable.

*

Dead by Daylight Pinball: Out of all the licensed tables, this one I knew the least about. It was also a table I generally shied away from, but over time I’ve come to enjoy it. Based on the videogame of the same name, Dead by Daylight Pinball has players choose one of two paths — the victims or the villain! This alters the in-game modes, as ramps are used to either escape or capture the characters. The ramps on this table are very player friendly, as is completing events, which in turn help accrue massive scores. Overall, an excellent table.

*

System Shock Pinball: Based off the cult-classic videogame, System Shock Pinball is the latest addition to the Pinball M library. Players navigate through various modes to defeat mutants, cyborgs and infamous villain SHODAN. This table has a unique three-level, three-flipper ramp that leads to a video mode. I enjoyed this challenge, but it can become frustrating once the multi-ball mode is unleashed. Despite that frustration, I was a little surprised with how easy it was to complete the Campaign Modes here, but that’s not really a complaint. One other bonus — purchasing this version also unlocks a less gory version in Pinball FX. It’s the exact same table, and I only played the family friendly version once, but it’s nice to see something for “free” in the current age of micro-transactions.

*

As a whole, I highly recommend these tables for anyone who enjoys pinball and doesn’t mind a little horror to go with it. System Shock is the only table sold by itself — the other four can be purchased individually or bundled together for a small discount. Pinball M also has trials of each table, so interested players can try before buying.

The post This Is Not A Review: Pinball M Tables appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH New challenge modes.

LOW Repetitive sound bites.

WTF Pinball blood trails.

Learning Pinball M was from the crew at Zen Studios, some of the best in the biz at creating quality digital pinball, I wondered why they would release a second, simultaneous title beside Pinball FX. Now that I’ve played this horror-influenced offshoot, it’s clear why Zen Studios would want something separate from their more family-friendly options. Thankfully, the same top-notch pinball experience gamers have come to expect is still more than present in Pinball M.

Pinball M has the same high-quality presentation and controls as its FX sibling. Flippers and plungers react with precision, and the ball physics remain lifelike. Players can adjust the viewing angle of the playfield and classic challenges like Time and 1 Ball, all make a return. Players who have enjoyed Zen Studios’ pinball offerings in the past will feel right at home.

Pinball M also contains a few upgrades that surpass last year’s mainline release, apparent in two areas — visuals and challenges. I was underwhelmed with the slightly bland presentation and in-game trophies that could be earned in Pinball FX, but Pinball M improves upon these by making each table its own corner, separate from the others.

By completing the newly-added Campaign mode, players can earn visual upgrades to each of these corners — basically, props from each of the source materials. There are seven per table, but each of the seven has three different versions based on high scores earned. While this doesn’t impact gameplay in Pinball M, it is a great way to brag about high scores since players can post their corner, complete with unlockable props, as part of user-created tournaments.

The same Campaign mode utilizes the new Pinball M challenges. One tasks players with reaching a pre-determined score in the shortest amount of time possible. Another is the Madness challenge — basically five-minutes of multi-ball to rack up huge scores. My favorite new mode is probably Shiver, where gamers have a nearly pitch-black playfield with only the steel ball and a few of the table lights to guide them. These new challenges (with or without their slight horror twist) would be fantastic additions to any digital pinball title.

As for the tables themselves, Pinball M includes originals based on a variety of properties. The core game itself is a free download and comes with a single table, Wrath of the Elder Gods. This is an updated version of the same table from Pinball FX. This time, the playfield is a little darker and a lot bloodier. This is a solid table and a great place to start without a financial commitment.

There are four other tables currently offered in Pinball M. These are based on movies (The Thing, Child’s Play) and videogames (Duke Nukem, Dead by Daylight). Zen Studios did an excellent job capturing the style and atmosphere of each, whether it was by using video clips from the movies or graphics that appear to be ripped directly from the source, the atmosphere here is top notch.

Each table plays well too, but I found my enjoyment of each to be more tied to how interested I was in the property — Duke and Thing definitely received more playtime than the other two. Thankfully, each table can be purchased separately or in a bundle, and there’s are even demos that players can test before sinking some money in. No new tables have been announced yet, but hopefully Pinball M receives expansions for the foreseeable future.

Ultimately, Pinball M is another solid outing from Zen Studios. Their typically-excellent pinball physics complement well-designed, original tables based on icons of film and videogames. For those who aren’t fans of the source material, the excellent new modes alone make it a worthy addition for any pinball fan.

Score: 7.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by and published by Zen Studios. It is currently available on XBO, XBX/S, PS4, PS5, Switch, and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the XBS. Approximately 6 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, unlocking many, but not all, of the in-game visual upgrades. Zero hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Violence. No official description is available, but the descriptors are accurate. Tables contain plenty of blood and four-letter language directly from the sources, often repeated regularly. Nothing was too over the top, but this game is not for youngsters. Parents not comfortable with their kids playing the games or watching the movies the different tables are based on, will want to steer clear of this pinball game.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game does not offer subtitles. Menu text size cannot be changed. In game commands like, “shoot the left ramp,” are accompanied by flashing lights or icons on the pinball table. However, I did come across one game mode where a sound cue did not have a visual accompaniment. On the Duke Nukem table, one video mode requires players to shoot alien enemies — they make a sound when they pop up and aren’t always on screen. As such, this game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Certain functions are remappable. The face button actions can all be switched, but the flipper actions can only be mapped to the trigger buttons.

The post Pinball M Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

The subject of this installment: Distrust, developed and published by E-Home Entertainment Co., Ltd

I am loathe to give Distrust a TINAR because it’s so promising. However, as should be apparent by the end of this non-review, it would be hard for me to give it a score without also having to score myself as the audience.

The game has an interesting premise, taking inspiration from John Carpenter’s The Thing. It’s the story of a crew that crash lands on an arctic base that appears to be abandoned. The crew are freezing and need to fight the elements and fatigue, as well as discover the mystery behind the empty facility.

Structurally, it’s a top-down/isometric RTS game where the player controls up to three crew members. The camera is not fixed, and allows rotation around the map for a better view of the areas that the crew must go into. The main tension comes from monitoring each character’s three meters — Warmth, Stamina and Satiety. (For those wondering if “satiety” is a real word, I looked it up, and it is. I suspect that whoever localized the writing might have google translated this because “Hunger” would have been a better descriptor.)

To replenish these meters, the player will have to split the group up and look for supplies, weapons, tools, crafting elements, places to sleep and the mechanism for opening the next area of the facility.

The purpose of the main meters are obvious, but failing to sleep will cause the characters to go crazy, while sleeping too much will cause floating monsters to track them down — explained by the creatures being attracted by brain waves during sleep. Too much damage or continued sleepless madness will cause the character to slip into a coma and then death. Death is permanent, and losing all your crew means starting again.

None of this is explained clearly in the tutorial, so it’s up to the player to discover this on their own or through diegetic hints from computer entries and notes littering the area. There’s a lot to learn, and there are many options available in any given scenario. For example, if a character encounters a locked door, they can shoot the lock (opens instantly but costs a rare bullet), they can crowbar it (quick, but degrades the tool that might be essential later), they can use an axe (if the door leads to the outside, this causes loss of heat within the cabin), or they can spend a long time sorting through a bunch of keys for the correct one.

All of this is hugely appealing to me — the roguelike elements the limited tutorial that requires work from the player, and the tension of near death and paranoia to mimic my favorite Sci-Fi/Horror film… this should have been My Kind Of Game.

The problem? The control system and how that changes the feel of the game. Because of its RTS floating-pointer controls, I spent most of my time staring at places where my characters were not.

Issuing orders and to properly optimise the play it means looking at empty cabins and then immediately flitting away from it before my character even arrives, to another empty space where the action is not. On top of that, the controls clearly have Keyboard and mouse in mind because on a controller it’s cumbersome to highlight the crew member I want to issue an order to, open the map, go to the point I want them to interact with, issue a command, then switch control to another crew member, open the map again, issue another command… wash, rinse and repeat. Also, since switching characters does not refocus the camera on them, I would often be looking at one character but in control of the other and issue a wrong order.

This interface led to me feeling disconnected and meant that playing Distrust had the tension of monitoring meters without the visual feedback associated with a good horror game. I just wasn’t emotionally invested in my crew, and this is a failing in my eyes because the stakes are meant to be high, but the game simply can’t make me feel it when I’m spending so much time staring at waypoints.

On top of all this, the game is just plain hard, and getting to the second area without at least one of my characters being on the verge of death felt almost impossible to do. Maybe it’s meant to be have people constantly being killed off like in a Horror movie, but in that case this should have been clearly communicated to the player — something similar to the XCOM reboot that murders 60% of the squad in its tutorial would give a clear message.

I found myself simultaneously bored and stressed by Distrust. Some of this might be alleviated by playing it on PC where the management element might be less frustrating, or it might also be solved by changing the control scheme on console to make me feel like I was with the crew members, rather than simply ordering them about. My engagement here was certainly lacking, but I did appreciate the myriad of options, the art style that evokes the cold of Siberia (where the development team are from) and the ’80s paranoia cinema vibe, but by the end it made me feel like I failed Distrust just as much as Distrust failed me, only ever getting to the second area and being unable to find the mental fortitude to get further. There is so much going on in the game that I did not engage in, so to score it would have necessitated a score for myself.

The post This Is Not A Review: Distrust appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Finding an adrenaline shot right as a teammate is about to die.

LOW Some occasionally unreliable pathfinding.

WTF How the hell do I use anomaly traps?

Distrust’s title is misleading. The game openly claims to be inspired by John Carpenter’s The Thing. On the surface, that’s true — it’s about surviving both natural and otherworldly threats in an Antarctic research base. The aliens in question don’t disguise themselves as humans, though, so the film’s major undercurrent of paranoia is absent. “Trust” has nothing to do with any of this.

I say this only to temper expectations. Don’t play Distrust anticipating a playable version of Carpenter’s cult classic. Play it, instead, for being an intelligent strategy-survival game that’s atmospheric and tense as hell entirely on its own merits.

After two explorers become stranded at the aforementioned research base following a helicopter crash, players must guide them through six consecutive fenced-in zones. With permadeath and procedurally-generated environments, Distrust is a roguelike, though it’s the good kind where there’s a valuable lesson in every failure. We enter each new run with a better understanding of how to survive than we previously did, and the ticking timers attached to every aspect keep the game nerve-wracking even as we’re treading through familiar territory.

The objective at all times is to move from one zone to the next, which always involves some sort of puzzle. Sometimes there’s a complicated locking mechanism. Sometimes solutions are a bit more roundabout, like having to charge a snowplow’s battery in order to clear a path. The game’s real struggle, however, is having to keep one’s team alive and healthy while they’re searching for ways forward.

Each person has three important stats: warmth, stamina, and satiety. While hunger and freezing temperatures will gradually sap a character’s health in expected ways, it’s sleep deprivation that provides Distrust with some of its most memorable twists, since an exhausted character will develop “madnesses.”

There are nearly two dozen of these sanity effects, and while a handful of them are silly (like “Shakespearean expert”) most of them hamper a person’s functionality and reliability. In one of my failed runs, for example, I was unable to ward off an alien attack because my character had been randomly trashing items in her inventory, including the ammunition I’d been saving for just such an occasion.

The only way to prevent such occurrences is to keep characters energized, and that’s where Distrust gets clever because the aliens only materialize when people are sleeping. So, every nap, however necessary, carries a risk of another sort. Unsurprisingly, coffee is one of Distrust’s most precious commodities.

Beyond that, survival involves a complicated but predictable set of rules. Gasoline powers the generators that keep the lights on, which holds most of the monsters at bay and allows characters to navigate indoor areas more expediently. Staying warm means keeping fires fueled, but the building in question also needs to be insulated, meaning no open or broken windows. Characters share a single inventory but can’t all use the same tool at the same time.

As a playthrough becomes progressively more difficult and obstacles pile up, players can make choices that speed progress but also put them at greater risk. For example, any locked door can be opened using a universal key ring, but finding the right key takes forever. Breaking the door open with a crowbar takes far less time, but then the door is broken and the player needs to repair it if they want to stay in the building and keep warm. Since repairing something requires planks, doing so rids the player of firewood that they might need down the road.

With so many consequences and a timer that’s constantly pulling characters closer to death, Distrust is a terrific engine for emergent thrills, often due to the player’s own negligence. I might get so caught up searching for bandages to patch up a profusely bleeding character that I forget to keep a generator fueled, leading my other guy to get killed in his sleep by an alien who was no longer afraid to come inside.

It’s the perfect type of game for procedural level design, too, with players having to apply their ever-expanding knowledge of the rules to a constantly-shifting landscape. Being at the mercy of random number generation inevitably leads to some unlucky frustrations, but that only sweetens the relief of, say, stumbling upon a first aid station just as someone’s about to succumb to an illness.

My only major issue with Distrust is that the pathfinding can be terribly buggy at times. Finishing the campaign means being efficient with time and resources, so it can be frustrating when characters don’t do what I tell them. I’d sometimes take my eyes off somebody for a moment and later find them running in circles outside, wasting time and losing body heat in the process.

Otherwise, though, Distrust is pretty top-notch stuff. It’s the sign of intelligent and well-considered mechanics that something as inherently repetitive as Distrust never once felt tedious to me. Russian publisher Alawar previously gave us last year’s Beholder, a similarly high-concept little gem from their home country. This makes them two-for-two on Steam releases, and I can’t wait to see what other fascinating indies they bring us from their side of the world. Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Cheerdealers and published by Alawar Premium. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via paid download and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 11 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: As of press time, this game has not been rated by the ESRB. There are paths and story threads that I probably haven’t seen, but from my experience, this would be rated Teen for non-graphic violence and moderate profanity. Nothing harsh.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Aside from the intro, which is subtitled, the dialogue is text-only, and all important information is communicated through visual cues.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

The post Distrust Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.