Apparently, this game has a complete character cut out for the GOG release. (He's a smoker and you unlock him by smoking cigarettes. Cigarettes seem to have been removed from the game.)
Reading through the forum for this game - this also makes at least the "Collect all characters" achievement impossible to get, which is just sloppy and offensive for GOG customers.
Whatever the reasons for this decision, it's not an approach that should be encouraged.
First thing you need to know: this has nothing to do with The Thing by John Carpenter. This is not a bad thing in itself, but the devs seem to go out of their way to market the game as inspided by the movie, which can leave you feeling cheated. In reality, the inspiration drawn is purely superficial. It's a isometric view survival game with some horror motives, set in an arctic base. You control a group of survivors, who search the base for answers and means to survive the harsh enviroment (and alien menace). ::: The game is about progressing through the base while keeping your characters alive - you need to keep them fed, warm and rested. However, food is scarce, heat needs refueling and sleeping can attract hostlie aliens. You need to act decisively and quick or die of hunger/cold, go mad or get eaten by googahs. ::: What sounds amazing in practice falls flat on the execution. I'm not 100% sold on the idea of controlling multiple characters at the same tame, it makes the game unfocused (and they share inventories, which is immersion-breaking). The base is randomly generated, which benefits multiple playthroughs at the cost of level design (bad trade-off imho). You need to search every nook and cranny of the base for supplies, which can be tedious. There is not much going on story-wise and you won't loose any sleep over the plot. The mechanics are simplistic (resource management + find a thing to click on a thing to proceed to the next thing), which - along with the procedural generation and basic story - gives the game a "mobile" feel. The resource management part of the game feels tacked on (warmth I get, but food and sleep is a bit out of place here). It does pick up pace a lot when aliens appear, which is when the game is at it's best. ::: All in all, it's a mediocre game designed just well enough not to pass as a marketing hoax trying to pull in fans of The Thing. Grab on discount if you like survival / rougelike games or find the theme appealing.
Whatsoever.
There's a very light sanity mechanic where stuff happens to the screen or the audio, like you everything turns green or you hear whispers (this is much more underwhelming than it sounds) These have zero effect on the character as far as I am aware, and pretty much only acts as a a tiny bit of a visual or audial blockade for the player.
The supplies management is pretty unreasonable. You will most often find yourself dead with an abundance of supplies, but you lacked the one thing that would stop the character from losing health, sometimes the only way to stop it is with a medical kit, which is a rare item, and this happens if the character gets too cold. Which happens a lot. It's not that it's hard, it's just so damn tedious and there is no way to sacrifice one bar to save the other, an option that better survival games have. Accidentally got a cut while searching? Sorry no bandages, you're dead. Fucking hell.
Every map is litterally exactly the same, except the buildings are switched around and in different shapes.
The only thing that's somewhat interesting about the game is the enemies, but so many of them are so similar, it took forever to find an enemy that wasn't a floating blob.
Bad. Bad game.
I really enjoyed the game! You begin with three characters available, out of which you can only take two (there's an achievement to unlock an extra spot and begin the game with three, but meanwhile you can also find characters on your run which you can rescue and they join your team). You can also unlock many different characters with different skills, so you have more choices later. It doesn't take too long to go through all areas, so you'll start unlocking new characters soon enough. I unlocked four new characters on my first run and I'm looking forward to start again and see if I can get a different ending.
It reminds me of This War of Mine; the way you interact with objects is pretty much the same and it's also similar in the way the game makes you feel helpless and how things can go bad quickly, you can see your characters get worse and die slowly if you run out of food or can't find the medicine to heal that -otherwise insignificant- injury. The game has a great setting and atmosphere.
It also has some bugs. The most annoying was the characters being stuck trying to go through a door, this happened quite a few times. I found other weird bugs on my first run. This is the reason I'm giving it only 4 stars.
I really recommend the game. After completing it only once, there's still a lot to discover and look forward to try in future runs,
There is a lot here that is really great and plays really well. Pro tip, don't say "oh I'll fix that window so I can get warm" before you explore the whole building and find there are 3 other broken windows.
There are a couple things like mortal wounds from a papercut that are annoying, but if you can suspend the specific and say "ok I was *somehow* seriously wounded and need *something* specific to heal..." Or the aforementioned broken windows that make you freeze to death despite being behind heavy locked doors... The real issue is the RNG is too random, they forgot to ensure some things balance out to actually make the game possible to win. As is, I've tried twice and even on "easy" it was impossible to win because you simply do not have what is required to survive. Like no bandages at all on a map so if you're wounded at the start, you die, game over. The second time one of the items required to get through the gate didn't actually get spawned, so it was impossible to advance even though I was doing pretty well. There are other bugs too though. In one instance the one character couldn't figure out how to use the bed, she just danced around it instead of sleeping so she died of exhastion. Unfortunately it seems the devs abandonded the game shortly after release with no patches, so what could have easily been fixed and made a great game has left an unfinished disapointment.
