The Thing (2002)

"The Thing is a third person survival horror game, and sequel to John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing. It was developed by Computer Artworks. A PlayStation 2 version of this game was released in North America on August 19, 2002, and in Japan on February 27, 2003.

The game used a fear system and a trust system to increase the realism of the game. This was implemented by making it possible for one of the player's teammates to be 'turned', and for the player to not realize that until it was too late.

In the trust system, the player may lose the trust of his squad if he kills a teammate on the belief that that teammate had been 'turned'. The squad would react to the killing depending on if the slain teammate was or wasn't 'turned'. If the teammate had been 'turned', the squad will praise you for killing him. However, if the teammate was still human, the squad will lose faith in you and may even try to kill you.

In the fear system, the squad reacts to the environment of an area. An area that is covered in blood, or an area where there is a lot of wreckage present, might inspire fear in the squad. Also, the number of 'things' present or the sizes of the 'things' may frighten the squad members. The individual members of the squad may react in one of three ways:

1. The teammate runs away.

2. The teammate becomes irrational and begins shooting (with both regular guns and flamethrowers) indiscriminately. As this places the player and the squad in significant danger, the player often has to kill this teammate. If the player kills this teammate, the squad will neither gain nor lose trust in the player.

3. The teammate will simply give up and commit suicide.

There are several different ways that a player may kill a 'thing'. A small 'thing' may be shot to death, while a larger 'thing' will have to be shot to near death with a regular gun and then torched with a flamethrower. This does not carry over to the boss 'things'; it varies from situation to situation as to whether a player can kill the boss with a traditional gun or kill the boss with the flamethrower."

Source: Wikipedia, "The_Thing_(video_game)," available under the CC-BY-SA License.