Although it’s not an official adaptation, the upcoming game Distrust from developer Cheerdealers is so strongly inspired by John Carpenter’s classic 1982 movie The Thing that fans are likely to fall in love with it.

Like the film (which was itself an adaptation of John W. Campbell, Jr.’s novella Who Goes There?), Distrust finds a small number of people stranded deep in the freezing Arctic, who slowly begin to lose control of their sanity as they realize that some members of their group may or may not actually be parasitic aliens in disguise.

Distrust will be played from a top-down isometric viewpoint, with 15 unique playable characters and a ton of randomly generated levels spread across the huge Arctic research station. Alawar Entertainment will publish the full game on Steam on 23 August, and if you’d like to give it a go before then, a demo is available on the store page.

Synopsis:

A helicopter crash left a group of explorers stranded near an Arctic base. As they try to find a way back, all they are doing is sinking deeper into a nightmare scenario. When they sleep, they attract a terrifying force that sucks the life out of their bodies, but the longer they battle exhaustion and stay awake, the less likely they are to survive…

As the survivors try to sleep just enough to stave off fatigue without dying, they slowly go mad and eventually reach the point where they can no longer trust their senses. In time, they can’t even tell the difference between reality and a hallucination.