'Unhinged,' the newest narrative game from the streamer, lets people play through a horror show, with very creepy results

It’s a stormy night. You’re in your apartment, looking nervously out the window at the trees bending in the wind, when you get a call from your best friend across the street. Her power is out — is yours still on? Suddenly, your living room goes dark. Get out of the building, she says. Meet her downstairs. That’s when you realize you’re not alone. Then everything starts going wrong.

This could easily be the premise of a new Netflix horror show — an episode of Black Mirror, say, or maybe something haunting from Ryan Murphy. But instead of simply watching where the show goes, you’re now part of it. When your friend calls in the game, your smartphone actually rings in your hand. When the lights go out, you use that same personal device to turn on a flashlight and look around. And when the shadows dancing in the corners start to move, it’s your actual skin you jump out of.

This is Unhinged, out June 30, a new narrative game that will show up automatically on your Netflix app (assuming your TV is modern enough to support it). Starring Sadie Sink and Zoë Kravitz, the interactive, immersive horror story isn’t a video game in the sense that most people might be familiar with — there’s no console to buy or controller to learn. Instead, your own smartphone becomes your entry into the world, navigating you through a creepy apartment building, fielding phone calls and text messages from friends and neighbors as you scramble to escape. “We’re not coming for Resident Evil,” jokes Sean Krankel, founder of the game developer Night School Studios, which was acquired by Netflix in 2021, and head of narrative games for the streamer. “It’s like, ‘I want to play a story,’ as opposed to, ‘I want to get extremely good at or play a game that has a lot of escalating difficulty.’”

Netflix has been in the video game space for several years. What started as a handful of mobile games — interactive dives into Stranger Things, a partnership with Red Dead Redemption, a slew of kid-friendly tablet fare — soon grew into TV-based titles, party games, and quick first-person one-shots that could be played by scanning a QR code on your TV. 

Night School had been known for making new kinds of experiences — particularly 2016’s Oxenfree, a paranormal game inspired by coming-of-age movies, which was available for PC, XBox, and PlayStation 4. When Netflix acquired Night School five years ago, they initially worked on a sequel to Oxenfree, then Thronglets, a mobile game that was also a plot point in an episode of Black Mirror. Now, the streamer is becoming more ambitious. Unhinged is a standalone story, not connected to any existing Netflix IP. As Krankel explains, it’s “like the coming out party for our team.”

To create something wholly new, the narrative team looked back to other games with a low barrier to entry, particularly early 2000s Nintendo consoles that invited novices to join the fold. “We looked deeply at the Wii [and] the Nintendo DS,” says Sam Warner, Night School’s game director. “I grew up with those, and I think that that focus on novel innovative play was something that we really started this game with.” This was to be a video game for horror fans, rather than targeted at people who were already inclined to seek out digital games. “If you’ve got Netflix and you have a phone, then this is for you,” he says.

The game is set in an apartment building that looks vaguely like New York, but really could be any city. When it begins, you are looking out at the living room from the point of view of the main character, Ava (Kravitz), seeing your cell phone in your hands. Players can make choices — answer the call from Claire (Sink), go out into the hallway, try and get in touch with your superintendent to figure out what’s going on — and depending on those decisions, the game will play out differently. Movement is controlled by an intuitive interface on your phone, which also allows you to call or send texts to characters in the game. Make a wrong move, and things will get bad fast. 

The first seed of Unhinged came from a technological breakthrough Night School made about two years ago, namely, being able to point your personal smartphone at your TV for it to act as a flashlight to navigate through a digital world. “Instead of trying to make classic game controls, with a joystick and buttons, work on [a smartphone screen] — which doesn’t usually work that well — we were like, let’s design a totally bespoke thing that makes it feel magical and awesome on your phone.”

They next discovered how to have the audio bounce back and forth between the TV and the phone — when you get a call in the game, for example, the audio comes from the phone, while you’re still hearing ambient noise coming out of your TV. “It was about two or three months of developing a story in tandem with that back and forth, and so the mechanics inspired the story more than the other way around,” says Krankel. They knew going in that the game would be horror, but it wasn’t until the flashlight mechanic came together that they figured out the setting. “Our other aha moment was like, if people were playing this at home, it would feel really terrible and scary to have it be about home invasion,” Krankel explains. 

The game only takes 20 to 50 minutes to play, though there’s a lot happening in that timeframe. “It’s a short experience, but it has a lot of opportunities to fail,” Krankel says. They had initially built in a slew of other features — conversations to navigate, a full slate of apps to play within the phone — but during production they pulled it back to something more manageable. “It’s intentionally bite-sized, like a show,” says Krankel. “So you can play it one night and be like, ‘What the hell, that was crazy, let’s play it again.’” 

The hope, then, is to convince people who don’t usually play video games to give this one a shot. In developing the game, “We talked a lot about both escape rooms and Disneyland rides,” explains Krankel. “To go into an escape room, or to go get on the Indiana Jones ride or something, you don’t have an expectation of skill, you don’t have an expectation of, ‘Oh, shoot, I’m going to look like a fool if I’m not good at this.’ We want the narrative games to feel that way.”