Netflix’s next TV gaming experiment will scare the hell out of you

As part of the latest evolution of its gaming initiative, Netflix has made a big push into cloud-based games you can play on your TV, much in the same way you’d watch a movie or show on the service. So far, these games have been pretty tame. Things like trivia, party games, and a weirdly dated FIFA. But Netflix’s next release goes in a completely different direction: It’s an interactive horror experience that’s gruesome, terrifying, and quite possibly the future of the company’s gaming efforts.

The new game is called Unhinged, and it launches on Netflix on June 30th. It’s developed by Night School Studio, which is best known for the Stranger Things-esque adventure game Oxenfree. Netflix acquired Night School in 2021, and since then the studio released a sequel to Oxenfree and some experiments, like a Black Mirror tie-in. But whereas Night School’s previous efforts were spooky around the edges, Unhinged is straight-up horror. And it’s done in a way that feels right at home on the streaming service.

“We wanted to make sure that this could feel like a TV show or a movie,” explains Night School cofounder Sean Krankel. “There are so many people out there who might love an interactive horror experience, but who don’t want to get good at aiming, survival mechanics, or rationing their ammunition. All of our design decisions were about how to make this thing really simple to interact with and approachable.”

Unhinged is a first-person game where you control a young woman named Ava. She finds herself trapped in her apartment building during a storm, and it just so happens that a killer is prowling about. Throughout the course of the game — which lasts less than an hour — you’re trying to get Ava to safety and discover who the killer is. All of Netflix’s TV games use your smartphone as the controller, but the twist in Unhinged is that your actual phone becomes Ava’s phone; you use it to point a flashlight and spot routes to take and items to interact with, as well as accept phone calls from Ava’s friend and her super. (Unhinged features a small but mighty cast, with characters voiced by Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and gaming stalwart Troy Baker.)

The experience sits somewhere between a game and a movie. It looks like a game, with its first-person perspective and 3D graphics, but it’s also been streamlined in multiple ways, cutting out a number of more traditional mechanics. For instance, you don’t control Ava directly; instead, at various points you’ll have to choose a path for her, usually by pointing the flashlight in a particular direction before time runs out. According to Krankel, these kinds of design decisions were made in the interest of making the game as easy to pick up and play as possible.

That wasn’t always the case,. The Unhinged concept started around two years ago as a more typical horror game built around the idea of using a flashlight. Eventually, the team settled on the idea of a controller serving as the character’s in-game phone, and around the same time Netflix began really putting effort into its cloud gaming offerings. The timing lined up perfectly. But the original Unhinged concept had to be altered to fit the new platform, a process Krankel describes as being “subtractive.”

Originally Unhinged had players directly controlling Ava, for instance, but that didn’t feel great without a normal gamepad. It also had more complex features like branching dialogue and a phone interface with different apps you could scroll through. “This feels like Flight Simulator,” Krankel remembers thinking at the time. “It was not at all the pacing that we needed.” The final product is much more akin to a theme park ride, racing you through a tense and at times horrifying experience without ever letting up. You have to make quick decisions, but you never have to fight with controls or the UI.

Another key part to making Unhinged fit on Netflix was its length. “We wanted a horror experience that somebody can get through in one night, which is how we envisioned it,” says Krankel. “Our hypothesis is that there’s really a market out there for that, and a lot of people who want something short and consumable. I think if we had to charge money for it, we would make different decisions. But one of the fun things about working [at Netflix] is that we can try things like this, and experiment with the duration of a game.”

It’s also an experience that was designed to be watched as well as played. It’s not a multiplayer game in the traditional sense — only one person can control Ava — but much like a Netflix series or movie, it’s something that can be even better as a communal experience. I played Unhinged while my teenage daughter watched, and it only upped the stress, as she yelled at me to make decisions in the heat of the moment. It’s these kinds of reactions that Krankel and the team at Night School are really hoping for when the game launches.

“I hope we get TikTok videos where people are losing their minds with this thing.”