Unhinged: Netflix’s interactive horror game signals serious ambitions in gaming

Netflix dropped a new release today and that in itself would not be that notable. But there two things about Unhinged that is unusual – one, it was a hush-hush project and, two, it’s a horror video game.

Netflix has been in the gaming space for years, but most of its products are mobile games not dissimilar to what you might download from the app store for $4.99. Hardly ground-breaking stuff.

Unhinged represents much grander ambitions to capture a chunk of a gaming market worth more annually than screen entertainment. Not since Bandersnatch, the 2018 interactive Black Mirror movie, has Netflix sent such a serious signal about its creative intentions in gaming.

Unhinged is being labelled an “interactive game” which feels like a tautology since all games are interactive, but it does reflect a desire to carve this out as something different.

For one thing, it was legit cinema talent on board as collaborators – filmmakers David Fincher and Zach Creggar (Weapons), and actors Zoe Kravitz, Sadie Sink and voiceover artist Troy Baker (The Last of Us game). All those people command decent-sized paycheques.

Unhinged runs for about 30 minutes and its core story takes place on the floor of an apartment building during a storm. You play as a character called Ava (Kravitz) who is woken up by a phone call from her friend Claire (Sink), who lives across the road.

The power cuts out and the only source of light is your smartphone camera. Ava starts to investigate, first by checking on her neighbour, and is soon being hunted by a serial killer. The exits off the floor are locked, as are the windows.

There are 10 different ways and times to die, most of them gruesomely, and one ending in which Ava survives the ordeal. The story is simple and contained, and the flash is in the vibes and horror sequences.

The game, which is technically still in beta, works by connecting your phone (you need to download a Netflix controller app) to your TV, using the former as the controls.

But not in a strictly conventional way – it’s designed to be immersive so you point your phone around the screen to illuminate things like how you would use your flashlight in a real environment.

And when Claire calls Ava on the phone, the audio comes through your phone speakers like a real-world call, while the rest of the diegetic sounds are transmitted through your TV. It’s a nifty separation.

You interact with objects as if you were Ava, making choices in a more seamless “choose your own adventure” approach than that Netflix used on Bandersnatch - in that, the story paused while you made a choice, whereas here, it keeps going as you make a choice.

Unhinged isn’t a sprawling open-world or even narrative-driven cinematic game like those from pureplay studios, but it’s a smart step-up from the gaming Netflix has been doing.

When the streamer launched Bandersnatch in 2018, it was expected to be the start of an exciting era which didn’t quite eventuated, and that tech was only deployed once more with an interactive Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt movie in 2020, which was a better marriage of form and story.

In the past few years, Netflix has poured reportedly more than $US1 billion building out its gaming offering, which included the acquisition of gaming studio Night School, which developed Unhinged in-house.

Unhinged is the first Netflix gaming release in years that seems significant, like it’s a real investment in a hybrid form that could be built upon. The secretive nature of it, announced only as it was released, was likely to drum up as much attention as possible.

The streamer has more than 120 games on offer but they tend to attract much notice, and that feels deliberate, as if Netflix gaming wasn’t quite ready to be in the spotlight yet.

None have made any real impact in the zeitgeist, and for subscribers, if they’ve toggled over to the gaming tab at all, it’s more of a “nice to have” than a “must have”.

But Netflix is not going to stop there. Last year, its president of games, Alain Tascan, told a game developers conference, “We’re not yet the Netflix of games, but that’s exactly where we’re headed”.