Netflix Games Pushes Interactive Horror Into New Territory With Unhinged, a Phone Led Nightmare Experience
In an industry increasingly defined by the overlap between cinema and gaming, Netflix is making one of its most deliberate attempts yet to collapse the boundary between the two. Its latest interactive title, Unhinged, developed by Night School Studio under Netflix Games, is not simply a horror game. It is a tightly constructed hybrid experience that uses the player’s phone as both controller and narrative conduit, turning ordinary domestic space into an extension of the story itself.
Set during a Category 5 hurricane approaching South Carolina, Unhinged places players in the role of Ava, played by Zoë Kravitz, a young woman trapped in a power outage inside her apartment complex. What begins as a desperate attempt to escape quickly spirals into a sustained survival nightmare as she is hunted through darkened corridors by a seemingly ordinary superintendent, portrayed through performance capture and voice by Troy Baker.
Ava is not alone, at least at first. Her best friend Claire, voiced by Sadie Sink, attempts to reach her through the storm, racing against collapsing infrastructure and communication failures. But as the situation deteriorates, the line between help and threat becomes increasingly unstable, forcing players to question who can actually be trusted.
The result is a roughly 30-minute interactive horror experience that feels as much like a film that invades your personal space as it does a traditional game. It is intentionally short, highly controlled, and designed to escalate tension continuously without relief.
A New Model of Interactive Storytelling
The creative foundation of Unhinged comes from a simple idea that quickly expanded into something more complex. Game Director Sam Warner described the original concept as starting with a flashlight.
The development team initially explored how a flashlight could become a physical extension of the player. From there, the idea evolved into using the smartphone as both a flashlight metaphor and a full control interface. The phone then became the central design pillar, not just as a device for input, but as a storytelling device that actively participates in the narrative.
That decision reshaped everything that followed.
According to Warner, the team asked a fundamental question early in development: what if your phone was not only a controller, but also your lifeline within the story? This led to mechanics where in game characters call and text the player directly through their real device, blurring the boundary between fiction and reality.
The idea was not simply immersion for immersion’s sake. It was about collapsing the distance between audience and character until both are reacting to the same moment in real time.
Sean Krankel, head of narrative games at Netflix Games, emphasized that early experiments felt too restrictive or too complex. The team initially tried adding branching dialogue trees, free movement systems, and layered interfaces. However, these systems created friction rather than tension.
What emerged instead was a philosophy of subtraction. Remove anything that interrupts momentum. Remove anything that makes the player think about controls rather than fear.
The result is a game where simplicity becomes the foundation of intensity.
Designing Fear Through Constraint
Unlike traditional horror games that rely on exploration, inventory systems, or combat, Unhinged is built on controlled vulnerability. The player is rarely given complex tools. Instead, they are given limited actions that feel intuitive by design.
A flashlight becomes the primary method of navigating dark spaces. A phone becomes both a UI and a narrative device. Movement is constrained, but perception is constantly manipulated.
The team intentionally avoided systems that might make players feel “bad” at the game. Instead, they wanted something closer to a ride or an escape room, where engagement is immediate and failure is not about skill but about survival instinct.
Krankel compared the experience to a theme park attraction or escape room structure, where players are not expected to master mechanics. They are expected to experience them.
This approach creates a specific emotional state. The player is not learning how to win. They are learning how to endure.
Warner explained that horror design often involves balancing familiarity and discomfort. In Unhinged, familiarity comes from the phone itself. It is an object every player understands intimately. Discomfort arises when that same device becomes the conduit for distressing information, sudden calls, and escalating urgency.
A Hurricane, an Apartment, and a Closing Trap
The setting of Unhinged plays a crucial role in its psychological pressure. The storm is not just background atmosphere. It is an active narrative force.
Set in South Carolina during a Category 5 hurricane, the environment isolates characters both physically and emotionally. Evacuations have already taken place. Infrastructure is failing. Power is intermittent or entirely gone.
This isolation allows the apartment complex to become a sealed environment, one where normal escape routes are no longer reliable.
Krankel noted that much of the game’s story exists beneath the surface. Players can discover additional context by examining Ava’s apartment or environmental clues scattered throughout the space. These details reveal aspects of her life, including her work as a bike messenger and her complicated relationships, as well as tensions between other unseen characters like Noah and Ben.
However, none of this exposition is required. It is optional depth that rewards curiosity rather than gating progression.
The narrative is designed so that urgency competes with exploration. The player is constantly deciding whether to investigate or escape.
Branching That Happens Under the Surface
One of the most interesting design decisions in Unhinged is its approach to branching narrative structure. Unlike traditional narrative games that rely on explicit dialogue choices, Unhinged hides its branching systems beneath player behavior.
Whether the player answers a phone call, ignores a message, or turns on a flashlight at a critical moment can subtly alter how information is revealed. These changes do not necessarily redirect the main storyline, but they reshape perception and timing.
Krankel explained that this approach allowed the team to maintain a tightly controlled narrative while still giving players a sense of agency. Events still occur in sequence, but the player’s understanding of those events can vary significantly.
This creates a form of experiential branching rather than structural branching. The story does not split into multiple campaigns. Instead, it shifts in tone, timing, and emotional interpretation.
In practice, this means two players may experience the same sequence of events but walk away with completely different interpretations of character motivation and trust.
Building Horror for a Dual Screen World
One of the most technically and creatively challenging aspects of Unhinged is its dual screen design. The game unfolds simultaneously on a television and on the player’s phone.
The television displays the primary visual narrative. The phone becomes an interactive overlay that interrupts, supplements, or redirects attention.
This constant switching of focus is not accidental. It is a deliberate attempt to control attention and induce tension. When a phone call interrupts a tense visual moment on screen, the player is forced to shift focus instantly. That shift itself becomes part of the horror design.
Warner noted that this required extensive research into earlier dual screen systems, including handheld consoles and experimental interface designs. However, the team ultimately had to build their own logic for how attention is distributed between devices.
The challenge was ensuring that neither screen felt secondary. Both had to feel essential, even when one temporarily dominates attention.
Casting That Bridges Film and Game Performance
The casting of Unhinged represents another key example of Netflix’s cross-media strategy.
Zoë Kravitz and Sadie Sink bring cinematic credibility and emotional nuance to the core relationship between Ava and Claire, while Troy Baker provides a performance grounded in years of experience in interactive storytelling.
Krankel emphasized that casting decisions were not only based on fame, but on vocal texture and chemistry. The goal was to ensure that Ava and Claire feel like real friends under pressure, not just narrative constructs.
Baker’s performance capture work also played a major role in shaping the physical presence of the antagonist. According to the developers, many of the most unsettling moments in the game were improvised during motion capture sessions, including subtle gestures that gave the character a more unpredictable physicality.
This blend of improvisation and structured storytelling helped the team achieve a sense of realism that supports the horror rather than distracting from it.
The Challenge of Emotional Precision
One of the hardest aspects of development, according to both Warner and Krankel, was mapping emotional beats onto interactive systems. Unlike film, where emotion is controlled through editing and performance, interactive storytelling must account for player agency.
In Unhinged, emotional pacing is controlled through environmental cues, timed interruptions, and controlled communication from non player characters.
For example, Claire’s attempts to contact the player often arrive at moments when attention is already under pressure. These interruptions are designed to create emotional conflict, forcing players to choose between urgency and connection.
This structure ensures that fear is not just visual. It is relational.
Players are not only reacting to threats in the environment. They are also managing trust, communication, and isolation.
A Short Experience With Long Term Ambition
Despite its brief runtime, Unhinged is positioned as a foundational experiment for Netflix’s broader interactive ambitions. The developers describe it not as a tech demo, but as a fully realized narrative experience that explores what only phones can add to storytelling.
The broader vision, according to the team, is to expand what interactive media can be by leveraging device specific features such as microphones, gyroscopes, and real time communication tools.
The ambition is not simply to make games more cinematic. It is to make storytelling more immediate.
As Krankel noted, the success of the experience depends not on mechanics alone, but on emotional coherence. Without story and character depth, even the most innovative interaction systems would collapse into novelty.
With Unhinged, Netflix Games is attempting to prove that interactive horror can exist at the same emotional level as film and television, while offering something those mediums cannot replicate: direct participation in the unfolding fear.
Conclusion: A New Kind of Horror Is Taking Shape
Unhinged represents a significant step in the evolution of interactive entertainment. It is minimal in structure but maximal in intent, stripping away traditional gameplay systems in favor of direct emotional engagement.
By combining cinematic talent, real time device integration, and tightly controlled narrative design, Netflix Games is testing a model where the player is no longer just an observer or controller, but an active participant inside the story world.
Whether this becomes a blueprint for future interactive titles remains to be seen. But Unhinged makes one thing clear. The line between phone, screen, and story is becoming increasingly difficult to define.
And in the world of horror, that ambiguity may be exactly the point.
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