Unhinged: Inside Netflix’s First Original Horror Video Game

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• Netflix Enters Horror Territory
• What Is Unhinged?
• The Cast: Kravitz, Sink and Baker
• How It Plays: Your Phone Is the Controller
• Two Ways to Play: Story Mode vs. Standard Mode
• The Studio Behind It: Night School Studio’s Pedigree
• Scoring the Scares: Jason Hill and Ren Klyce
• Netflix’s Bigger Gaming Play
• Release Details
• Fin

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Netflix has spent the better part of five years quietly building out a games division, but it’s taken until now to commit fully to one of streaming’s most reliable genres: horror. On 30th June, the company releases Unhinged, its first original horror video game, fronted by a cast that includes Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink and veteran voice actor Troy Baker. It’s a release designed to land at a very specific intersection — playable like a game, paced like a TV episode, and cast like a streaming original — and it arrives just two weeks after Netflix’s FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition game, suggesting the streamer is now moving through genres deliberately rather than testing the waters with one-off experiments.

What makes Unhinged worth paying attention to isn’t just the star power attached to it. It’s a fairly direct statement of intent about where Netflix sees its games business heading: away from companion apps and mobile time-killers, and toward short, cinematic, star-driven experiences that live inside the same home screen as its films and series.

 

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Unhinged drops players into the perspective of Ava, a woman trapped inside her apartment building during a Category 5 hurricane. The power has gone out, the building has emptied, and Ava’s only connection to the outside world is a phone call from her best friend Claire, who lives across the street and stays on the line as events unfold. What begins as a contained, storm-driven thriller setup gradual tips into something stranger and more threatening, as Ava starts to realise the building isn’t as empty as it first seemed.

Netflix has been careful in how it frames the experience, describing it as something closer to “playing” a show or film than a traditional video game. The full playthrough runs roughly half an hour — intentionally close to the length of a single streaming episode — which positions Unhinged less as a standalone gaming purchase and more as an extension of an evening’s viewing queue. It’s a structure clearly built for casual discovery: something a subscriber stumbles into from the Netflix home screen and finishes in one sitting, rather than a title they seek out and commit hours to.

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Zoë Kravitz voices Ava, marking her first project with Netflix despite a film career that includes The Batman. Sadie Sink, long associated with the platform through Stranger Things and the Fear Street films, voices Claire, Ava’s best friend and primary lifeline through the ordeal. Rounding out the principal cast is Troy Baker, one of gaming’s most prolific voice actors thanks to roles in The Last of Us, who plays Ben, the building’s superintendent.

The casting is notable for blending two different kinds of star power: Kravitz and Sink bring straightforward screen recognize, while Baker brings credible with an audience that already takes narrative games seriously. It’s a pairing that mirrors Unhinged’s own positioning — a project trying to appeal equally to Netflix’s film-and-TV subscriber base and to players who already engage with story-driven horror games as a format in their own right.

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The mechanic at the centre of Unhinged is what sets it apart from Netflix’s earlier mobile-companion games. Players launch the experience on their TV through the Netflix app, then scan an on-screen QR code to link their smartphone, which becomes a one-to-one motion controller for Ava’s flashlight. Moving the phone in the real world moves the beam of light on screen, turning a basic horror trope — exploring a dark room with a single light source — into something tactile rather than passively watched.

It’s a meaningful evolution from the keyboard-and-remote inputs Netflix has used for previous interactive titles, and it leans into something horror as a genre has always relied on: physical tension. A flashlight that moves when your hand moves closes the gap between watching a character search a dark hallway and feeling like you’re the one doing the searching, which is precisely the kind of immersion a thirty-minute, single-sitting horror experience needs to land its scares.

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Unhinged ships with two distinct ways to experience it. Standard Mode is built for a straightforward playthrough, with Ava’s interactions, calls and decisions moving the narrative forward in real time. Story Mode, by contrast, appears designed for a more relaxed or shared viewing experience — closer to how someone might half-play, half-watch a friend work through a horror movie, rather than requiring the same level of active, moment-to-moment input throughout.

The dual-mode structure speaks directly to who Netflix is hoping picks this up. A purely hardcore Standard Mode experience risks alienating casual subscribers who associate Netflix with passive viewing rather than active play; a Story Mode option gives that audience a way in without abandoning the format’s interactive hook altogether. It also makes Unhinged easier to experience as a group activity — something to be passed around a room — rather than a solitary undertaking, which fits neatly with how a lot of casual horror media already gets consumed.

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Unhinged was developed by Night School Studio, the in-house Netflix team acquired by the streamer in September 2021 as part of its early push into games. Night School’s track record makes it a fitting choice for Netflix’s first horror title: the studio built its reputation on Oxenfree, a supernatural teen thriller about a group of friends who accidentally tear open a ghostly rift on an abandoned island, and followed it with Oxenfree II: Lost Signals. More recently, the studio developed Black Mirror: Thronglets, a retro pet-simulator game built around the plot of the Black Mirror Season 7 episode “Plaything.”

That history matters here for a specific reason: Night School has spent a decade working at the exact intersection Unhinged is trying to occupy, between narrative-driven games and prestige streaming content. Where Oxenfree leaned on dialogue systems and a moody, atmospheric island setting to build dread, Unhinged trades that slow-burn structure for something far more compressed and physical — a shift that tracks with Netflix’s stated goal of making the format approachable for subscribers who’ve never picked up a controller for a horror game before.

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Sound is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in a game built around darkness and a single beam of light, and Netflix has brought in serious credentials to handle it. Composer Jason Hill, known for his scores on Mindhunter and Gone Girl, provides the music, while veteran sound designer Ren Klyce — whose film credits stretch across some of the most atmospherically distinct thrillers of the past few decades — handles the sound design.

It’s a pairing that signals Netflix isn’t treating Unhinged’s audio as an afterthought bolted onto a tech demo. For a game whose entire gameplay loop is built around what players can and can’t see in a darkened apartment, sound design effectively becomes the second half of the horror, cueing tension and danger in the spaces the flashlight doesn’t reach.

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Unhinged doesn’t exist in isolation. It arrives roughly two weeks after Netflix launched FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition, and Netflix’s head of narrative games has framed the horror title as part of a deliberate strategy: get subscribers to stumble onto a game from their home screen, hook them with something they can finish in one sitting, and use that as a gateway into the platform’s wider games catalogue. Since introducing games in 2021, Netflix has built that catalogue out to more than 100 titles, ranging from licensed hits to originals tied directly to its own shows.

Unhinged represents a fairly clear signal of what comes next in that strategy: short, star-led, genre-specific experiences rather than sprawling original productions. With horror covered, Netflix’s narrative games lead has already indicated more genre and story-driven titles are in the pipeline, suggesting Unhinged is closer to a proof of concept for a format than a one-off experiment.

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Unhinged launches globally on Netflix Games on 30th June, included at no extra cost for all Netflix subscribers and free of ads or in-game purchases. It can be played via the Games tab on a TV-connected Netflix app, paired with a smartphone using the in-app QR code. No separate purchase, download from an app store, or additional subscription is required beyond an existing Netflix account.

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Unhinged is a small, tightly scoped project on paper — a half-hour horror experience playable with nothing more than a phone and an existing subscription — but it carries an outsized amount of strategic weight for Netflix’s gaming ambitions. By pairing recognisable screen talent with a studio that has spent a decade building narrative-first games, and by using physical phone movement to make a familiar horror trope feel newly tactile, Netflix has built something that asks very little of a first-time player while still delivering a genuinely interactive scare. Whether it succeeds as the gateway Netflix is hoping for will depend less on the half-hour runtime itself and on either subscribers who finish it actually go looking for what else the platform’s games tab has to offer.