If you’ve yet to play Unhinged on Netflix, do it today. It’ll only take 30 minutes of your time, but it’s 30 minutes I promise you’ll never forget. It’ll play on your mind in the best and worst way possible, prompting you to recommend others should play immediately, all while making you triple-check your doors are locked tonight.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Unhinged is the new game from Night School Studio, the creative minds behind the Oxenfree series. It boasts a star-studded cast that features Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and Troy Baker, and it challenges players to survive the night in their apartment building after a hurricane warning, only to find themselves a victim of a home invasion at the very same time.

A New Way To Play

This isn’t just your average horror game where you sit in front of your TV or monitor and use your controller or mouse and keyboard to push forward the action, praying no one sees you react to every jump scare. Instead, you use your phone alongside the gameplay unfolding before you, and primarily, you actually use it as a phone: receiving calls, text messages, and even using it as a flashlight.

You aim your phone at the screen to look around with the flashlight, evoking Wiimote flashbacks for me, and this point-and-click style is then used to interact with objects and move around the game’s environments. It brings the gameplay out of the screen and into your hands in more ways than one. Not only are you physically using your phone, but the audio comes through both devices; you hear the protagonist, Ava, through your screen, but when others call your phone, like your friend Claire, the audio comes from your phone speaker, pulling you directly into the action.

It’s a delightfully tantalising taste of what the future of gaming could be like. Most of us are used to relying on our phones when gaming, but usually it’s to look up relevant guides and cheat our way to the best outcomes without a single misstep. Now your phone is in your hand because it’s part of the game itself, and I’m obsessed with the idea.

I’m sorry, I’m going to make another Wii reference: the Wii U gamepad. Remember that novelty? That’s what this reminds me of, but it’s executed much better here. The Wii U gamepad never fully lived up to its full potential or what we were promised. You had a few games that utilised it in clever ways, like ZombiU, but Unhinged takes that idea to the next level because it’s your real phone, being used as a phone, and dialling the immersion all the way up to 11.

My only regret is playing in the middle of the day instead of at night when it’s dark, as then it would have been an even better (and spookier) experience.

I’m not suggesting every game ever should suddenly start utilising mobile phones in this way, but Unhinged is onto something here. I can imagine a fully-fledged, much longer horror experience that taps into this idea in terms of both the gameplay mechanic and the narrative. And then I can imagine half a dozen more similar horror games that use the same phone mechanic, but each with a fresh story, establishing a new way to thrill horror fans. We’re only just scratching the surface here.

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I don’t want to detail the narrative or events of Unhinged, as the game is very brief and best experienced first-hand, but just know that it’s gory, bloody, and will make your pulse race. It’s less ‘short but sweet’ and more ‘short but scary as hell’. It lives up to its name well.

Much like how Supermassive Games has carved out a path and a name with its interactive drama survival horror games, all of which feature similar game mechanic templates but different settings and characters, Night School Studio could do the same. Essentially, I want more, please. Night School Studio, please make more of this. Make another one. Make it bigger and scarier to the point where my phone battery will be in danger of dying because I’ll play it for so long.

Unhinged Like Follow Followed Horror Released June 30, 2026 ESRB 18+ Developer(s) Night School Studio Publisher(s) Netflix Games 3 Images Close Genre(s) Horror Powered by Expand Collapse