Netflix’s Unhinged Is a 30-Minute Trip You’ll Want to Replay Immediately
If you haven’t tried Unhinged on Netflix yet, clear a little time and jump in today. The experience is over in about 30 minutes, but it’s the kind of 30 minutes that sticks with you—both in the best way and the “wait, did I lock everything?” way. By the end, you’ll probably feel compelled to tell other people to play immediately, and you might also find yourself doing an extra check of your doors long after the credits should have stopped rolling.
If the title isn’t ringing a bell, Unhinged is a new game from Night School Studio, the team behind the Oxenfree series. It features a high-profile voice and motion cast including Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and Troy Baker. The setup is simple: you’re tasked with surviving the night inside an apartment building during a hurricane warning, only for the situation to shift from bad weather to a full-blown home invasion at the same time.
A New Way To Play
This isn’t horror in the usual sense of sitting in front of a screen, gripping a controller or mouse, and hoping you don’t flinch too loudly at every jump scare. Instead, Unhinged uses your phone as an actual tool during play. You don’t just look at it like a secondary screen; you treat it like a phone—taking calls, reading texts, and even using it as a flashlight to navigate what’s happening around you.
During the experience, you point the phone at your main display to check your surroundings using the light, which brings back a certain Wii U Gamepad vibe—though this time the concept lands with more purpose. The same point-and-click approach is then used to interact with items and move through the apartment spaces you’re trapped in. It’s a clever trick that pulls the action out of the “watching” mindset and into your hands, making the device feel less like an accessory and more like part of the character’s reality.
Sound design plays a big role in that immersion, too. Audio comes through both devices: you’ll hear the protagonist, Ava, through your screen, while incoming calls route through your phone speaker. When someone reaches out—like your friend Claire—the conversation hits your phone directly, forcing you to engage as if the call is happening in your own space, not just inside a game.
It’s an exciting, slightly unnerving preview of what gaming on everyday hardware could become. Most people already treat their phones like a companion while gaming—checking guides, looking up strategies, or trying to optimize outcomes—but Unhinged flips that habit on its head. Your phone isn’t merely there to help you; it’s folded into the gameplay itself, and it makes the whole experience feel more immediate and personal. I can’t help but be into the idea.
Sorry, I’m going to make one more Nintendo-era reference: the Wii U Gamepad. Remember how novel that felt at the time? That’s the energy Unhinged brings back for me, but it’s implemented far more effectively. The Gamepad never fully reached the promise it carried, even if there were clever games that leaned into it—ZombiU is a good example. Unhinged takes the same general concept and pushes it further, because you’re not looking at a glorified controller screen. It’s your real phone, being used like a real phone, and the immersion gets dialed up until it’s practically at maximum.
The only downside for me was timing. I played during the middle of the day instead of when everything’s dark outside, and that probably muted the scare factor. With the lights low, this would have been even more effective—and more haunting.
I’m not saying every game should suddenly start using mobile devices in this way, but Unhinged is clearly onto something. It makes me wish for a longer, fully developed horror experience that could expand the same mechanic alongside a deeper narrative. And from there, it’s easy to imagine a whole wave of horror titles adopting the phone-based approach—each one telling a different story while offering a fresh way to mess with players who love being scared. Right now, it feels like we’re just scratching the surface.
Subscribe for deeper coverage of immersive game innovations
I’m not going to spell out the plot or the specific events of Unhinged, because the game is brief and it’s at its best when you experience the shocks firsthand. What I can say is that it goes hard: it’s gory, it’s bloody, and it’s the kind of horror that gets your pulse moving. It’s less “short but sweet” and more “short, but terrifying”—and it honestly lives up to its name.
Night School Studio has an opening to build something similar to what Supermassive Games has done with its interactive drama survival horror lineup. Those titles often share recognizable mechanic patterns, while still swapping out settings and characters to keep things fresh. If Night School Studio follows that same path, there’s no reason this couldn’t become a recurring style of experience. Essentially, I want more. Night School Studio, please make another one. Make it bigger, make it scarier—so scary that I end up worrying my phone battery might actually die before I stop playing.
