Until Unhinged, I'd never played a game on Netflix before. Sure, I've seen them on my Netflix app, but never once have I been tempted to tap on any of them, as I assumed they'd be the equivalent of simple mechanics-lite mobile games. Unhinged, now that I've played through it, is most definitely NOT that. It's much more.
First there's who's involved in Unhinged. It's being developed by Oxenfree, a highly decorated studio responsible for Oxenfree prior to its acquisition by Netflix in 2021. (Note: I highly encourage you to watch my conversation with Oxenfree studio head Sean Krankel above in order to hear him talk more about the design process behind Unhinged. And if you're like to hear more from Krankel about his game-development career, you can revisit my 2019 IGN Unfiltered interview with him.) And it stars Zoë Kravitz (The Batman) and Sadie Sink (Stranger Things) along with veteran video game voice actor Troy Baker (The Last of Us). So there's plenty of talent to go around.
Second, there's the kind of game Unhinged is. It's a first-person horror game, and while it is played with your phone, your phone isn't serving as a glass-screened gamepad. Instead, the phone in your hand is the phone in Kravitz's character Ava's hand in the game. That means that when Sink's character Claire calls you, you tap the Answer button on your phone. When texts come in, they come in on your phone. It's all on a fictional UI on your screen, of course, but it grounds Unhinged in an easily understandable reality. And your phone's flashlight is key, so you simply aim it where you want to look and the first-person perspective reflects it. It's shockingly simple, mechanically speaking, but instantly intuitive, and it just works.
The setup for the story, meanwhile, is fairly simple: Ava and Claire are good friends who live in neighboring apartment buildings. They can see each other out their respective windows, and they've decided to ride out the threat of the incoming category-5 hurricane that everyone else has been evacuated for. When the power goes out, you guide Ava down the hall to check on their friendly neighbor and, well, it's a horror game, so you can imagine that things go south from there.
I completed Unhinged in about 30 minutes, right in the middle of the 20-40 minute estimate Krankel gave me when I first sat down. You absolutely can die, and there are nooks and crannies you can poke around in if you dare. I was won over by what I played, such that I want to have my non-gamer wife try out Unhinged when it's released on Netflix on June 30 to see what she thinks of it. But to my fellow core gamers reading this: if, like me, you've never bothered paying attention to the games available on Netflix, Unhinged is the first one I'd implore you to give a chance to. I don't think you'll regret it.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
