Night School Studio has built its reputation on story driven games that blur the line between cinema and player choice, but its latest project for Netflix takes that philosophy in an entirely new direction.
Unhinged transforms your smartphone into an essential part of the experience, using calls, audio and a flashlight mechanic to create psychological tension inside your own living room.
We caught up with Sean Krankel, General Manager of Narrative Games and head of Night School Studio, to discuss why the team abandoned traditional game mechanics, how they found the emotional core of Unhinged, and why realistic horror has become far more unsettling than the supernatural.
Unhinged feels less like a traditional game and more like an experiment in controlled anxiety. At what point did the team realise this idea needed to exist as something people physically interact with through their own phone instead of a controller?
Krankel: I’ve always believed there’s a way to express a story or genre through well-matched interactivity. On this project, we spent months prototyping mechanics using the phone as a controller, looking for a story that would map naturally to it. The one we kept coming back to was a flashlight, because there’s such a strong one-to-one relationship between moving your phone in your hand and a beam of light moving on screen. For a few months it was just “a flashlight game”: something we knew could be scary, but without a story attached.
Then we developed the phone conversation mechanic, where audio plays through both your phone and your TV, and combining the two felt like chocolate and peanut butter. That’s when we knew we had something special. It required very little for the player to learn, and that benign control scheme leaves you exactly as powerless as you are in everyday life. From there it clicked: if people are playing this at home at night, why not set the game in their own home at night? The mechanics plus being trapped in your own house felt so powerful and so simple that it snowballed from there.
Night School has built a reputation on conversations and player choice, but this seems much more intimate, it’s almost invasive. Were there any moments during development where you realised, “Okay… this might actually be too effective”?
Krankel: On this one, we really wanted to remove as much of the gamey, uncanny valley as possible. Having your primary communication come through a phone that feels real, in an environment that feels real, and one that envelops you so completely in escalating stressful situations felt powerful pretty early in development. Originally we actually wanted other standard narrative mechanics, like branching dialogue or additional apps on your phone, but we pulled all of that out because it wasn’t feeding the emotional intent or the pacing we wanted. In this game, your ability to push and pull on the story is frantic: it’s who do you call, when do you answer your phone, when do you have your flashlight on. You’re dealing with a terrible scenario, and we wanted you constantly on your toes, not able to ponder and strategize how a dialogue tree might work.
The fact that it’s as effective as it is in practice has us excited for the future, especially because we play tested extensively with both very game-fluent people and people who haven’t played games at all. All of them can get through the experience, which gives us really positive signals about building approachable mechanics for intense, authentic stories.
Horror games usually rely on monsters or jump scares. Unhinged seems to build tension through uncertainty and ordinary technology. What scares you more personally, something supernatural, or something that feels plausible?
Krankel: I love a great supernatural story, but as my life has gone on, as I’ve lost people I love and built a family of my own, it’s definitely the more realistic stuff that scares me. So when we came to this concept, and it wasn’t about a boogeyman that lives in your dreams or in the woods, but instead the worst possible neighbor, it just felt so awful in all the right ways.
Unhinged is out now
Rather than chasing bigger jump scares or increasingly complex gameplay systems, Unhinged focuses on making familiar technology feel unsettling by placing players inside the experience through the device they already carry every day.
Night School Studio has created a horror game that feels immediate, personal and surprisingly accessible, if this is any indication of where Netflix Games is heading, interactive storytelling may have found one of its most immersive formats yet.
Check it out on Netflix.
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