We love all sorts of games. Sometimes it is hard to cover a game in our traditional review style, which is why we have tidbit-style reviews. These shorter reviews cover games that deserve attention too, but simply don’t fit our good, mixed, and bad template.
- Unhinged | score: 78%
- Developer | Night School Games
- Publisher | Netflix
Unhinged is a short horror game that just released on Netflix of all places, played on your TV screen and controlled with your mobile phone. It’s very clever in how it uses your phone, the flashlight can be turned on/off and is pointed at your screen to interact with certain objects, and you receive calls on it (with audio coming from your phone) and text messages.
It feels very immersive (and I don’t use that often when describing games, as it’s an overused adjective) and really made me wonder what else is possible with this kind of setup. At some point, my character even fell down a trash chute, and when landing, the phone screen broke and remained like that for the rest of the game. Really nice touch. I could also see them adding suspense with a bigger game and needing to find a charger because your battery is almost dead.
It’s short with a runtime of only 35-40 minutes, and there is no branching path or alternative ending. There is only ever one correct way forward, even though that path might feel dumb (like answering a phone call you wouldn’t in real life). I’d have much rather had some choices that really impacted the survival of my character, over the reflex-testing “point at this object in time” gameplay they went for now, but I guess part of that choice comes from wanting to show you the gruesome death animations. A final nitpick: I would have really wanted subtitles on the TV screen, but that was not an option.
Unhinged is an easy recommendation to fans of the horror genre when you already have an active Netflix subscription and it’s a clever way to use the bigger screen + phone setup that I would like to see explored more in bigger titles.
Final score: 78/100
Robby lives and breathes video games. When he’s not playing them, he’s talking about them on social media or convincing other people to pick up a controller themselves. He’s online so often, he could practically list the internet as his legal domicile. Belgian games-industry know-it-all.
