Night School Studio, the developer behind Oxenfree, has quietly dropped one of the most inventive horror games on Netflix right now. It's called Unhinged, it runs about 45 minutes, and it does something genuinely smart with the phone sitting in your hand.
The setup is deceptively simple. Before you can even start, you scan a QR code on screen to link Netflix's controller app to your own device. A few seconds later, your real phone becomes Ava's phone, complete with a convincing UI overlay that mimics her messages, contacts, and call history. When her friend Claire rings in a panic about a power cut, that call comes through on the device in your hand. You answer it with a tap. The voice spills into your actual room.
That's the hook, and Night School commits to it throughout.
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How the phone gimmick actually works in play
Navigating Unhinged uses your phone's gyroscope to control an on-screen torchlight pointer, which serves as both a cursor and a neat piece of atmosphere. The apartment Ava moves through is dim, the power is out, and that beam of light is your only real guide. It's a first-person walking sim at its core, streaming entirely from Netflix's servers, but the phone integration keeps pulling you back to the device in your hand.
Between calls from Claire, you can browse Ava's full message history: a nervous elderly neighbour, a recent ex, a superintendent who reads a little too carefully between the lines. Night School packs a surprising amount of character work into these exchanges, and it costs you nothing but a few seconds of scrolling. The world-building is economical in a way that a lot of longer games never manage.
Then the story accelerates. A noise from the living room. Another call from Claire. And then Night School stops being careful and just goes for it, holding the tension for the rest of the runtime without ever fully releasing it.
Netflix's gaming strategy, and where Night School fits
Here's the thing: Netflix's path through the games industry has not been graceful. The service started with bundled mobile games, then moved into studio acquisitions, then briefly attempted a big-budget triple-A push that was shut down before a single game shipped. More recently, the focus has shifted hard toward casual party games built around phone controllers, targeting audiences that Nintendo and Sony largely stepped back from years ago.
Night School was acquired by Netflix in 2021, the same studio that made The Wolf Among Us a touchstone for narrative adventure fans. Since that acquisition, the studio's output has been limited. Unhinged is their most visible release in some time, and it lands as something of an outlier in Netflix's current catalogue.
That contrast is actually what makes Unhinged interesting beyond the game itself. If Netflix wants to be taken seriously as a games platform, it needs something more than party games and licensed tie-ins. Night School is producing exactly the kind of interactive experience that justifies a games subscription for people who don't want to play Bingo on their phone.
What Unhinged gets right and where it stumbles
The cast is strong. Zoë Kravitz and Sadie Sink carry the emotional weight of the story despite spending most of the runtime as voices rather than faces, and both performances feel genuinely grounded rather than game-adjacent. Troy Baker also appears, though his instantly recognisable voice works against the story at a key moment in a way that's hard to ignore once you notice it.
The pacing is close to perfect for what it is. Forty-five minutes of escalating dread, choreographed tightly enough that there's almost no dead air. The horror tropes stack up quickly, and a few land in daft territory near the end, but the momentum rarely drops.
What most players miss in games like this is how much the central mechanic needs to earn its place. Plenty of interactive experiences bolt on a phone gimmick and call it innovative. Unhinged actually builds its best moments around the conceit. There's a beat near the end, a small detail requiring nothing more than a glance down at your phone, that reportedly lands like a genuine surprise. No spoilers, but Night School clearly thought about what this format can do that a traditional controller setup cannot.
For anyone who wants a taste of the studio's earlier narrative work before jumping into Unhinged, the gaming guides cover a range of story-driven titles worth exploring.
What this means for Netflix games going forward
Unhinged is not a perfect game. It's brief, it leans hard on familiar horror beats, and it won't linger in memory the way Oxenfree did. But it proves that Night School still knows how to build something genuinely interesting within constraints, and that Netflix has at least one studio capable of producing experiences that feel like they belong in a serious conversation about interactive storytelling.
The real question is whether Netflix gives Night School the space to keep making these. If you want to see more of what the studio can do with the format, checking out the Wolf Among Us guide collection is a decent way to revisit the kind of narrative craft that made Night School worth acquiring in the first place. Unhinged is a proof of concept. The next one is where it gets interesting.
