Netflix's Unhinged drops you into a Category 5 hurricane with almost no time to breathe. Ava is alone, the power is out, the stairwell doors are padlocked, and something is very wrong with her neighbors. What starts as a welfare check on Joyce spirals into one of the more genuinely unsettling horror game setups in recent memory. If you just finished it and your brain is still processing, here is a full breakdown of the story, the killer's identity, and both endings.
What is the setup in Unhinged?
The game opens with a phone call. Ava's friend Claire, who lives across the street, can't sleep as the storm rolls in. Neither can Ava. The neighborhood has lost power, and a Category 5 hurricane is hours away from making landfall. Ava decides to check on Joyce, a friendly neighbor on the same floor, but finds her door ajar and the fridge hanging open. No answer when she calls out. When Ava returns to her own apartment, the door is open too. Claire's warning starts to make sense: someone is inside.
The building itself works against Ava at every turn. The lift is dead. The stairwell doors are padlocked, which is a strange call by the superintendent Ben given a hurricane is literally overhead. Visual details hammer home the trap metaphor: a mouse caught in a snare sits in plain sight, a physical echo of Ava's situation. She is the mouse. The building is the trap.
Ava's messages with Claire
What happened to Noah in Unhinged?
By reading through Ava's message history, you can piece together that she and Noah were in a relationship that ended badly. The trio of Ava, Noah, and Claire was once close, but the breakup fractured things, with Claire siding with Ava. Noah's messages still carry warmth, though, which makes what comes next worse.
When Ava reaches Noah's apartment, she finds him at his desk, completely still. His face is wrapped in plastic to muffle any screaming. His stomach has been cut open, his organs visible. He's still breathing, which means it happened minutes before Ava arrived. Duct tape on the kitchen counter confirms this wasn't opportunistic. It was planned around the storm.
Noah's scream draws the killer directly to Ava. She's forced to watch as he drags Noah's intestines to the sink for what the killer calls a "clean." It's one of the most disturbing scenes in the game, and it's designed to be.
Who is the killer in Unhinged?
The security room in the basement is where everything clicks. There's a board covered in photographs: Noah, Joyce, and Ava. Noah and Joyce have been crossed out. Ava's photo is covered in hearts, drawn over and over. The room also shows feeds from hidden cameras placed throughout the building, including inside Ava's own apartment. Her living room. Her bedroom. Her bathroom.
The killer's identity lands when Ava watches him on the monitor and sees him dial a number. Her phone rings. It's Ben, the building superintendent.
Ben has been watching Ava for an unknown length of time. He has built a replica of her apartment in the basement. He nails her hands to the table of that replica space, and it's here that Joyce's fate is confirmed: she was murdered, likely lured there earlier with a box of chocolates and placed in the fake apartment as part of Ben's warped vision of domesticity.
The final call decision
Ben's exact motivations are left partially open, but the evidence points toward a man who views other people as objects to control. He doesn't see his victims as human. The "cleaning" ritual, the removal of organs, the positioning of bodies in his replica space: all of it suggests he wanted to strip them down to something that couldn't resist him, something closer to the mannequin than a person. His obsession with Ava specifically, combined with the hidden cameras and the painstaking recreation of her home, points to a fixation that had been building long before the storm gave him his window.
What happened to Joyce in Unhinged?
Joyce was the first to go. Based on what the game shows, Ben likely manipulated her into the basement replica apartment earlier that day, possibly using the box of chocolates found near her. She was murdered there, positioned alongside the mannequin, and left as part of Ben's constructed fantasy. Joyce wasn't a target of hatred. She was a prop.
How does Unhinged end?
Both endings explained
Ava manages to shoot Ben four times with a nail gun. She reunites with Claire, and for a moment the game seems to hint that Claire might not be trustworthy. That thread doesn't go anywhere. The story jumps forward in time, and Ava receives a phone call. The number is familiar.
Ben survived.
The only real decision point in Unhinged determines which of the two endings you see: do you answer Ben's call?
The call itself is real. Night School Studio's director Sean Krankel confirmed this publicly. Ben did not die from the nail gun shots.
Ben's surveillance setup
What makes the ending work is the metaphor underneath it. Ava's entire night was defined by being unable to escape, physically and psychologically. The apartment building, the storm, the locked stairwells, the nailed hands: all of it was about control being taken from her. The final phone call gives that control back. Answering it means letting Ben back in. Ignoring it means choosing, finally, to leave him behind.
The cracked photo in the answer-the-call ending is doing real work too. It's Ava, Claire, and Noah, smiling, before everything fell apart. Ben's call pulls her back into that grief. Ignoring it lets the picture stay cracked without reopening the wound.
Is Unhinged a horror game worth playing?
Unhinged sits firmly in the horror games space, and it earns its place there through atmosphere and story rather than combat or mechanics. The game is short and linear, with one meaningful choice. That's a fair criticism if you came in expecting branching paths. But the story it tells within those constraints is tight and genuinely disturbing, and the ending's symbolic weight lands better than most horror games manage with twice the runtime.
For more guides on navigating every twist and mechanic, the full Unhinged guides collection has you covered.