Unhinged review – Trapped in linear, under the guise of choice

Netflix has, on occasion, added genuinely incredible video games to its catalog. Shifting through an array of mid games filled with AI images are brilliant works of art such as IMMORTALITY, Before Your Eyes, and OXENFREE. But these aren’t original Netflix Games.

The corporation, having a bit of an identity crisis with its serial killer and true crime obsession, has released a video game inspired by the very things it keeps shoving in front of its younger audiences. With a banging cast and the real horror of a home invasion as its selling points, I went into Unhinged expecting something similar to Black Mirror‘s Bandersnatch. While that was a mixed bag of tricks, I was completely wrong to believe that Unhinged would be any different. And it’s a right shame when the story was crafted by OXENFREE‘s Night School Studio.

In the midst of a storm, where warnings of a hurricane have seen people evacuate for the night, Ava wakes to a phone call from her friend, Claire. The stairwell doors are locked thanks to the superintendent, and the power is off, meaning the lift is out of order. So when Ava goes out to check on her friendly neighbor, only to discover the door to her apartment seemingly unlocked itself, Ava realizes she isn’t alone tonight.

https://embeds.beehiiv.com/a8d62108-86ed-4039-bf49-44877ba62c15 Screenshot by Destructoid In fact, Unhinged has a lot of potential. For starters, it has the interesting mechanic to make yours and Ava’s phone one and the same. This immersed me in the setting immediately as I scoured her messages for juicy lore and called the police the moment I got the chance to. It invites experimentation, but it’s surface level at best.

Night School Studio does a great job at establishing relationship dynamics with as few words as possible, but there wasn’t enough time to care about what was happening on-screen. I was hoping for backstory and lore outside of a few trivial messages that are a skeleton of what video game lore should be. I hoped for something similar to Life is Strange: True Colors in how it was handled, but it was far from being anything more than telling us what characters we could expect to show up.

Screenshot by Destructoid The phone could have been amazing. I half-expected there to be moments where the phone would ring, and I had to drop the call, else I’d be killed. I wanted pure anxiety from turning the flashlight off when the attacker was nearby. We should have relied on the phone more, with it being the primary mechanic in Unhinged; alas, it was sadly underutilized.

Unhinged was easy to control, and the calibration worked most of the time. But where it falters is the creation of tension, which was manufactured and manipulated with the illusion of choice and a timer. Nothing you choose in this game actually matters beyond choosing the correct option. There are often only two choices laid out in front of you; one being right, the other wasting your time so the timer runs out faster. The illusion of freedom and choice in this game is shoddy and infuriating. Dealing with the enemy came down to waiting for him to leave the room for no reason beyond Ava’s plot armor. The game holds your hand the entire way and pretends you’re making the decisions.

Screenshot by Destructoid Instead, Unhinged plays as a bite-sized kind of creepy experience where you’re forced onto this linear path that pretends you’re going down branches which are really just dead ends. I tried my darndest to choose differently in both playthroughs. I prayed something else would happen. I’d repeatedly hang up a phone call, ignore the on-screen prompt when it forced me to take action, try to call the police whenever possible, or explore a large room with nothing going on in it. The only changes Unhinged provided were in dialogue, where subtle differences appeared depending on the information you gathered earlier in the game.

But the graphics are amazing, the lighting is immaculate, and the voice acting is great (as expected from a ridiculously high-budget cast). Unhinged‘s biggest strength lies in its sound design. Though it doesn’t fit the setting nor story particularly well, the sound design is creepy, uncomfortable, and I felt tense in those slow-down moments that put a little stutter in my step. It paired extremely well with the suffocating setting, heavily inspired by cat-and-mouse symbolism, and all too obvious references to remind us that Ava is trapped. Still, it did a damn good job at establishing an atmosphere.

While I enjoyed the claustrophobic setting and the intense and clever use of lighting from the storm to create dread, it wasn’t enough to impress or scare me beyond thinking “oh that’s cool.” That’s because the story is subpar. Though I enjoyed the slight paranoia I had over characters, you can guess exactly where the story is heading, including the “reveal.”

Screenshot by Destructoid As there are no real choices in Unhinged, because the game is just about surviving the night and nothing more. The endings are split at the very last choice you make in the game. Yes, Unhinged is short, but without any differences in what happens, why would you play the entire game again just to see a cutscene with different dialogue? Like watching the Stranger Things finale, my time was wasted all over again. I’m frustrated because Unhinged looked really promising and could have been awesome.

Marketing this Netflix Game as an interactive story all about reflexes is a white lie to the consumer who wants to make quick decisions in an anxiety-inducing setting. Unhinged had potential if only it actually was the very thing it sold itself to be: A game of choice.

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