Netflix's Unhinged is a slick 30-minute horror game let down by its own phone gimmick

Netflix just dropped Unhinged, a point-and-click horror game developed with Zach Cregger and David Fincher, and it stars Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and Troy Baker. The whole thing runs about 30 minutes and is free to play with a Netflix subscription after downloading the Netflix controller app.

The game's central hook is that your phone doubles as the protagonist Ava's phone — you text her friend Claire for help, use the torch to navigate a pitch-black apartment building after a hurricane knocks out the power, and swipe through QTEs when the blood-soaked killer closes in. It's a clever idea on paper, but in practice the phone controls are temperamental enough to undercut the tension. Accuracy suffers during quick-reaction sequences, and Claire rings Ava's phone so relentlessly — even when the killer is standing a few feet away — that the reviewer ended up enabling Do Not Disturb on their own device just to cope. As a mouse substitute for pointing and clicking, the phone never quite earns its place over a standard controller or keyboard.

Unhinged is a short, scrappy horror game built around a gimmick that half-works. Point-and-click horror is already a genre that struggles with player agency, and layering a phone-as-controller mechanic on top adds friction rather than immersion. Cregger is best known for Barbarian, and Fincher's involvement signals Netflix is serious about pairing prestige film talent with its games slate — which makes the execution here feel like a missed opportunity.

What saves Unhinged is the cast. Kravitz, Sink, and Baker all deliver performances strong enough to carry the thin runtime, and the apartment-building setting is genuinely creepy for what it is. If Netflix extends the format, irons out the phone controls, and lets players use a keyboard and mouse, there's a solid foundation here worth building on.