Point and click horror can be really tricky to pull off, it can lack a sense of agency over your own actions as characters are funneled into certain choices. But it’s even harder to do well when the thing you’re using to point and click with is your own temperamental phone.
Instead of using a mouse and keyboard or a controller, Unhinged—Netflix’s latest horror game from Zach Cregger and David Fincher—requires players to connect their phone and use that instead. It functions as Ava, the protagonist’s phone as she calls her friend Claire throughout the game for help, all while running away from some creep covered in blood.
I see the vision with this, and to be fair it certainly makes you feel immersed when you’re texting Claire for help or direction, or using its torch to help light the way through the dark hallways of your apartment building after a devastating hurricane takes out the electricity. But that immersion can also backfire.
Why was Claire calling me when the killer was stood a few feet away? More importantly, why the hell didn’t Ava put her phone on silent? I actually got so frustrated at this halfway through I went so far as to put my own phone on ‘do not disturb’ to try and solve the issue. Unhinged is a very short horror game, clocking in at around 30 minutes long, and Claire was lighting up my phone for almost all of that.
Another area where the phone did more harm than good was using it as a mouse to point and click your way through the story. Again, I see the aim with this, to try and make players feel more immersed as if they were actually walking around the semi-abandoned building with nothing but their phone to light their way. But I also found it to be quite a temperamental tool, with accuracy being quite hard to master in some of the QTEs where you have to make a quick escape or reach for something to defend yourself before the man covered in blood finally lunges at you.
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It wasn’t an unforgivably awful experience, but if you’re going to make people use something other than a controller or keyboard then there has to be a better reason than ‘it’s cool’, and it should work just as well if not better.
All of that aside, though, Unhinged was a pleasant point and click horror experience. The setting was suitably creepy, and while there wasn’t much suspense that’s to be expected from a meager 30-minute horror game.
What carried Unhinged more than anything else, though, was the acting. Zoë Kravitz stars as the protagonist, and then there’s Sadie Sink as the well-meaning friend and Troy Baker as the killer. All of their performances were absolutely amazing and did a vastly better job at immersing me in this story than my phone/controller substitute.
So if you have 30 minutes to spare, a Netflix subscription, and are willing to download Netflix’s controller app then I’d recommend checking Unhinged out. If it had a longer run time and actually let me use a keyboard and mouse then my praise would likely be higher, but it’s still a good horror game with what it had to work with.
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