Checked out Unhinged
I finally played through Unhinged, Night School's final game, which runs in the Netflix television app on a variety of platforms. Shortly after its release, Netflix shut down the studio. I know a bunch of people there and I'm very frustrated that they're now out of work.
Unhinged is a super short experience. I used the Netflix controller app to play it at a party on a friend's television. We played "pass the controller" style, so I suppose I didn't properly play the whole thing... but it's a playstyle I can recommend.
I think anyone who works in games narrative should check this out. The thing you'll probably pay the most attention to is the control scheme - your phone is the controller, but the thing it represents in-game is your character's phone. Your phone is a second-screen narrative delivery system and it achieves this by being a phone and receiving in-game calls and texts. The main control scheme involves turning on your in-game phone's flashlight - using a button on your real phone - and waving it around the room to find interactive hotspots. Of course, you do this by naturalistically waving your real phone around your actual room.
It's an avenue of narrative expression that started with the PS4 controller playing narrative voice log sounds at you in a couple games years ago, then meandered through Netflix's decade-long anxiety about "second screen experiences" and finally got us here, to a team making an actual attempt to Do It For Real. It works and it feels pretty cool. It was so performant on the (non-console) device we were using to run Netflix that it was actually kind of eerie. The control scheme feels like a Whole Idea, which is really impressive, because the game is only 30 minutes long and doesn't have a ton of time to spend on anything.
It does feel like this kind of control scheme - where you ship a game annd its controller support apps on minimum three different OSes - is only practical for platforms and large corporations. Even then, I imagine the bureaucratic lift necessary to do this work across multiple teams in a megacorp might be exhausting. So now that Night School has been shut down, I'm curious whether this is the last time for a long time that we'll see a team execute on this idea. I can close my eyes and imagine how much work this was! I'm very glad that this team got it out the door before Netflix shut them down.