Is Netflix Unhinged the Future of Storytelling? We Discuss

0:01Spawn on Me is the premier podcast spotlighting people of color. Every week we talk news, what we've been playing, and tell you who's invited to the cookout. Our show is all about talking about gaming through a prism of blackness because we are the culture. Welcome to Bricago, y 'all. What's good, everybody? In Bricago, Kahlief here, and we have a fantastic interview for you. I am very excited because if you are ready to talk about a very dope game, a very dope experience, I have just the person to talk to you about that. Sean Krenkel, who is the GM of Narrative Games over at Netflix, coming to talk about their new joint, Unhinged.

0:41Sean, I'm so excited to have you on the show, man. How are you doing? I'm doing great. You're going to make me blush. I'm super excited to be here, and we're right at the cusp of getting ready to put this thing out in the world, so very excited. Oh, man. So I had been a fan of the work that you have done over the years as a co-founder of Night School, you know, Oxenfree, one of my favorite games, Oxenfree 2, one of the bangers in that space that I've always thought was really innovative in so many different ways. Now you're working over at Netflix. Netflix has pulled you all into the fold and you're making these really like ridiculously cool experiences.

1:25Give folks at home a little bit of the kind of background story of how you all two kind of got together to kind of join forces and do this kind of excellent and super fun work. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, it was so it has already now been, I think, about four and a half years and we were mid pandemic, I'm pretty sure. So we were all at home on Oxenfree 2 at the time. And it actually it didn't start with the intent of us to become, you know, a broader piece of Netflix at all. It actually was that we were talking about bringing some of our stuff over to what was going to be a burgeoning platform for them.

2:04And so at that time, this is like they didn't even have a full games team yet. And we had been talking about bringing After Party actually over to the to the platform. and as we were talking, you know, we would have these discussions and they would happen once a month or so. And it kind of felt like the same discussions you have with other publishers and things. And after one of these calls, uh, the, the person that we were talking to at the time was like, can you stick around for a few minutes after the call? And I was like, oh shit, this is going to fall apart. And then he said, we love what you've been doing.

2:34We love what we've been talking about to, to, you know, build on with, with after party, but would you ever be interested into bigger relationship. And I was like, Oh my God. So I ran out of the room. I told my wife, holy cow, this is an opportunity. And within maybe three months we had joined Netflix. So yeah, at that time we were sort of midstream on Oxenfree 2 and then working on a couple other things more in the gestation phase. Oh man. I'm sure that that was like one of those days you're just like, do you remember when that thing happened after, you know, again, there was a ton of success and critical success around both of those Oxenfree games.

3:12And it felt like the question from the community was, what's going to be the next thing that moves you forward in the space? And having this be the next kind of, you know, move in that direction is brilliant. And I'm so happy for y 'all because y 'all make dope stuff. Talk to me a little bit about, give the elevator pitch to the people who are not necessarily in the room with us now talking about Unhinged. Like what would be the thing that you would tell those folks when you're kind of conveying what the game is to people. Yeah, so it is a game that uses your phone as a controller, but ultimately think about your phone working like your actual phone.

3:50So when you get a phone call on your phone in this game, you hear it through your phone. When you turn on your flashlight on your phone, that works like a flashlight in the screen, and you can peer into the darkness. And it's a story game that basically focuses on a home invasion gone super sideways. Like a home invasion is already bad. But as somebody who's played it, you know how off the rails this thing goes. And so you've got a best friend who's across the street. The two of you should have evacuated because there's a Cat 5 hurricane rolling through. And what starts as a very small feeling experience that has, you know, it's you in your apartment talking to your friend across the street.

4:27And you can see each other rear window style devolves into chaos. Oh, and you know what I get to do now? I get to do the very old school late night thing of being like, we have a clip. Let's show the trailer right about now.

4:48Claire, are you okay? No, my power's out. Let's just find a hotel for the night. Yeah, sure. Okay, meet you downstairs in 10 minutes. Oh, hey, while you're in there, grab my sweater. And where? Your room. I see you in there. Claire, I'm not in my room.

5:12I'm like 85 % sure I saw someone standing in your bedroom. There's no one else here, okay?

5:22What's going on? Ava, there's someone! Oh, no, no, no! He's coming! Hi! Oh, my God! The fire escape! I'm out the window! Go! It's stuck! Pry it open! I gotta get out of here. Fuck! It's okay! Where the fuck is that screwdriver? You got this! Just keep moving. God, I don't wanna die! Oh my god!

5:55Come on, motherfucker. Come on,

6:03motherfucker.

6:08that's pretty damn good whoever cut that trailer together goddamn that was on point my god i mean at this point you i'm sure you have seen that trailer in multiple instances over the time before it went live and and and out to the public how does it feel to kind of see the thing that you've made and also kind of then have that, you know, classic kind of well-known Netflix branding alongside that. How crazy is that at this point? It's absurd. It's totally crazy. It's extra crazy because we've been working on this thing in, you know, like you work on anything in building, but looking down for so long at this and you're like, I can't wait to get it out into the world and see how people, how it's going to resonate.

6:50And yeah, I mean, that thing gives me goosebumps every time I see it. I'm so excited. Yeah. You all nailed it. As a big horror, as a huge horror fan, the first things I thought was like, oh, okay, you guys are going in a really interesting direction. Sadie Sink, Zoe Kravitz, and Troy Baker attached to the project and being a part of what is a very cool project. Tell me what it was like to kind of get those folks on board and say, hey, do you want to make a horror game that's going to be playable on Netflix? How did that discussion go? That it was interesting because we talked about it almost less of it as a game and more.

7:27And I know this is going to sound so lame, but it's hard. I mean, you've played it, so, you know, it sort of is an experience, right? Like if there are of it that are that that clearly use the verbs and language of games, but also it's not a very difficult thing to play at the same time, it's super intense. Right. So the way we talked about it was more just that it's this immersive thriller. and we were pretty far along sort of building out the the core mechanics and we knew the story that we wanted but ultimately we were like if this thing is going to really succeed it has to have you know amazing performances and it has to be go way further than just the gimmicks of those inputs because otherwise it's a tech demo and we do not want to build a tech demo we want to make something that is an insane story that people talk about the same way they would talk about their favorite show or their favorite movie and so early days you know once we had it kind of all boarded out and knew what the whole thing was one of the coolest parts of working at Netflix has been that the the walls between different groups, be it, you know, the casting department or the product team or whoever, there kind of are no walls.

8:27And so the people that cast the shows there are the same people that we reach out to and work with as well. And so we just ended up being so fortunate to get literally like our dream cast. Like this is all the folks that we wanted to work with so bad. And, you know, Sadie and Zoe, I think in their respective roles, it was important for them to to play off of each other in even a sort of textural way and like, like what their vibes are. And, you know, they, they kind of change over the course of the game there that who, who is the, the, the more, the braver friend kind of changes at different times.

9:00And so the fact that that ended up, you know, they turned in such incredible performances, like carries all that. And then Troy, you know, Troy, he's, that man is a monster. Like, I mean, in this game, he's, he's a literal monster but in general like his range just continues to astound me in you know i think the thing that i love about troy is for a lot of his career he has been at least in his digital roles has been the kind of cute cheeky you know kind of you know dig and poke at you with saying with the quips are very fast and you know all of those things and the multiple characters that he's been attached to, but he's been in his bad guy phase now for a little bit.

9:50And, you know, the way Troy presents is, you know, very, very chill. He's a very chill dude in real life and like very nice, super likable in all those ways. But like when he turns that like bad dude filter on, he's phenomenal at that aspect of, of, of learning that craft and, in doing that when it was you know a part of the kind of recording sessions for these individual characters and kind of seeing the ensemble come together were there some moments in there where there was some interplay that you didn't expect that added to and kind of brought out each one of those characters in a different way again we're not going to do what this was because it's coming out literally the day before it goes live but were there some some moments in there where you were like, oh, this is what I was hoping for.

10:36And it really came together. Can you talk a little bit about that? A hundred percent. And, um, it's interesting because like each, each actor and each character ended up slight, we, we slightly tweak aspects of the script or the story, the more we started working with folks. So like with Zoe, for example, she, um, you, you know, where it goes with her by the time we, the second half of the game and she was doing as intensive things in her performance as she was doing, we realized like we wanted to go back to the beginning and change some of her lines that were initially maybe a little bit not snarkier, but like there was just stuff that that in the beginning, if we were to tee up the end a little bit better, we could sort of reconfigure things.

11:17So where I'm going with that is to say that the back half of the game, because of what she goes through, we would get exhausted just watching her. Like we would get super shook and sweaty listening to her because we're like, this is insane how far she's willing to go for this thing. So for her, it was it was changing some lines in the beginning to change, you know, who she was. I think, you know, on the Sadie front, she immediately found the character and we actually didn't change much of it. Like she did what was on the page and then just plus it way up. And then Troy was the one who I think the most he he he like took the clay of who this character was that he's playing and molded it in real time with us and that was I was just like so grateful because what started as a dude that felt slightly I don't know Michael Myers-ish got turned into a very specific character and one that has humor in it and one that is like like you like he's he's kind of a just a goofball jackass of a villain you know at the same time He's not he's not he's not Michael Myers, right?

12:20Like he has a very specific thing that has made him behave the way that he's behaving. So anyways, yeah, I think that the the other thing was that Troy, you know, we had done a fair amount of mocap early on and Troy had seen the mocap and we hadn't done it with him. And he was like, can I just come in and redo like all like, yes, please. you can because he then took that character the posture the the the movement the i mean you know how how he enters the scene the first time all that i mean these are like special troy touches so i've never gotten to work with this guy in my life and i was like in awe completely because his vocal performances are always killer but watching him physically embody this character was like insane yeah i think i think getting to see more of his behind the scenes stuff when he when he gets to kind of showcase those things is where you really get a chance to see him shine like you said i think it does you know again his his cheekiness in his personal self comes out in these characters where you can see there's a little bit of him where it's like i enjoy this in a way that is not you know what i mean like that's kind of cool to even see that stuff not only do i know what you mean there is some stuff that has to stay on the cutting room floor because he he found the edges and he crossed them on the, you know, it's like, oh, damn, we can't use this or that.

13:39And so he definitely found the edge while we were finding the character together. The other quick thing, I'll tell this as fast as possible, but it just like blew me away. So imagine we're on this giant stage and there's a particularly physical scene that he's doing. And they're, you know, kind of resetting and going back to take it again. And he's and there's no markers on the ground. It's just a big sort of flat plane surface. this. And he goes back to a spot and the the mocap director on the stage is like, actually, you know, you're supposed to be back over here. And Trey's like, No, I'm not.

14:08I remember like I he just and he's not braggadocious. He's just going No, I'm not this is where I should be. And the directors kind of like, I'm pretty sure it's over here. And then they're like, Let's look at the data. He had it in his head. I'm talking about he went 30 feet back to the very specific spot, because it was just all mapped. And I was like, this guy is from another planet. I mean, he's a vet. He's been on those big, you know, PCAP stages so many times at this point that I'm sure that he's in it. And to be fair, you know, I'm giving a ton of love to Troy, but, you know, both Sadie and Zoe, I do want to give them their flowers for really bringing something, something special to this performance in a way that made me hope that we get a chance to see, you know, Zoe specifically do more in the video game space because she has a knack for it in a way that really came through in this experience for sure.

15:00I really agree. I mean, I think that they both it was the the cool thing was that we didn't have to ask them to to contort into some crazy cartoonish characters. They showed up and performed the way that they would for a film or a show. And a lot of our recording session just felt like that. And so, yeah, it was they they both really just did such, such incredible work. And, you know, like this thing, it is emotional under the hood. It's the story of these two friends. I know that there's a lot of spikes and crazy things that happen. But ultimately, at night school, we view this as a friend. You know, it's a friendship story that plays out over the course of one night.

15:36Yeah. Night school does relationships very, very well in terms of kind of bringing that very grounded space in kind of, you know, otherworldly events. You do such a good job of the writing in that respect. I do want to talk about the technical stuff because, you know, Netflix games as a whole, you know, I've used it here and there and using, you know, if you're not familiar, most times when you're using or playing a game on Netflix as a platform, it is using your phone as the controller. Usually just scanning a QR code, it pulls up an app that usually is like that, that kind of connects you to the remote control layer of it.

16:14Or you can kind of do it through the web version of the thing. And this seamless way that you were all thinking about game mechanics, using real life objects as digital replacements for the thing that you're connecting to in world is really brilliant. Like the first thing I thought was as soon as I finished, as soon as I started and got the first phone call, I was like, oh shit, that felt right. That felt like exactly like I had an expectation for that to feel and hope because I think a lot of teams try to do that facsimile and it doesn't necessarily feel as connected because you're like, I'm holding the thing and it feels like, oh, well, I had to go to a browser and put in a code and do this thing.

17:00once you've done that initial setup, you have nailed the technology on that layer. Talk to me a little bit about when you're thinking about the core loop of this thing and integrating what is the most well-known and used piece of technology that we all are engaging with every day. Talk to me about how you kind of all scoped that out and thought about how you were going to kind of incorporate that into this experience. Yeah, that, I mean, thank you. That means a lot because we the game started more from that place than even the initial story concept. Like we really we were looking at Netflix as a platform and going, OK, you know, if the last few years of Netflix games have been purely mobile and they're all literally mobile games, I think that is such a known space.

17:47But this dynamic of moving to TV and using your phone as a controller could either be a gift or a total curse. And like, I think in the beginning, honestly, our team looked at it like, how the hell are we going to make something fun on this? Because if you try to adapt a D-pad and buttons onto your phone and you don't take the extra step to make it feel native to the device, it's going to feel sort of lesser than or, you know, you can get you can get pretty good. But we wanted to make it feel magical. And so a lot of the things we started doing were just like, what makes sense using an accelerometer, using a surface of the phone with bespoke imagery, things like that.

18:23And a flashlight was the first thing. Like we were really into a flashlight and did just basic tech demos inside of the space where we're like peering around in darkness. And it just it felt like a magic trick, like when that stuff started to work. So for a while, it was just like the flashlight game. And we didn't know what I do something with a flashlight. And then we got to the part where there was interplay between audio on TV and the phone. And then we're like, oh, this is now this is a a Play-Doh factory for story. We can push some story through these types of verbs because they're they're unique and they feel right on the phone and it feels really pretty magical.

19:01And so it pretty quickly then evolved into what is the most grounded personal story we can tell that feels very easy to interact with. And it was like, well, use your phone as a phone. And then that even inspired the idea. You know, we knew we wanted to do something in the realm of horror and go harder than on in the past. And with that, we were like, well, where what would be a great setting for that? And, you know, you could stick out in the woods. You could stick it wherever. But we we want to put it in your home, like a home invasion in your home. Right. And so that when those things come together, which is a very messy process and does not go nearly as smoothly as I just explained it.

19:36But like when we're like, like macheting our way through that and the two things started to talk to each other, like a crisp story idea and these interesting mechanics that feel like they should only work on a phone that then both sides inspired each other a lot and things really got rolling in. Yeah. And, you know, you can see the combination of the forethought of mapping out when certain events are going to be happening. And the even harder part of, yes, this is a very linear story in the way that it kind of is experienced with not, you know, I think a lot of folks are thinking this is like, you know, choose your adventure, which it's not.

20:15There are some branching paths in which you kind of are moving through the space to kind of figure out what the next thing is going to be. But it's not guided. You're guiding yourself through it. But there are some endpoints to be able to get to that are both, you know, story driven, a little bit action driven, which are scary as hell. And you've nailed that part of like that tagline of like your phone may die. I mean, your phone won't die, but you might. That is so brilliant. That's so good. Um, but it winds up being those things of like, when you're crafting that experience and figuring, all right, we have a confined layer of where people can go.

20:54How are you thinking about the, the, the routing to where you want people to go and the kind of small pieces of unbeaten path that people will always touch and kind of play around with? How are you thinking about kind of when you're crafting the story of how to get people where they need to get you to see the full experience while also giving them some feeling of freedom to be able to go so it doesn't feel like it's on rails yeah that part is another one that uh as i explain it it might sound like we had it figured out we did not have it figured out like in the beginning it was everything in the kitchen sink was in there and we had it where we had a free walk mode and people would just be walking into walls and looking at the ground and the control input didn't feel good.

21:36We had, we had, we actually had branching dialogue choices in there for a little bit, and they were not additive because ultimately we knew what we wanted the player experience and the player fantasy to be. It requires a certain type of pacing. It requires a certain type of forgiveness of controller input. Cause we want you to be able to frantically be moving around and not boxing with the controls. So, you know, it took a while for us to get to this place where we went, let's just make it all about the flashlight and about like having four or five different points of interest or things to deal with at any given moment, but not having to juggle a bunch of things beyond that, not a bunch of esoteric game language stuff or not weapons and all these other things.

22:18And so, you know, and the more we leaned into that and went, OK, like we found this kind of this node based navigation language that both lets you freely explore and look around in a very sort of fluid way, but also doesn't ever let you have a shitty shot. Like it never looks bad, right? Like you're never like looking up at the ceiling or something weird. Um, that was, that became part of the language of our design then. And it was the same thing with like, how and when do texts and phone calls work and overlap and how long there's even a rule set that we have under the hood for like how long a line of dialogue should be because we know exactly how long somebody has to parse that or when to text somebody at the scariest, most annoying moments.

22:58Like, I hope you were probably like, God damn it, Claire, stop calling me because that you know we I think we just had this rule internally where we said if we have all these ingredients and a short time for people to learn them then our goal should be that the players never looking at their phone unless we actively wanted them to they're looking down to orient themselves or figure like they're confused then we're not gonna keep the pacing we're not gonna keep the scares we're not gonna keep the intensity and the propulsive nature of what we wanted so I'm really happy with like the the the balance that we found of just enough free walk, just enough movement, just enough that makes it feel intuitive and naturalistic and hopefully sort of disappeared.

23:40You know, like you don't really think about how to move much after a while. But it took a while. It took a lot of iteration to get there. Yeah. I got mad at my phone multiple times during the experience. I was like, yo, leave me alone. I don't know where I'm supposed to go yet. Or this guy's trying to kill me. Leave me alone. Try to get the hell out of here. Yo, calm down. or call the goddamn cops like go help me right like come on sis like help me out um yeah the own vibrate sound we made sure it's just annoying enough like it's just it's not just a natural vibrate sound it's like a jesus i don't need this right now type of a sound yes it is it is very much that like i was so once once i got the ability to kind of check out the content i was like you know it was you know my wife and i hadn't had nothing to do that night so i was like oh come come watch me play this thing because she is not a horror fan and she had she had to tap out because because there's some gruesomeness in there but like um she tapped out but we were in the middle of one of those sequences in that really hard buzz and that really like and she was like god damn it claire like be useful do something um so you got you got her specifically and then there's really there's other cool parts in there that you all see that really kind of drive home that that urgency and that tension in a way that's really really smart um i also love the fact that this game is one in which you are not having it safe for the player in terms of dying in a game like this.

25:16I think games like this and experiences like this often safeguard the player in a way to kind of keep them engaged and be able to do it. Like there are fail states in this, which I think is really smart. Talk to me a little bit about like what the design choice was there to say like, well, yeah, we want you to feel like you are in imminent danger in a real way. Talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah. And this is one of the first times our studio has done that. And I think for games where you have a bunch of like a bunch of branching dialogue and you can die and then go back there, there's a thing that we wanted to avoid death states, because if you go too far back, you feel like you're almost gaming the system.

25:56You know, it's like when you read an old choose your own adventure book and like skip around and see where stuff goes. So we were like, one, the stakes have to be real so you can die and you've seen you can die quite gruesomely in it. And so we were just like, if those stakes aren't there, none of this will feel as pulse pounding as we want. And so even that first moment where you can die, I'd say more than 50 percent of people do end up dying in that one. And that's I think we we want people to feel that at that moment. And later throughout the game, the complexity of getting through those sequences actually eases up a little bit.