When Charlie Brooker’s Netflix series about tech-driven dystopias, Black Mirror, returns, it will do so with a surprising new twist: a mobile video game tie-in called Thronglets. Think Tamagotchi, but psychologically threatening.
Netflix showed off both a sneak peek of the new season of Black Mirror and the accompanying life sim game from Night School Studios during a private event in March during the Game Developers Conference. Sean Krankel, cofounder of Night School Studios and Netflix’s newly appointed general manager of narrative, says the team worked closely with Brooker to create “an artifact” from the show people could experience as an extension of its story.
“The way I came back to the team and I was like, oh my God, imagine if you brought a Mogwai home and it effed up your life after you watched Gremlins,” Krankel says. “That’s the vibe that we really wanted to create there.”
Night School, which Netflix acquired in 2021, is well-versed in creating games based in TV universes. Previously it worked on a tie-in to USA Network’s Mr. Robot; the studio was also working on an unannounced game which would have connected to Netflix’s Stranger Things before the title’s publisher, Telltale Games, abruptly shut down.
Working with Brooker, Krankel says, had been a dream of his after seeing the 2018 Black Mirror film, Bandersnatch. “It was designed so well that even when you finished it, it was immediately dangling the carrot to come back and play it and get stuck in that loop,” Krankel says. “They showed a real gamelike design sophistication to it.”
Unlike the series, which typically tells different stories about the perils of technology and near-future dystopias through anthology, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was a stand-alone film and a fully interactive experience. Viewers make choices throughout the movie that shape its story, clicking options using their TV remote much like they would click buttons in a video game. Krankel says that after getting wind that Brooker would be returning to that world—in this season of Black Mirror, Will Poulter reprises his role as video game developer Colin Ritman—he knew it was a project Night School wanted to be a part of.
The season 7 episode, titled “Plaything,” is an homage to—or possibly a horror story retelling of—Brooker’s time as a video game journalist in the 1990s. Brooker wrote for a games magazine called PC Zone, which plays a role in the show, and once had to review a life sim game called Creatures. ”That’s as autobiographical as this gets, because then all sorts of horrible things happen,” Brooker says. The episode’s protagonist pays a visit to Poulter’s character, who sets him down the show’s dark path. Brooker wanted “the juxtaposition of making it look as cute as possible and having quite disturbing and dark things.”
(It has to be said that the show’s depiction of a games journalist—a greasy, socially awkward white guy whose stammering and social ineptitude border parody—is so eye-poppingly painful I can’t decide whether to be a little insulted at the stereotype or ask to hear Brooker’s horror stories over a stiff drink.)
It wasn’t the first time Krankel had pitched a collaboration to Brooker; he says the Black Mirror creator had been “meh” about previous ideas. (“Surely I didn’t ‘meh,’” Brooker says.) But the episode featured a “Tamagotchi gone really wrong life sim” type of game, Krankel says, that Night School had a good feel for.
You raise the thronglets, and then they terrorize you.
Courtesy of Netflix
There is no escape.
Courtesy of Netflix
Thronglets—the game has the same name in real life as it does in the show—is sort of like Stardew Valley or Zoo Tycoon. You raise tiny yellow creatures, the thronglets, as they multiply. You alone are responsible for keeping them clean, happy, and fed. Unfortunately, from what I’ve played of the mobile game, that’s a task that spirals out of control very quickly. The pesky little thronglets remember when you let them go hungry or bored; as their numbers grow, they’ll start to die if you can’t act quickly enough.
“Charlie said something early on that we wrote on the wall very quickly: ‘Thronglets are adorable and horrible,’ and so that is the game,” Krankel says. “We want you to fall in love with this character. We want you to multiply them, but guess what—you’re also raising them … these creatures are a reflection of you, ultimately.”
Black Mirror’s new season premiers on Netflix today, April 10. Krankel wouldn’t disclose many details about how Thronglets ties into the “Plaything” episode but did say there are ways in which “the game talks to the show and vice versa … there are things attached to the show that will talk back to the game.”
