“Black Mirror” is getting more “Black Mirror”-y with Netflix‘s launch of a video game based on an in-universe game from the newly released Season 7.
Titled “Thronglets,” the game is featured in the seventh season episode “Plaything,” which includes the return of Will Poulter’s character from the 2018 interactive installment of “Black Mirror,” “Bandersnatch.”
Per Netflix’s description for the “Thronglets” game, “Set in the same universe as ‘Black Mirror’s’ ‘Bandersnatch,’ this long-lost Tuckersoft game hasn’t seen the light of day since its cancellation in 1994…until now. It’s a Tamagotchi-gone-wrong that turns into a personality test for humankind.”
“Thronglets” was developed by Netflix-owned game studio Night School in partnership with “Black Mirror” creator Charlie Brooker and his writing team.
The game launched Thursday at 12 a.m. PT timed to the release of “Black Mirror” Season 7 and is available exclusively for Netflix subscribers via the streamer’s app. “Thronglets” is free to play for subscribers and does not include any in-game purchases.
“A lot of the early conversation was, the thing about ‘Black Mirror’ is you expect this to– we can’t just do a standard game, right? It has to have some element to it that’s possibly unexpected, or it looks like it’s going one way, and then it sort of goes another,” Brooker said. “The juxtaposition of making it look as cute as possible, and having quite disturbing and dark things happen in it. And so I think around there it definitely was when it really started feeding back into the episode itself, as well.”
Brooker says there was a “cross-pollination” in how the show and the game affected each other, even though the episode was completed first.
“In fact, when we were looking at the designs of the creatures themselves, they went on an evolution where we shot the version that we shot and we were trying to save money by having everything in camera and we ended up having to replace it all because we redesigned the Thronglets later as a result of looking at the [Night School] team’s work,” Brooker said.
Without giving away the plot of “Thronglets” or “Black Mirror” Season 7 episode, “Plaything,” Night School co-founder and “Thronglets” game developer Sean Krankel broke down the concept: “It’s hard to talk about the episode without spoiling all of it, but the rough setup, I would say, is that Colin Ritman, who’s the brilliant game designer from ‘Bandersnatch’ returns in this episode and there is a game that looks like it could be ‘Lemmings’ or an early life sim. But, of course, it has a lot more than that.”
Once you download and start to play the game, Krankel says it will become apparent how the mobile title is meant to be cute and terrifying all at the same time.
“Charlie said something early on that we wrote on the wall very quickly, which was, ‘Thronglets are adorable and horrible.’ And so that is the game,” Krankel said. “It’s a lot of, like, we want you to fall in love with this character. We want you to multiply them, proliferate them. But guess what? You are also raising them. And that’s what happens in the episode, and that’s what happens when you play the game. You have these creatures that are a reflection of you. And then we move through sort of multiple genres over the course of the experience with the characters.”
Watch the trailer for the “Thronglets” game below.
