Black Mirror has always had an interest in video games. But until now, we’ve not been able to actually play any of their fictional games. Series creator Charlie Brooker has attempted an interactive episode in the past with Bandersnatch, but it was kind of a flop.
Not so Thronglets, a highly addictive cute-but-horrifying tie-in with an episode from the new seventh season of Netflix’s Black Mirror. Plaything, the fourth episode, revolves around a mysterious unreleased game that enthrals a young gaming journalist.
Watching it through, the cute soundtrack and visuals will make you want to play – and you actually can, if you have a Netflix login and a smartphone. I’ve never smashed the download button so fast.
This being a Black Mirror venture, my antenna for sinister goings-on was already way up. Within the first few moments of game play I was already getting serious Doki Doki Literature Club vibes. It seems super cute and wholesome on the surface, but that glitching screen and lack of save slots to keep you firmly on the game’s looping track is a warning sign that things will get dark, fast.
Thronglets starts out much like it does in Plaything. You enter an unspoilt Eden of a pixel art sandbox with a single tap-to-hatch egg. Your little yellow Throng is hungry, so you give them a little pixel apple. If you’re familiar with the Bible, you know it’s already game over for innocence, but the charade persists. For entertainment you can plop down a ball, and when they get dirty scrub them with a soapy sponge. How sweet!
Thankfully, you don’t have to regularly dose yourself with acid a la Plaything to communicate with your Throng. They quickly learn language, and you gain more tools to assist them. An apple tree for sustenance, a bathtub for hygiene, a roundabout for play. An axe to chop up trees. They go forth and multiply via mitosis, and you have to try and keep up.
Black Mirror loves an Easter egg, and there are just so many classic Nineties games Thronglets reminded me of. It’s a mash-up of The Sims (trying to balance all those crushing needs), Age of Empires and Civilisation (strategy for base building and resource hogging), and Creatures (trying to rear an alien AI beastie with limited tools), to name a few.
Perhaps because I was familiar with these games, I was foolishly convinced that I would find away to succeed at my promise to care for the Throng. The problem is, for a supposedly super-intelligent AI, they have a serious death drive. Thronglets were forever running off and getting stuck somewhere. No matter how I placed my orchards and bath tubs and roundabouts they began to fall into a depressed inertia and eventually expired, a little Thronglet ghost wafting into the ether.
They’ll also entice you to murder, or at least manslaughter. If they don’t do their best to die from neglect, you can accidentally fling them into a lake or the void, or crush them beneath something. When you agree to build the Throng a bridge and your deforestation efforts are slow (because you’re busy trying to care for them!) they offer you a horrifying alternative to lumber —their own bones. It’s macabre, but tempting. After all, I had all those Throng corpses lying around making me feel guilty.
Brooker is a video games aficionado — he used to write about them for a living — so it’s something of a surprise that Netflix has taken this long to get around to creating a spin-off game based on the show. Predictably, it gets dark, and fast. No spoilers, but the Throng swiftly discover extractive capitalism and start demanding gems. You can’t progress the game without building them mines and factories, terraced houses and grand theatres. The death toll rises and purple goo pollution spreads. Even when I unlocked the mop tool I could not keep my unwashed mass clean.
Are you a monster, or have you created one? Thronglets has a lot of philosophical rumination in between the frantic gameplay, where you can discuss love, death and power, and engage in futile attempts to defend your actions. Even the desire for online self-examination is satirised. Your Thronglets regularly give you feedback on what they’ve “learned” about you, building up a picture of your personality traits that are delivered to you by the closing credits in the form of a damning spider chart.
The only bit that grates is when the Black Mirror-ness of it all gets a bit much. The Thronglets suggesting they can use your phone and its internet connection to start messing around is spooky for a few seconds, until you remember that it would 100 per cent get Netflix banned from the app store. Some fake news push notifications were fun, though.
As a stand alone game, it’s gripping. By the time I’d reached one full playthrough, I was sweaty-palmed and immediately resetting to try again — but do it better. Surely, this time, I’d be good.
Thronglets is available for download now
