Reviews
‘Public Access’ Brings Analog Terror to the World of Tabletop RPGs [Review]
When The Gauntlet published Brindlewood Bay, author Jason Cordova realized that he had a framework that could be applied to other tabletop roleplaying game settings aside from mystery-solving grannies that run afoul of fiendish cults. After the success of the Kickstarter campaign last year, Cordova returned to an idea he was kicking around in 2014 called Public Access, which had players narrating weird found footage horror scenes but didn’t have much in the way of game or story. Upon revisiting it, he expanded on the idea with lessons learned from both Brindlewood Bay and The Between, another game of his that uses the same system, while still retaining his original analog horror vision. After getting my hands on Public Access, it’s clear that this RPG sits at a perfect intersection of mechanics and theme, creating a unique experience for both players and game masters.
Public Access is a tabletop RPG set in 2004, casting players as a group of adults who return to the small town of Deep Lake, New Mexico in search of answers to strange mysteries. What draws them together is their memory of TV Odyssey, a public access station that became an internet urban legend after vanishing off the face of the Earth. As your investigation continues, you’ll run into numerous uncanny threats hidden under the surface of Deep Lake and come across Odyssey Tapes, VHS tapes that have recordings of the bizarre programming that aired on the infamous station. Your return to your home town resurfaces memories, both good and bad, so players are encouraged through mechanics to lean into focusing on the nostalgia of their childhood, providing a warm and inviting way to give a respite to the terrors that they’re facing.
As previously mentioned, this game is based on the Brindlewood Bay ruleset, which uses the resolution mechanics from the Powered by the Apocalypse family of games. Anytime you’re required to roll dice, you roll two six-sided dice and add up the total plus any relevant stat. Based on the results you’ll either get a full success, mixed success or failure. Failures and mixed successes are when the Keeper, this game’s name for a game master, gets to complicate the player’s lives, so rolling dice always carries with it an aura of tension, especially during more perilous situations. Thankfully, players have the option to ‘turn a key’ on their character sheet in order to improve a bad roll. Turning a key requires them to narrate a specific flashback in order to get the benefit, filling in details such as a time you realized your parents weren’t perfect or the moment you realized childhood wasn’t going to last forever. It’s a very clever system that gives the player mechanical incentive for finding ways to deepen their character through focused events in their backstory.
The majority of the game is focused on investigating specific mysteries in the town, following a pre-written and structured format that still leaves tons of room for collaboration and improvisation. Every mystery – there are eight included with this initial release with the promise of more to come – has a clear list of suspects and clues, but it’s up to the Keeper and the players how those elements are introduced and how they combine to form a solution. Players discover clues with rolls as they play, and once they reach a set number of clues they can formulate an answer and roll to see if they’re correct, which then gives them an opportunity to deal with the threat at hand. Each mystery has a sharp identity, with titles like Slumber Party Summoning Circle and The Deep Lake Lurker, but still feels completely unique to the unsettling world of Public Access.
Even though it works great in these one-off focused mysteries, the game also has a campaign structure that makes it easy to string everything together in a satisfying manner. As players collect clues during the mysteries, they have the chance to run across the Odyssey Tapes. When watching the tapes, which plays out in a neat little minigame where each player gets a section of the tape to narrate based on a prompt, they progress through the overall TV Odyssey Campaign. This framework provides Keepers with specific scenes to play out at certain milestones which shed light onto the history and mythology of Deep Lake. Afterwards the Keeper is asked to write down their continually evolving theory about what the tapes mean to the overall mystery of what happened to the station. The campaign has a specific end point that it’s working towards, and it’s up to the Keeper to write the final mystery based on everything that’s happened at the table.
While the looser structure and focus on improvisation may be intimidating to new game masters, Public Access does an outstanding job of including advice to guide you through every step of the way. Not only does it include full scripts for how to introduce the game and walk players through the setup session, but there’s also a plethora of pages dedicated to advice on how to complicate the players’ lives in intriguing and personal ways. It’s refreshing to see a game that’s so dedicated to making the game master’s experience as smooth and fun as possible. The character sheets and mysteries themselves also have excellent prompts that will help guide players into effortlessly fleshing out their characters and building the world collaboratively. By the time you make it to the end, everyone at the table has all the tools and experience needed to make the final mystery into a satisfying climax for both the characters and the overarching narrative.
Cordova and the rest of his writing team have combined the best elements of his previous games with one of the most unique and evocative settings I’ve seen in a tabletop RPG. Analog horror is often so defined by its visual aesthetic, but the combination of gorgeous art and superb writing bring the subgenre to life in a medium that’s so heavily reliant on theater of the mind. The one-two punch of nostalgia and terror is evident on every page, giving you a beautiful blueprint for a perfectly creepy campaign that’s fun for both players and game masters alike. Insert that tape, hit play, and tune into the Pure-White Signal, because Public Access is something special.
Public Access can be purchased on DrivethruRPG.
Reviews
‘Unhinged’ Review: Netflix’s Interactive Horror Thriller Is Short But Serviceable Gaming Fare
Netflix has such a strange history in gaming. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people don’t even know that there are free mobile games you can access through the service. Many of them are adaptations of their TV series, like “Too Hot to Handle” or “Squid Game”, while some are mobile versions of existing games, like Into the Breach or Hades.
In addition to mobile games, they’ve also created interactive movie experiences where you use your remote to select narrative options at branching points. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was a fairly successful version of this, but my sentimental favorite was the one where WWE’s New Day had to escape a murder house boobytrapped by The Undertaker. Even if some of these made a bit of a splash, it seems it never really hit with mainstream audiences the way their shows do.
One of the studios they purchased while trying to break into the game space was Night School Studio, the creators of the spooky narrative series Oxenfree. This struck me as a particularly smart acquisition, as this type of narrative game seems like something that would feel at home under the Netflix umbrella. While they did release Oxenfree II while owned by the streaming giant, it was released on traditional platforms, which led me to wonder when their first Netflix exclusive would show up.
While they did produce a game called Thronglets, a mobile version of a plot element from an episode of “Black Mirror”, the recently released Unhinged seems to be one of the highest profile Netflix games in a long time.
Unhinged is a first-person, narrative-driven thriller starring Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and Troy Baker. This 30-minute experience, played on your TV through the standard Netflix app, is controlled by your phone, using some clever tricks to make the whole thing feel more immersive. It’s a neat variation on the “interactive movie” subgenre, with a tiny bit of point-and-click adventure game DNA thrown in for good measure, but it doesn’t exactly offer you as many options as something like Until Dawn.
Kravitz plays Ava, a woman who is hunkering down in her apartment complex during a dangerous hurricane. As she talks with her friend Claire, who lives in a neighboring building, about possibly leaving to find shelter elsewhere, she finds herself in a desperate chase with a crazed killer that stalks her through the halls of the building. It’s a decent setup for a very contained story, but I wish there was a little more meat on the bones. The voice acting is great, but there’s not really a ton of characterization for the two leads, and the killer was a bit “generic psycho” for my taste. There’s some implied backstory with other tenants in the building, but it’s not enough to make me feel like there’s a web of relationships that would give the story more emotional weight.
To play the game, you open up your Netflix app wherever you usually watch, then select the game. This will bring up a QR code, which you’ll scan on your phone, prompting you to download a controller app that will sync up to the game. The majority of the way you’ll interact is by pointing at the screen like a Wiimote, which selects on-screen options for Ava and shines her flashlight around the environment.
While this does give it the feel of an FMV game, Unhinged is rendered in a photorealistic graphics style, and while not quite to the level of something like P.T., it does the trick of drawing you into the action. You’re still put on a pretty strict path while moving around, which is done automatically when you select a direction, but moving your phone gives you the ability to look around your environment, even if only slightly.
The real immersive part of the game is the fact that your phone also acts as Ava’s phone. The plot is frequently moved forward by calls and text messages that you answer as you would on your own cellular device. As sound blasts out of your phone, it does put you in the shoes of the main character, momentarily worrying you that the sound of the call or text is going to alert your on-screen stalker. This part of Unhinged truly takes advantage of the format to draw you deeper into the story, though unfortunately it’s so effective that I wished the game found even more ways to use it.
There are a couple clever moments that make for unique ways of delivering twists or doing extremely light puzzle solving, but most of the time it’s just used to allow your friend to give you instructions on how to move the narrative forward.
All these mechanics come together to give the illusion of tension without actually fully delivering on it. When you get to a situation where you’re under pressure, a timer bar will appear on the top of the screen, indicating how long you have to get to safety. It’s a fine gimmick, but it comes off as a little hard to gauge. Since you don’t have direct control over your character, all your actions are very heavily animated, and sometimes your choice ends up taking longer than you think it will not because of the idea behind the choice, but because of the length of the animation. Fortunately, if you die, you’ll just pick back up at a checkpoint right before the choice, and you’ll even be treated with a voiceover discussion between police officers examining the crime scene, describing how you died.
So in theory, there is tension, counting down as the killer gets closer and closer to reaching you, but what you’re actually doing almost never feels like it’s testing you in any meaningful way. Actual choices come up very infrequently, making most of your interaction with the game world just scanning your pointer across the screen looking for an interaction point to progress, hoping the animation doesn’t take up too much time before the timer runs out. I didn’t hit a ton of friction points with it, and there’s even a Story Mode if you want to take out all possibility of death, but I found myself wishing there were more ways to affect the world around me. The phone calls and texts felt really fun and clever, but the rest of the gameplay just didn’t match that, making me wish there was more emphasis on the unique interaction model rather than the more traditional one.
Even though the mechanics aren’t necessarily pushing the tension as hard as they could be, the actual content of Unhinged’s story contains some pretty brutal situations. The villain isn’t the most unique or fleshed out, but he’s responsible for some gruesome moments that raised the stakes to make the game feel more intense. It makes your fight for survival feel that much more desperate, so even if you’re just highlighting icons on the screen, it feels more visceral thanks to what Ava is witnessing.
While I appreciate the game being lean and mean, I wish it was just a little bit longer. Thirty minutes is a pretty short runtime, and it doesn’t feel like the story for Unhinged has the time to come up with something that really sets it apart from other stories of its kind. The focus on the hurricane at the beginning made me think that was going to be more integral to the plot, but it didn’t really do much aside from explaining why the apartment complex was so empty. Thrillers like this live or die on how memorable their killer is, and there wasn’t anything really clever or unique about him. If this game doubled its runtime to the length of a standard Netflix show, it might have given them more room to build character relationships that made the action more meaningful, or at least given it a bit more personality of its own.
Night School Studio is on to something with the format of Unhinged. The combination of on screen and on phone prompts makes the game feel more immersive, drawing you in even when the narrative itself doesn’t feel fully formed or unique. The short runtime is both a help and a hindrance, keeping the pacing tight at the cost of adding any depth to the proceedings. This feels like a great first draft, and I hope that Night School is given the freedom to continue experimenting with the model, as the level of polish shown here was promising.
Even with its flaws, if you’ve already got a Netflix subscription, there’s no reason not to sit down for half an hour to check out Unhinged. If you can keep your expectations in check, it’s a nasty little thrillride that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Unhinged is streaming now on Netflix.
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