The Conjuring: Unspoken turns your phone into a spirit box

The Conjuring: Unspoken is a Netflix game, built by Supermassive Games, and it hands you the one prop every haunted house movie has taught us to want: a spirit box. Netflix announced it on Tuesday and it arrives October 13, exclusively on the service, playable on your TV or in a desktop browser with your phone acting as the ghost hunting kit. I have been waiting for somebody to make the phone-as-controller trick feel like it belongs in the fiction instead of bolted onto it. This might be the one.

Ground rules first. Nobody here has played it. This is a read of what Netflix and its partners have put on the record, plus what I think is interesting about it, and I am keeping the story talk to premise only.

Netflix Tudum's announcement lays out the pitch. You play demonologist Francesca Noakes, investigating the Red Lion Inn in England, a place Netflix describes as reportedly haunted. A grieving family, the Coopers, has checked in, and small wrong things start piling up: dolls go missing, a music box plays by itself, a daughter hears her late mother whispering. It is a narrative game, so you steer it by picking dialogue options. The twist is the hardware. The TV shows the inn. The phone in your hand becomes an electromagnetic field reader, an infrared camera that overlays thermal readings so you can hunt for cold spots, and a spirit box.

Ghost hunting shows have spent twenty years waving gadgets at dark corners. Netflix finally put the gadget in your hand.

The store listing fills in the practical bits. The Netflix Games page tags it as an interactive story for one player, runs it at 60+ minutes, rates it 16+ for violence, language, and blood, lists TV and web as the places to play, and names Supermassive Games Ltd. as the developer. The controls run through Netflix's Game Controller app.

Here is my actual opinion, and it hangs on that one-player line. Supermassive's horror games are famous as couch games, the kind you play with a room full of people yelling at whoever just opened the wrong door. A single-player listing on a service that already sells party games on TV is a deliberate choice. I think it is the right one for this specific gimmick. The spirit box only works if the person holding the phone is the person who is scared. Pass it around a room and it becomes a toy. Keep it in one pair of hands, lights off, and the phone buzzing a cold spot two feet from your face is a genuinely new kind of jump scare.

The 60+ minutes figure is the part I would watch. That could mean a tight one-night haunt, which suits the format, or it could mean the experience is thinner than a Supermassive name suggests. Netflix has not published a fuller runtime, so I am not going to guess. I will say that a horror story built for one sitting is not a bad thing. Most of the best haunted house films run under two hours for a reason.

There is context worth knowing, and it is not cheerful. The Verge reports that Supermassive announced plans in August to lay off up to 75 people, and that a former director at the studio said this week that more than 70 are leaving. The same report notes Netflix shut down Night School, the Oxenfree studio behind June's horror title Unhinged, in August. So this lands as a showcase for Netflix's TV game push while the people making these things are having a rough year. I hope the game is good enough that the credits get read.

One detail I keep looking at: the key art shows the phone's camera overlay stamped 12.1987, with a pink figure and glowing footprints that only show up on the screen. Netflix also says a few familiar faces pop up, and that you do not need to have seen the films, though knowing the Warrens helps. That is about as far as I will go on story.

Before October 13: a quick setup check

• Check your country. Netflix lists Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. That is 17 markets.
• Check your TV now, not on launch night. Open the Netflix app, pick your profile, and look for a Games option at the top. No Games option? Netflix's help page says to check Manage Access and Devices and flip the toggle that shows devices compatible with games, then look for a software update.
• On a computer, use Chrome or Edge. You want to see a row titled Games or Party Games. If you only see mobile games, the help page points to the browser or a browser update.
• Charge the phone. It is your controller and your EMF reader, infrared camera, and spirit box. One phone or tablet per player.
• Mind the connection. Netflix recommends download speeds of 10 Mbps or higher.
• Plan an evening, not a lunch break. The listing says 60+ minutes, and the 16+ rating cites violence, language, and blood.

The device details come from Netflix's game help page for Unspoken, which is worth a look if your TV is more than a few years old.

October is crowded with dark things on Netflix. Miles already flagged Below and its Newfoundland sea creature and Dead-End Job's convenience store nightmare, and on the console side we just filed Star Wars: Galactic Racer's launch. Unspoken is the odd one out: a game that only exists on a streaming service, asking you to hold the scary part in your own hand.

What I want on the 13th is simple. I want the phone to feel like evidence, not a remote. If the infrared overlay and the spirit box make me lean toward the screen when every instinct says lean back, Supermassive has found something worth building on. If it is a pretty way to pick dialogue options, it will still be a fun Halloween hour. Either way, I will be the one in the dark holding the phone.

How we made this: researched and drafted with AI assistance. Sources are linked in the piece.