You Can Actually Play the Terrifying Video Game From Black Mirror Season 7

Black Mirror‘s new season is here, bringing six tales of tech-based terror, tyranny, and emotional damage to Netflix. While all the episodes feature scenarios you can imagine actually happening—but aren’t quite achievable in 2025—a key piece of one is actually making its way into reality. And it’s one of the cutest yet also scariest: the Thronglets video game from the Peter Capaldi-starring “Plaything.”

“Plaything” winds itself around a murder mystery that’s not really a mystery; the only suspect (played by Capaldi and Lewis Gribben at different points in the decades-spanning story) left his DNA all over a mutilated corpse in the 1990s. With neither DNA nor dead body identified, the case tugs at police until a peculiar shoplifting arrest leads them to an even more peculiar man.

As he tells them his history during an extended interrogation, we learn this all ties back to Thronglets, a game he learned about from genius designer Colin Ritman (Will Poulter, reprising his Black Mirror: Bandersnatch role) while toiling at PC Zone magazine in the early ’90s. Except, it’s not really a game: Thronglets creates entirely digital life forms—cute little chirping critters—and the “player” is tasked with looking after their well-being. That sounds so nice and nurturing! What could possibly go wrong?

Well, this is Black Mirror, so everything can go wrong, including an unhealthy obsession that leads to murder and potentially a full-scale apocalypse. Who wouldn’t want to get in on that? Netflix announced today that Thronglets, the “subversive game that never was” in the universe of Black Mirror, having been deemed “so dangerous that it was canceled midway through development,” is now a mobile game you can start playing right now.

While it seems likely that what happens to Capaldi’s character won’t happen to the average real-world player (depends on how much acid you take, probably), you can still expect to be taking care of an ever-expanding society that will start to “communicate” with you more and more the longer you play. Netflix also promises some Black Mirror Easter eggs will pop up along the way.

If that sounds enticing, you can download it now to your Android or iOS device here, and note that you will need a Netflix account to play it. Netflix has also created a game guide with more details.

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