Night School Studio’s Unhinged traps Ava (voiced by Zoë Kravitz) inside her apartment building during a Category 5 hurricane, with the power out and a killer working his way toward her one floor at a time. Her only lifeline is a phone, which doubles as your controller. The night ends in one of two ways, and the difference comes down to a single decision.
Quick answer: The story reaches the same climax no matter what. The only branch is the final phone call from Ben. Ignore it and Ben is, in Ava’s mind, dead. Answer it and he tells her they will meet again. Both are canon.
Note: Full spoilers for the entire game follow.
How the night starts: Ava, Claire, and a locked building
The game opens on a phone call from Claire (Sadie Sink), Ava’s best friend who lives across the street. The neighborhood has lost power, a hurricane is closing in, and neither woman can sleep. Ava is alone in her unit; Claire at least has her pet for company.
Ava decides to check on Joyce, a friendly neighbor on her floor. The door is ajar, the fridge hangs open, and Joyce doesn’t answer. Something is clearly wrong. When Ava returns and finds her own door open, Claire’s warning finally lands. Someone is inside.
Ava is trapped in every sense. The stairwell doors are padlocked and the lift is dead, which raises the first real question of the night. Why would the superintendent, Ben, seal the only way out?
The cat-and-mouse setup
The building is a snare, and the game keeps pointing at it. A mouse sits caught in a trap. A mannequin waits in the basement, standing in for Ava as a plaything the killer can keep. The message is blunt. Ava is the mouse, and the killer wants tonight to go exactly the way he has planned it.
What happened to Noah
Reading through Ava’s message log tells you Noah is her ex. The three friends, once inseparable, split when the relationship soured and Claire sided with Ava. Even so, the texts make it clear Noah still cares about her.
Inside Noah’s apartment, Ava finds him seated and motionless in the center of the room. His face is wrapped in plastic to muffle his screams and his stomach has been cut open. He is still breathing, which means the attack happened only moments earlier. Duct tape on the counter and the timing around the storm show this was planned. Noah’s scream draws the killer straight to Ava, and she is forced to watch him drag Noah’s intestines to the sink to “clean” them.
Who is the killer in Unhinged
The security room in the basement removes any doubt. A board carries photos of Noah, Joyce, and Ava. Ava’s picture is covered in hand-drawn hearts, while the others are crossed out. The monitors show the apartment floors and, more disturbingly, hidden cameras inside Ava’s own home. Living room, bedroom, even the bathroom.
Then the reveal lands. Ava watches the attacker on the monitors as he dials a number. Her phone rings. It is Ben, the building’s super, asking where she is. The stalker, the cameras, and the padlocked exits were all his.
What happened to Joyce and Ben’s motive
After a failed escape attempt that sends Ava down a garbage chute, Ben nails her hands to the table of a replica of her apartment. There she learns Joyce was murdered too, just like Noah. The likely sequence is that Ben lured Joyce down earlier that day, using a box of chocolates, and staged her in the fake apartment.
Ben’s exact motive stays deliberately murky, but the pieces fit together. He rebuilt Ava’s apartment after watching her through hidden cameras, and he treated his victims as puppets to talk to and control. His habit of washing or removing their insides so they resemble mannequins suggests he wanted a home filled with corpses he could pretend were still alive. He did not see the people he took as human. He saw material for his experiments.
Both endings and the one choice that matters
Ava fights back and shoots Ben four times with a nail gun. There is a brief beat of hesitation as she reunites with Claire, as if you are not meant to trust her, but that thread never pays off. The game then jumps forward in time, and an ominous call confirms one thing. Ben survived the night.
The whole story funnels into a single decision point. Do you answer Ben’s call?
| Your choice | What you see |
|---|---|
| Ignore the call | The credits roll without further contact. In Ava’s mind, Ben died that night. |
| Answer the call | A cutscene slowly zooms onto the fallen photo of Ava, Claire, and Noah. Ben tells Ava they will meet again. |
What the two endings mean
The split reads as a metaphor for toxic relationships and the effort it takes to leave one behind. Ben spent the night treating Ava as a fantasy he refused to let go of. To move on, Ava has to kill that same idea, the notion of a man who would never stop chasing her. Ignoring the call is Ava choosing to let him die in her head so she can heal. Answering it reopens the wound and drags the trauma back into her life.
You could argue Ben actually died and that the call is only Ava’s mind replaying the fear. That reading does not hold up, though. Night School Studio director Sean Krankel confirmed the final phone call is real, so Ben genuinely walked away from that night regardless of which button you pressed.
If you want to experience both outcomes for yourself, the game runs exclusively on Netflix with no ads or in-game purchases, and you can replay to reach the other ending.
