“Black Mirror,” Charlie Brooker’s darkly satirical TV brainchild, is known for lamenting the perils of modern technology with anxiety-inducing — and often, horrifically gruesome — made-for-television movies.
But it’s found a brand new way of sending its viewers into a screen-obsessed panic: Its latest venture, a choose-your-own-adventure game called “Bandersnatch,” debuted on Netflix in the last days of 2018.
“Bandersnatch” takes place in the 1980s. Players only get one choice at their character, and it’s Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead), a programmer creating his own choose-your-own-adventure game for a company called Tuckersoft.
There are multiple timelines and endings to “Black Mirror”’s game-film-hybrid, and players navigate through them by deciding between two options at every round. You’re given 10 seconds to decide if Stefan should eat Sugar Puffs or Frosties for breakfast, 10 seconds to decide if he should do LSD with legendary game designer Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), and 10 seconds to decide if he should bludgeon his father to death with a glass ashtray, or calm down.
“Black Mirror” isn’t always one for subtlety, and sometimes that’s a good thing. After all, both “Nosedive” (Season 3) and “USS Callister” (Season 4) were well-received by critics, and neither episode was coy about its premise or motivation. But “Bandersnatch” smacks you with its thesis again and again. And then one more time, just in case you didn’t already get the point.
In one scene, Colin simply rambles on and on about personal freedom and the lack of it while tripping on acid, presenting the episode’s thesis in one clean monologue: “People think it’s a happy game. It’s not a happy game. It’s a fucking nightmare world, and the worst thing is, it’s real and we live in it.”
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