Interactive Black Mirror: Bandersnatch


A stand-alone installment of Black Mirror dropped on Netflix Friday. The new release is a special event separate from the next season of the series that feature interactivity. The episode has a choose your adventure capability to alter the story. Bandersnatch is about creating an interactive video game with the same choose your adventure scheme.

"Bandersnatch" comes with five possible endings. Viewers who choose the quickest path, and decide against any do-overs, can make it through the film in around 40 minutes. The average viewing time is around 90 minutes.

Altogether, there are over a trillion unique permutations of the story. However, this also includes relatively simple iterations that don’t necessarily alter the story itself.

This type of interaction is common with video games but is unique on mainstream TV/movies.

The episode begins with a notice/tutorial of how the interactions work. During the episode, viewers are presented with choices with a timer. If no choice is made, the playback makes a choice for you and moves forward. Once a chose is made, the choice is locked in. There's no rewinding to redo the option unless you restart the episode.

Some choices seem inconsequential, but like most Black Mirror Episodes some choices are bad and worse.

Note, that the episode doesn't seem to work on Apple TV, so you may need to view on another device or Mac.