The season 7 episode, titled “Plaything,” is an homage to—or possibly a horror story retelling of—Brooker’s time as a video game journalist in the 1990s. Brooker wrote for a games magazine called PC Zone, which plays a role in the show, and once had to review a life sim game called Creatures. ”That’s as autobiographical as this gets, because then all sorts of horrible things happen,” Brooker says. The episode’s protagonist pays a visit to Poulter’s character, who sets him down the show’s dark path. Brooker wanted “the juxtaposition of making it look as cute as possible and having quite disturbing and dark things.”
(It has to be said that the show’s depiction of a games journalist—a greasy, socially awkward white guy whose stammering and social ineptitude border parody—is so eye-poppingly painful I can’t decide whether to be a little insulted at the stereotype or ask to hear Brooker’s horror stories over a stiff drink.)
It wasn’t the first time Krankel had pitched a collaboration to Brooker; he says the Black Mirror creator had been “meh” about previous ideas. (“Surely I didn’t ‘meh,’” Brooker says.) But the episode featured a “Tamagotchi gone really wrong life sim” type of game, Krankel says, that Night School had a good feel for.
Thronglets—the game has the same name in real life as it does in the show—is sort of like Stardew Valley or Zoo Tycoon. You raise tiny yellow creatures, the thronglets, as they multiply. You alone are responsible for keeping them clean, happy, and fed. Unfortunately, from what I’ve played of the mobile game, that’s a task that spirals out of control very quickly. The pesky little thronglets remember when you let them go hungry or bored; as their numbers grow, they’ll start to die if you can’t act quickly enough.
“Charlie said something early on that we wrote on the wall very quickly: ‘Thronglets are adorable and horrible,’ and so that is the game,” Krankel says. “We want you to fall in love with this character. We want you to multiply them, but guess what—you’re also raising them … these creatures are a reflection of you, ultimately.”
Black Mirror’s new season premiers on Netflix today, April 10. Krankel wouldn’t disclose many details about how Thronglets ties into the “Plaything” episode but did say there are ways in which “the game talks to the show and vice versa … there are things attached to the show that will talk back to the game.”