![]() Player choice is limited between two ridiculous options - drink three espresso drinks or make a pizza with every possible topping, for instance. There’s no overarching narrative whatsoever. Viewers get to choose which one they try. Stunt-driver dog Buddy and his pal Darnell from the stop-motion series Buddy Thunderstruck need to decide what wild thing they want to do, so they consult their bag of “maybe” ideas and pick two. Wildīuddy Thunderstruck: The Maybe Pile follows a simple premise. It’s a different, enjoyable spin on the Netflix interactive, but the storyline doesn’t change based on your input, and you don’t have control over the options. If you fail, the cat loses one of three lives and restarts the segment with a different scenario. While not explicitly adult, the trivia questions are tailored for a slightly older audience than the Tom and Jerry-esque aesthetic implies - players will at least need to know what a subpoena is. Each trivia section is a randomized category, like “Chess Moves” or “Best Birthday Gifts,” and each one presents three rounds of two answers to pick from (“Good Knight or Bad Bishop,” for instance, and “Surprise Subpoena or Surprise Party”). Your success at the trivia sections determines whether the cat burglar is successful at the given task. Your specific choices don’t lead to customizable outcomes. Problem is, it doesn’t score well by the standards of this ranking. Which option players get appears to be random, but either way, the success of each segment depends on how accurately and quickly players can answer a series of silly trivia questions. ![]() For instance, breaking into the museum could involve vaulting over the gate or digging a tunnel. There are six different segments - entering the museum, distracting the guard, the prehistory exhibit, the ancient artifacts exhibit, the medieval exhibit, and the painting theft itself, and each segment has multiple alternate scenarios. Viewers play as a cat stealing a priceless painting from a museum and outwitting a guard dog. There are so many different combinations of scenes that can play out. The trivia-based game Cat Burglar is actually really fun. There isn’t much wiggle room beyond whether you get answers right or wrong. It’s more interactive than Headspace: Unwind Your Mind, but it’s still designed to be a trivia game first and foremost. The game gives the trivia questions a minimal storyline, as you need to answer correctly in order to free the little characters who have been captured by an evil sword. It’s based on a popular app called Trivia Crack, and it’s basically a daily trivia game. ![]() Similarly, Netflix files Trivia Quest under the interactive tag, but it isn’t an interactive story like the entries below. Useful for what it’s meant for, but not so much for a story experience. You can customize from there, but it’s just a glorified menu. The only interactive part of this is picking which Headspace program you want: meditation, relaxation, or sleep. This shouldn’t even really count as an interactive experience, but Netflix has labeled it as an Interactive, so we’re mentioning it. Honorable mention: Headspace: Unwind Your Mind This list considers whether a given Netflix interactive special is fun to play, what kind of story it’s telling, and whether your choices actually have any effect on how that story unfolds. The service’s latest interactive special, the ambitious We Lost Our Human, prompted a new update of our rankings. Still, Netflix continues to drop the occasional interactive story, and we’re continuing to rank each one based on how interactive it actually is. These Choose Your Own Adventure-style stories became some of Netflix’s more distinctive offerings for a short while, but they’re getting rarer as Netflix’s focus shifts toward skill tests like Cat Burglar and Trivia Quest. Wild marked a new phase for Netflix’s interactive shows, which started off with relatively simple interactive experiments for kids in 2017, designed to test the waters for actual Netflix games down the road. 2018’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and 2019’s You vs.
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