Popverse's top stories of the day

• Livestream The Breakfast Club reunion panel with Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, & Ally Sheedy live from Chicago's C2E2
• MEMBERS ONLY: Livestream the Lord of the Rings movie reunion panel with Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, John Rhys-Davies, and Andy Serkis live from Chicago's C2E2 2025
• Max's The Pitt season 2 will take place during the Fourth of July weekend (even though its release date is January 2026)

There’s a couple of special surprises for Black Mirror fans in ‘Plaything,’ one of the new episodes in the seventh season of the series that just dropped on Netflix. Firstly, ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’ isn’t the only sequel to a pre-existing episode in the season… and secondly, one of the video games mentioned in the episode is not only real, it’s available to play right now.

‘Plaything’ turns out to be a sequel to 2018’s interactive special episode ‘Bandersnatch,’ as evidenced by the reappearance of Will Poulter’s Colin Ritman and Asim Chaudry’s Mo Tucker, who make cameo appearances in the 1990s timeline of the episode. Ritman, as it turns out, has created a game called Thronglets, a game that is more than meets the eye… but to say more would be to spoil the episode.

Thing is, ‘Thronglets’ — or a version of it, at least — is real, and available to download via mobile app stores (and Netflix), having been launched to coincide with the new season going live. The Hollywood Reporter spoke to Sean Krankel, lead of developer Night School Studio which created the playable version of the game, who said that he and his team had two primary reasons for wanting to work on the project.

“One: We were big fans of Bandersnatch already, but two: The idea of a game that is going to exist only in these snippets in the episode, and that we could expand on that and go, ‘Let’s make it a real thing, not just a marketing activation, but a real full-fledged game inside of there.’ That was just like a dream,” he explained. “It was really critical to us to not feel like it was just a disparate sort of feature set that loosely ties into it. Rather, we wanted to be like, ‘Oh, this is the game that literally got lifted out of the episode.’”

Krankel says that he’s looking forward to fans really engaging int he game, and finding out that there’s more to it than meets the eye: “I can’t wait for people to find and start uncovering the secrets, because there’s a lot of secrets.”

Colin Ritman would approve. Well, unless you went for the other ending of ‘Bandersnatch,’ of course. The seventh season of Black Mirror is available on Netflix now.

Want to know what's coming up next in pop culture? Check out Popverse's guides to:

• Upcoming movies
• Upcoming TV shows
• Upcoming comics
• Upcoming games
• Upcoming fiction books
• Upcoming comic conventions