Stranger Things RPG to arrive on mobile in 2020

Netflix announced a third Stranger Things game at the streaming company’s E3 Coliseum panel on Wednesday. The untitled adaptation will be the third mobile game tied to the show, after this summer’s Stranger Things 3: The Game, and comes from the Helsinki-based studio Next Games.

The game will be a location-based puzzle RPG, rendered in a “’80s retro, Saturday-morning-cartoon style,” according to Chris Lee, director of interactive games at Netflix. Sounding a bit like Pokémon Go meets Stranger Things, the game will center around exploring and battling the Upside Down with other players using location-based mechanics and Google Maps integration.

“We are huge fans of Stranger Things and thrilled to work together with Netflix to bring our shared vision of Stranger Things into life in a mobile game format. Our core focus will be to deliver on Stranger Things’ rich and intense themes like friendship and supernatural adventure, and translate these into snack-sized entertainment on your mobile device,” said Next Games CEO Teemu Huuhtanen in a press release. “Combined with Netflix’s second-to none ability to reach audiences across the globe, we will deploy all of our accumulated creative and technological expertise to create a game for the fans of the series all around the world.”

This is Netflix’s first appearance at E3, marking their venture into the gaming space with Stranger Things 3: The Game and Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics, due later this summer. A previous Stranger Things mobile game was released in 2016 and followed the events of season one, with Jim Hopper as the central character looking for the boys. The new game comes out on July 4 — the day that the new season premieres — and will follow the events of season three, but with an extra dimension to the story, or being a “season plus plus” adaptation, as Stranger Things writer Paul Ditcher called it.

The new Stranger Things mobile game is set for release in 2020 on both Android and iOS.