Netflix Games used to feel like one of those subscription extras you could safely forget existed. That’s become much harder to justify. Its catalog now includes everything from enormous console games to strategy titles, indies, and smaller experiences that actually feel at home on a phone.
The problem now is deciding what deserves the storage space. We’ve narrowed the mobile catalog down to 10 games we’d install first. Netflix also has a separate lineup for supported TVs and computers, which we’ll get to later.
Putting Red Dead Redemption inside a Netflix subscription still sounds slightly ridiculous. This isn’t some cut-down mobile version, either. You get John Marston’s full Western adventure along with Undead Nightmare, which gives this one an absurd amount of game for something sitting inside your Netflix membership.
It’s bigger and slower than most things you’d normally play on a phone, but that doesn’t hurt it as much as you’d think. You can knock out a story mission, chase a bounty, or wander around on horseback for 20 minutes before realizing you’ve achieved absolutely nothing.
And underneath the novelty of playing it on a phone, it’s still Red Dead Redemption. Netflix didn’t need to do much more than put one of Rockstar’s best games somewhere millions of people could already reach it.
Dead Cells has never been especially interested in being nice to you. You’ll find a build you’re convinced will finally work, get flattened by something embarrassing, and start over. Somehow, that remains fun hundreds of deaths later.
The Netflix Edition includes the base game and its previously released expansions, including Return to Castlevania. There’s enough here to keep experimenting with weapons and routes long after a more forgiving game would have rolled the credits.
The catch is the controls. Dead Cells demands more precision as the difficulty climbs, and virtual buttons aren’t always the best partner for that. It’s playable on-screen, but this is one of the games here that benefits most from having a Bluetooth controller nearby.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge handles the jump to mobile well. The bright pixel art stays readable on a smaller display, and the brawling doesn’t collapse into finger gymnastics once virtual buttons appear.
It also remains manageable when the screen fills with Foot Clan goons. Better yet, you can bring other players into the fight, which is where Shredder’s Revenge starts feeling closest to the arcade beat-’em-ups it’s borrowing from.
It turns out a game designed to make four people yell at the same screen still works pretty well when that screen fits in your hands.
Into the Breach is almost unfairly well suited to mobile. Battles take place on tiny grids, everything is turn-based, and the game shows you exactly what the enemy intends to do before you move. Knowing what’s coming doesn’t make stopping it any easier.
You command a squad of mechs protecting cities from giant alien creatures, but brute force isn’t always the answer. Moving an enemy one square can save a building, redirect an attack, or turn one monster against another.
That makes each battle feel more like a compact puzzle than a conventional strategy fight. Five minutes is enough to make progress, but it’s also very easy to look up and discover you’ve been solving tiny mech disasters for an hour.
Football Manager is what happens when watching a soccer match isn’t stressful enough and you decide you’d also like responsibility for everything happening behind it.
Football Manager 26 Mobile trims down the enormous desktop game without turning it into a glorified team picker. You’re still building squads and adjusting tactics, then watching the expensive striker you were absolutely certain would fix everything forget how goals work.
A phone makes a lot of sense for this kind of game. Football Manager is mostly menus, statistics, and decisions rather than reflexes, so tapping through your managerial crisis feels completely natural.
It may also be the closest your phone will ever come to feeling like a spreadsheet capable of ruining your evening.
Spiritfarer is cozy in the sense that you can fish, cook, and improve a boat. It becomes considerably less cozy once you remember that the passengers you’re looking after are dead.
You play as Stella, a ferrymaster responsible for finding spirits, getting to know them, and eventually helping them move on. Most of your time is spent sailing between islands and taking care of the characters traveling with you.
That’s where Spiritfarer earns its emotional weight. It gives you enough ordinary time with these characters that saying goodbye doesn’t feel like a scripted sad moment the game suddenly drops on you.
For something so gentle, it can be alarmingly good at ruining your mood.
Bloons TD 6 looks harmless right up until your screen is full of monkeys, projectiles, and a deeply concerning number of balloons.
The idea couldn’t be much simpler. Put towers along a path and stop waves of bloons from reaching the end. The trouble starts when one weak spot in your defense turns into several thousand balloons pouring through it at once.
That’s why it works so well as a pick-up-and-play game. A round can fill a few spare minutes, while the upgrade systems and harder maps are more than capable of eating the rest of your evening.
The cartoon monkeys are lying to you. This thing has depth.
Oxenfree starts with a group of teenagers hanging out on an island and wastes very little time turning the evening into a supernatural disaster.
The dialogue system is the real hook. Conversations keep moving while you explore, and possible responses appear without freezing everything around you. You can answer, interrupt, or stay quiet, and those choices gradually reshape the relationships between the characters.
There’s very little interface getting in the way. You walk, tune a radio, and talk while the island keeps becoming stranger around you.
The supernatural mystery gives Oxenfree its momentum, but the reason it sticks is much more mundane. Eventually, you’ll care far too much about whether these fictional teenagers still like each other.
Most of the games here started somewhere else before landing on a phone. Before Your Eyes is different because your phone’s hardware becomes part of the game itself.
You move through a person’s memories, but you don’t decide when each moment ends with a button. You blink. The game watches for real-life blinks through the camera, and closing your eyes can push the story forward whether you’re ready or not.
It sounds like a gimmick right up until you’re staring at the screen trying desperately not to blink because you want another few seconds with a scene.
That lack of control is what makes the idea work. Memories move on without asking whether you’re finished with them.
Put Before Your Eyes on a normal controller and you’d lose more than an input method. You’d lose the thing the game is actually about.
Explaining too much about Immortality would spoil half the appeal, so the setup will have to do. Actress Marissa Marcel starred in three movies that were never released, then disappeared. You’re given the footage and left to figure out what happened.
There isn’t a conventional game world to explore. Instead, you move through film clips and select details in the frame, which sends you to other footage with a visual connection to whatever you picked.
Very quickly, you’re bouncing between three fictional productions and finding things that make the original missing-person mystery seem almost quaint.
There’s no tidy quest log telling you what clue comes next. You prod at an archive until something strange falls out, then try to work out why it bothered you.
Netflix won’t tell you what you’re supposed to notice. That’s half the fun.
Netflix’s move into TV gaming gives the service a second kind of game library alongside its downloadable mobile titles. The selection currently leans toward games that work best when several people are sitting in the same room.
Netflix still treats TV and computer gaming as a beta, so availability depends on your country and hardware. These are the games we’d try first.
FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition has no interest in recreating the enormous simulation behind EA Sports FC. It wants to get a match going before everyone on the couch finds something else to do.
Built around the 2026 World Cup, it includes all 48 participating national teams and the tournament’s 16 stadiums, with support for up to four players. Passing and shooting are handled through touchscreen gestures.
That stripped-down approach suits Netflix. You aren’t digging out extra controllers or spending the first match teaching someone what six buttons do. You can get everyone playing quickly, which is probably more important at a party than accurately simulating a defensive midfield.
Jackbox figured out the phone-as-controller party game years before Netflix started experimenting with games on TVs, so the two fit together almost suspiciously well.
The Jackbox Party Essentials includes Fibbage 4, Quiplash 3, and Drawful 2. One rewards convincing lies, another rewards funny answers, and Drawful asks everyone to discover just how badly a human being can draw with one finger.
Up to eight people can join, and nobody needs a pile of spare controllers. Everyone already understands the basic hardware because it’s probably sitting in their pocket.
Of all Netflix’s TV games, Jackbox feels the least like a technology demo and the most like something you might actually use.
Overcooked! All You Can Eat is technically cooperative, although anyone who has played it with friends knows cooperation can turn into blame with impressive speed.
The collection includes both main Overcooked games, their DLC, and more than 200 increasingly unreasonable kitchens. Up to four people have to keep food moving while the stages do their best to make a simple dinner service feel like disaster management.
Being able to join with a phone removes one of the usual barriers to getting a group playing. After that, the game will happily create its own barriers.
Whether everyone is still speaking afterward remains outside Netflix’s control.
Few games need less explanation than Tetris. Blocks fall. Make lines. Try not to fill the screen. Tetris Time Warp keeps that foundation, then occasionally throws you backward through the game’s history.
Certain retro-looking pieces trigger a Time Warp that temporarily changes the rules to resemble an older version of Tetris. Finish the challenge and you’re dropped back into the present.
Up to four people can play, so almost anyone can jump in without a tutorial. Experienced players don’t get an entirely free ride, either, because the old rules are just different enough to trip up muscle memory.
Apparently, even Tetris can find new ways to make you feel bad at Tetris.
Netflix Games now covers two fairly different ways to play. Mobile games are downloaded to a phone or tablet, while a smaller catalog runs through supported TVs and computers.
Everything in the catalog is included with an active Netflix membership. The included games don’t have separate purchases, ads, or in-game purchases.
On iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, Netflix games behave like normal standalone apps. Find one through Netflix and you’ll be sent to the App Store or Google Play to install it.
After that, you can launch the game normally and sign in with your Netflix account. Save data is tied to the Netflix profile you choose, so pay attention before handing your phone to someone who considers deleting profiles a perfectly reasonable troubleshooting technique.
Device requirements, controller support, and offline play vary from game to game. Check the individual listing before committing a heroic amount of storage space.
TV and computer games use a separate catalog from Netflix’s downloadable mobile games. On supported devices, they appear alongside the usual movies and shows.
Choose a game and Netflix displays a QR code. Scan it with a phone or tablet to pair that device as your controller. Multiplayer games generally require everyone to connect their own device.
On a computer, supported games can also use a keyboard and mouse. Physical gamepads aren’t currently supported for Netflix’s TV and computer games.
Availability varies by country and hardware, so finding something on mobile doesn’t guarantee the same game will be waiting for you on your TV.
A great game can still make for a bad mobile port, so raw quality wasn’t enough. We also looked at how well each game fits the device you’re actually using, particularly its controls, interface, and pacing.
Where Digital Trends has reviewed or played a game before, that experience informed our recommendations. We also wanted variety. There isn’t much value in recommending 10 excellent games that all scratch exactly the same itch.
Finally, we checked that every game was still listed in Netflix’s current catalog when this guide was updated. The lineup changes over time, so a title can disappear even after spending years on the service.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.