Playtest

Scary and tense. This episode becomes a nonstop rollar coaster half way through and it really unnerved me. The lead is so likable that the ending mindfuck hits really hard.

Easily my least fave episode (so far). For the first fifteen minutes, nothing makes sense and things just circumstantially happen to allow the story to move forward. It's a very interesting concept relating to both mind control and video games, but its execution is awful mainly because of how smugly self-aware Brooker's script is, and the main character is insufferable. A wasted opportunity.

Genuinely terrifying. I've found movies in this genre (The Game, Total Recall) to overstay their welcome, so it was nice to get a condensed version. The endings to most BM episodes are excessively cruel and this is no exception.

This would've been so much better if the main character wasn't so insanely annoying.

One of the better episodes of the show. Which isn't much, but still.

I love the Total Recall vibe, this was pretty good.

I found this particular episode to be a bit lacking. It never felt scary to me and the themes of simulated reality and losing memory are par for the course when it comes to sci-fi. Playtest isn't bad, it just doesn't do anything new, anything interesting, or even anything all that well, just passable.

Wunmi Mosaku was nice. I also liked the most of the beginning and build the story, but the playtest itself was not that cool.

Good, but among my least favorite episodes. It just didn't have the same creativity as others, and I didn't understand why so long was spent at the beginning fleshing out this character. None of it seemed to matter.

Nobody enjoys a bad trip.

Brilliant

Awesome.

Sufficiently creepy turn.

Basically a much weaker version of eXistenZ. Russell is okay - if a tad irritating - in the lead, and it's got enough going for it to kill an hour, but there's really nothing here that hasn't been seen before elsewhere.

Like many Black Mirror episodes, what makes it so scary is that the tech is either available or right around the corner. How real Virtual Reality can become is a very scary premise.

Takes a bit of time to get going compared to other episodes but jeez, once it does it doesn't hold back. Intense is an understatement.

The problem with this episode is that any of the eccentric Japanese video game developers that Shou Saitou is based on (take a guess) would've made a far more interesting game given this technology.

Really it's that Futurama Scary Door ending that brings this down.

Everything that scares us in the 21st century is in this episode. Including our knowledge of what's scaring us and the scary awareness that this shouldn't scare us because we know that this is scary. Scary.

Holy fuck. Tried to watch this by myself. Couldn't get through it. The extreme sadism of the piece really bothered me, and Wyatt Russell seems like such a nice guy. Had to wait for some friends to watch it with me.

Wyatt Russell is genuinely perfect here. [SPOILER] It captures descent into madness about as good as I've ever seen. I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually been scared by a movie/tv show, and this was one of them.

I really like Wyatt Russell (who reminds me a lot of Owen Wilson and is also the offspring of some guy named Kurt). It's a very watchable episode, but I'd rewatch 'Total Recall' or 'eXistenZ' over this any day of the week.