I loved Squid Game, the twisted Korean thriller about desperate contestants trapped in a life-and-death game show, when it came out in 2021. I watched it with the same shameful intensity as my dog devours a marrow bone. But even though I felt grubby watching, and enjoying, something so patently tawdry, I was far from alone: with 1,650 million watched hours, it is Netflix’s most successful series ever. Which made it inevitable that there would be an attempt to cash in on the show’s viral success, hence the appearance of Squid Game: The Challenge.
To understand Squid Game: The Challenge, you first need to understand Squid Game. In the original show, contestants participate in a series of deadly reimaginings of childhood games. Red light, green light; marbles; honeycomb: all run the risk of killing you or carrying you closer to a jackpot of 45.6bn South Korean won (£28.2m). As social commentary goes, it was an incredibly heavy-handed critique of the country’s issues with income inequality; as a sickly compulsive viewing experience, it was unparalleled.
