The first two episodes are largely devoted to showing the desperate lives of gambling addict Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), disgraced embezzler Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), North Korean defector Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon), and the other players, and explaining why each of them would participate even after learning - via a red light–green light contest featuring a giant robot and sniper rifles - of the game’s deadly stakes. might imagine the one percent to be.įor the most part, writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk’s mix of high and low elements like that works incredibly well. And the satirical elements about the evil billionaires who come to bet on the game can at times feel like how a grade schooler - particularly a grade schooler whose teachers have exposed them to The Most Dangerous Game, gladiator fiction, etc.

Despite a big cast, the storytelling is relatively simple and straightforward. It’s not just the games themselves, but the brightly colored, oversize playground (both metaphorically and, in a few sequences, literally) in which the players are forced to live and compete. On the other, it is a show meant to appeal to its viewers’ twisted inner child. It is frequently ultraviolent, occasionally frank sexually, and throughout a dark satire of income inequality. On the one hand, Squid Game is an intensely mature piece of television.

Squid game lights out