Squid Game (2021) Review: Playground Games, Adult Debts

Is Squid Game worth watching?

Yes. Squid Game earned its global fame: the first season is a ferociously gripping survival thriller that uses childhood games to say something pointed about debt, desperation and inequality. Its striking design and a superb central performance from Lee Jung-jae make it far more than a gimmick. The reservation is the follow-up, because seasons 2 and 3 are bleaker, baggier and less surprising, so the complete series is less impressive than its opening chapter.

What is Squid Game about?

Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is a gambling-addicted chauffeur in Seoul, drowning in debt and failing as a son and father. Like hundreds of other desperate people, he accepts a stranger’s invitation to play a series of children’s games for an enormous cash prize. Among the contestants are his ambitious childhood friend Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), a guarded North Korean defector, Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon), and a fragile elderly man. It becomes clear very quickly that losing a game means far more than elimination.

Outside the arena, a police officer (Wi Ha-joon) goes looking for his missing brother, and the masked organisation running the games is overseen by the enigmatic Front Man (Lee Byung-hun).

Squid Game was created, written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk for Netflix and is in Korean. This review covers the complete series: three seasons and 22 episodes released between 2021 and 2025. The story has ended, and seasons 2 and 3 play as one continuous second half.

Nursery colours, adult stakes

Hwang’s defining choice is to stage brutality inside a world that looks like a children’s picture book. Pastel staircases, a giant doll and cheerful playground sets are shot with a bright, clean formality, and the contrast between that innocence and the violence it contains makes the imagery almost impossible to shake. The simplicity of the games is the point: anyone can understand the rules in seconds, which leaves all the tension to the characters.

It also gives the satire its bite. Every round forces the players to decide how much of their humanity a way out of debt is worth, and the show keeps asking whether the arena is really so different from the society outside it. The sequence built around a game of marbles, in which cooperation curdles into something much harder, is among the best hours of television of its decade.

Lee Jung-jae leads a vivid ensemble

Lee Jung-jae became the first actor to win the Emmy for lead actor in a drama for a non-English-language performance, and Hwang won for directing, and both awards feel deserved. Lee plays Gi-hun as a hopeless, likeable mess whose kindness is both his weakness and his only real asset, and he makes the character’s slow hardening painful to watch.

Around him, Jung Ho-yeon gives Sae-byeok a flinty self-possession that became the show’s breakout turn, and Park Hae-soo makes Sang-woo’s cold arithmetic understandable even at its worst. The first season works because these relationships feel earned before the games start testing them.

Where the later seasons falter

Seasons 2 and 3 have strong moments, but they lack the first season’s shock and economy. The story was split across two releases, and the first of them stops rather than ends. New contestants are sketched more thinly, the villainous VIP spectators remain cartoonish, and the relentless cruelty starts to feel repetitive rather than revealing. The ideas are the same ones season 1 explored more sharply. Viewers who loved the original should still finish the story, but with tempered expectations.

Who should watch Squid Game?

It suits adult viewers who like high-stakes thrillers with a social conscience, and it is a natural first Korean drama for people who usually avoid subtitles. Season 1’s nine episodes make an absorbing binge on their own; the full series is a bigger commitment. The violence is frequent and graphic, with shootings, bloodshed and themes of suicide, poverty and exploitation, so it is not for younger teenagers or the squeamish.

If you want more from Korean television:

• The Glory, a slow-burning revenge drama about cruelty and class with the same unsparing streak.
• Happiness for another story of people trapped in a closed space as the social order breaks down.

The verdict

Squid Game’s first season is a genuine modern classic of survival television: tense, beautifully designed and furious about the way money sorts people into winners and losers. The later seasons dilute that achievement without erasing it. Watch it for the original nine episodes, and treat the rest as an extended, darker coda.

Rating: 4/5