Squid Game – Season 1 Review

Hundreds of cash-strapped contestants accept an invitation to compete in children’s games for a tempting prize, but the stakes are deadly.

If you haven’t heard about Hwang Dong-hyuk‘s series Squid Game by now, then you must be living under a rock. No, seriously. When the show was released in its first week back in September of 2021, it took a bit to catch on. You could hear some rumblings about it on the internet, but it wasn’t really a craze… yet. Fast-forward to now, and the show is practically inescapable. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to you to decide.

Everywhere you look online, you will see merch, memes, and more relating to the show. I finally finished the first season the other day and I have to say – believe the hype. Squid Game is not only the best show of the year, but it’s also one of the best shows I’ve seen period. It kind of becomes annoying to see something become so wildly popular because then you feel an obligation to like it. But trust me when I say that Squid Game really is that good.

It starts off simple enough with episode one, “Red Light, Green Light” where we see that a young man named Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is struggling for money and wants to provide for his mother and young daughter. In order to get even just a bit of cash, he starts gambling on horse races which don’t always go his way. But when he gets taken to a mysterious building where he is forced to play children’s games to make millions of dollars, he must do whatever it takes to win. The only problem? There are four-hundred and fifty-five other players competing to do the exact same thing. And only one can win.

Squid Game is a riveting but also emotionally devastating look at greed and how far one is willing to go if it means they will be financially secure for the foreseeable future. Without money, you are going to have an extremely hard time traversing life, and all four-hundred and fifty-six players in the games have money issues, and Squid Game challenges us to think about what we would do for a lot of money.

Would you push somebody off of a glass bridge leaving them to fall to their death if it meant you would be one step closer to the prize money? Would you be willing to backstab somebody if it was the only thing you could do to win? Squid Game brilliantly showcases just how much we as humans will do if money is guaranteed to us. It’s actually kind of horrific to watch some of the things these contestants do all for the sake of some crisp dollar bills, but it also makes for some of the most unpredictable television I’ve seen.

The characters here are also extremely well-written and by the time the show comes to an end, you will truly get a sense of who the main characters are and what their motivations were. For example, we learn about Gi-hun’s struggles with poverty and his family in the very first episode, and he only gets more interesting from there. One of the best additions to the cast is without a doubt is O Yeong-su as Oh Il-nam, a character that is so much fun to watch and one that takes a lot of skill to properly portray, but Yeong-su did make it look so easy.

It’s also a visually dazzling show with some of the best cinematography I’ve seen in a television show in years. On top of that, all of the extremely intricate sets that were designed for the series are absolutely staggering. I cannot even begin to imagine just how complicated and frustrating it would have been to build even just one of the sets in Squid Game. Each game room has an incredibly distinct look and feel to it, and I worry that the people that worked tooth and nail to make these sets won’t get enough praise and recognition.

There is not a single episode of Squid Game that feels unnecessary or tacked on. Heck, there’s not even a single scene that feels out of place. Truth be told, by the time the credits rolled on the final episode of this show, I was met with two feelings – excitement and sadness. Excitement because I had just watched nine hours of an extremely well-written, directed, and acted show that seriously had me thinking about things. Sadness because all of that was over.

Even if season two never comes out, at least myself and many others can take comfort with the fact that this first season is some of the best-written television you can find and also one of the most remarkably original and intense. Squid Game is truly a revelation.