Netflix’s mobile game Squid Game: Unleashed came out today, a week ahead of the disturbing show’s second season, and a few days before the premiere of Beast Games, Mr. Beast’s embattled take on the show with Amazon. All of these things are distinctly not Squid Game, which is what makes them so very Squid Game.
First things first: Squid Game: Unleashed is fine, and I enjoyed playing it this morning. It’s a lot like Fall Guys without the physics (game director Bill Jackson told Polygon, “We didn’t want the characters to feel unreal and have their physics feel unreal”). Characters start in the iconic green jumpsuit, though their outfits can be customized with currency you earn by playing. Some, like Kang Sae-byeok, are characters from the show, while others have been invented for Unleashed. Each character has a dossier in their info screen that tells a backstory about why they joined the game.
The levels themselves are takes on the show’s challenges; without the psychological aspect that made the show so compelling, they’re largely races to a finish line. There’s Red Light, Green Light, which came back in a later round in one of my games with the addition of buzzsaws. The dalgona challenge, where characters had to carve a shape from a candy, here is a race along the outline of shapes to fall to the ground and make it to a finish line, a compelling combination of teamwork and competition. The marbles episode appears to be recast as a race to a school, with busses, electrified water, and fire to avoid. The challenge where characters inch across a glass floor stays pretty straightforward and works well as a game level. A final round I spectated, a take on the hand-to-hand combat that ended the show’s first season, features players knocking each other out of a slippery squid-shaped arena, grabbing weapons and shields from floating present boxes that are definitely an aesthetic contrast to the actual moment in the show.
The brutality of the show is present in moments where you’re eliminated, either ragdolling to a bloody death or being sharply felled by a sniper. Developer Boss Fight has done a good job keeping the contrast between the show’s bright, cute spaces and the violence behind them without tipping too far in either direction. As Jackson told Polygon, “You don’t want to create a world where players don’t want to be;” I’m sure it was an immense game design challenge to try to make a game players would want to play and have fun with from a narrative about characters’ life experiences forcing them into an unthinkably terrible situation.
Atop all this is all the stuff of any mobile game: leveling up through play, earning different kinds of currency that can be spent on outfits or giving your character new abilities surrounding in-game items like bats and dodgeballs. While it makes sense from a gameplay perspective to earn currency while you play and not just when you win, the whole idea of this runs against the core concept of the show. Money was such a hard, ever-present feature in Squid Game, from characters’ motivations to the pig full of cash dangling above their heads. Here, as in many mobile games, money feels cheap and abundant, which sands off much of its meaning. If you, like me, aren’t the kind of player who’s motivated by cosmetics, it basically doesn’t matter at all.
Here’s where Unleashed and Beast Games and Netflix’s reality competition Squid Game: The Challenge all miss the point. Squid Games’ games got their meaning from the story behind them, both the show’s written narrative and the deeper issues it pointed to. It cast a spotlight on money and power and class divides and the fundamental unfairness of society, all of which resonated with viewers because we’re so aware of these issues but can feel like we have few outlets for challenging or changing them. It would be fun to, say, climb on a Ninja Warrior course because the course is the topic of that show; in Squid Game, the fun is just a set dressing that highlights how unfun and unfair it is to try to survive in actual society. If you strip all that away to just the mechanics, all you’re left with is uncomfortable reality shows and a perfectly fine mobile game dressed in Squid Game’s aesthetics.
There are individuals at the top of Amazon and Netflix and the Mr. Beast empire who are less bloodthirsty corollaries to Squid Game’s rich antagonists, who see art and people as nothing more than dollar signs (Remember when Netflix exec Bela Bajaria, asked about her favorite shows, replied with “I’m a fan of TV” before having strong opinions about the wine on a private jet?). I don’t want to presume these people are ignorant of the conflict they’ve wandered into, or get all holier-than-thou about what Netflix can do with its properties or what Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk should do with his show. I’m sure everyone involved is hyper-aware of how weird the extended Squid Game universe is, even as they milk it for every drop of cash and viewer engagement it’s worth.
In a different world, maybe Squid Game could have stayed what it was without getting little bits nibbled off to feed the IP machine. But the world we live in is the one where the people who make money are going to make money, and the rest of us are going to find resonance in Squid Game’s message while still thinking “it would be fun to play a version of this without killing someone or getting shot in the head,” and where Boss Fight has made a totally OK, even enjoyable mobile game to satisfy both those parties. Squid Game the show highlighted the conflicting choices people make in our current system; in that way, maybe all these spinoffs fit right in.
