‘Squid Game’ Creator Reveals His Favorite Season 2 Game

With “Squid Game” Season 2 elevating the stakes and introducing a contemporary lineup of harrowing challenges, creator Hwang Dong-hyuk lately shared which recreation stood out as his private favourite.

Identified for mixing childhood nostalgia with life-or-death penalties, every recreation within the new season carries its personal emotional weight and psychological complexity.

Nevertheless, one recreation, specifically, captured the “Squid Sport” director’s imaginative and prescient greater than every other.

Warning: Main spoilers forward for the Season 2 finale of “Squid Sport,” which is now streaming on Netflix.

“Squid Game” Season 2 brought back several familiar games whereas introducing a sequence of latest, intense challenges. Ddakji, the sport utilized by The Salesman (Gong Yoo) in each Seasons 1 and a pair of to recruit potential gamers, made its return, setting the tone for the season’s high-stakes dynamics.

The season opened with a contemporary addition: “Bread and Lottery,” featured in Episode 1. On this recruitment recreation, The Salesman purchases 100 pastries and 100 lottery tickets, providing them to seemingly random people in public, creating an unsettling sense of probability and desperation in broad daylight.

Later in the identical episode, a brutal confrontation unfolds in a 3rd recreation the place The Salesman pits Mr. Kim and Woo-seok in opposition to one another. Their destiny hinges on Jokenpô—higher often called Rock, Paper, Scissors—a deceptively easy recreation with lethal penalties on this context.

One other universally recognizable recreation, Russian Roulette, makes its harrowing debut. Notorious for its life-or-death stakes, this recreation is launched by The Salesman as a way for Gi-hun and himself to settle their escalating battle, leaving the result completely to destiny.

After all, followers of Season 1 will instantly acknowledge the chilling return of Purple Gentle, Inexperienced Gentle, the enduring childhood recreation overseen by the menacing doll, Younger-hee. Its presence serves as each a callback to the sequence’ roots and a reminder of the ever-present hazard lurking in every seemingly easy problem.

Viewers additionally noticed the Six-Legged Pentathlon, which compelled individuals right into a sequence of interconnected duties requiring teamwork, precision, and unwavering belief of their companions. In Mingle, alliances turned each a lifeline and a possible entice, as gamers had been pushed to navigate shifting social dynamics beneath excessive stress. In the meantime, the Particular Spherical (Lights Out) plunged the world into full darkness, stripping away any sense of safety and forcing gamers to depend on intuition and uncooked survival abilities amid chaos.

With regards to the brutal and emotionally charged video games of “Squid Sport” Season 2, creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has a transparent favourite.

“I’d say the pentathlon,” he informed Variety. “Not solely was it probably the most difficult to shoot, however I believe after we had completed filming it, I loved watching it myself probably the most. And particularly so as a result of inside one spherical of video games, you get 5 smaller video games.”

“And as in Season 1, I needed to showcase these precise youngsters’s video games that Korean folks grew up taking part in, particularly those that I grew up taking part in myself,” he continued. “With the way in which I acquired to point out the world 5 completely different video games in a single spherical, I might say the pentathlon was most likely probably the most satisfying to shoot.”

Inside a month of its launch, “Squid Sport” turned Netflix’s most-watched sequence, breaking information as the primary Korean and foreign-language present to earn a Display Actors Guild (SAG) nomination. Driving the wave of its unprecedented success, Netflix expanded the franchise with a actuality competitors sequence impressed by the present, which premiered in November 2023.

“As a result of I created Season 1 with out a lot considered doing the second season, when it was determined that we might do Season 2, the stress was certainly immense,” director Hwang informed IndieWire. “I used to be considering to myself: will I actually have the ability to pull this off? Will I have the ability to create or write one thing that will exceed Season 1?”

“However as soon as I acquired to writing, and as soon as I acquired into the story of Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) returning to the video games together with his personal motives, it really went quite a bit higher than I believed it could,” he continued. “I used to be capable of create a narrative that I felt was extra intriguing, provide you with extra fascinating characters and provide you with extra authentic and intriguing video games as nicely.”