‘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 not too long ago 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.

Nonetheless, one recreation, particularly, 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 recent, 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 generally known as 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 method for Gi-hun and himself to settle their escalating battle, leaving the result solely to destiny.

After all, followers of Season 1 will instantly acknowledge the chilling return of Pink Mild, Inexperienced Mild, 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 pressured individuals right into a sequence of interconnected duties requiring teamwork, precision, and unwavering belief of their companions. In Mingle, alliances grew to become each a lifeline and a possible lure, as gamers have been pushed to navigate shifting social dynamics underneath excessive strain. In the meantime, the Particular Spherical (Lights Out) plunged the sector into full darkness, stripping away any sense of safety and forcing gamers to depend on intuition and uncooked survival abilities amid chaos.

On the subject of 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 advised Variety. “Not solely was it probably the most difficult to shoot, however I feel 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 wished to showcase these precise kids’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 best way I obtained to point out the world 5 totally 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” grew to become Netflix’s most-watched sequence, breaking information as the primary Korean and foreign-language present to earn a Display Actors Guild (SAG) nomination. Using 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 thought of doing the second season, when it was determined that we’d do Season 2, the strain was certainly immense,” director Hwang advised IndieWire. “I used to be pondering to myself: will I actually be capable of pull this off? Will I be capable of create or write one thing that might exceed Season 1?”

“However as soon as I obtained to writing, and as soon as I obtained into the story of Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) returning to the video games along with his personal motives, it really went quite a bit higher than I assumed 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 unique and intriguing video games as effectively.”