Squid Game is a new Korean TV drama that has only been recently released on Netflix, and yet it swept the world like a storm. People are playing the games at MRT Pasar Seni, Singaporean cafes are offering games played on the show in the shop, people are talking about it everywhere you go, people are finding whether the doll in episode 1 is real and if it is, where is it, and people are discussing what message the show is trying to send.
In my opinion, Squid Game is wildly overhyped.
Sure, it's quite an entertaining show, but it's not exactly a new entry into the world of kill-for-fun. When I first saw it, I thought it resembles too much like Escape Room, an American movie released in 2019. There are many similarities: a recruiter went around getting a number of players to play a game. Unbeknownst to the players, the losers actually pay with their lives. And all of the players, but the winner, would be killed, and thus the game begins. The difference is Squid Game has players in the hundreds while Escape Room only has 8 players, and in both shows, the game are funded by rich people who just like watching people kill for fun.
In my opinion, the show is fine, but the craze around it seems overhyped and hyperbolic. There are many shows with similar themes and similar storylines, but somehow Squid Game got the craze. Maybe it's new to the Korean market, and very new being a Korean-produced Korean show, but the storyline is a bit banal and I don't get the hype. Nonetheless, it was still an entertaining to watch.
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