Critic Reviews
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With its eclectic cast and inventive updates to the original, Squid Game: The Challenge manages to serve up palpable suspense and authentic human drama without murdering a single contestant.
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It would have been nice to see more Korean players, and the drama’s sense of capitalist satire is muted here, but after banging through eight of the episodes, I have to declare myself hooked. Move over The Traitors, there’s some wild new gameshow crack in town.
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Squid Game: The Challenge is fully aware it’s a hokey reality show capitalizing on pre-existing content, and it doesn’t try to be anything more than that. Somehow, it still manages to employ new twists that match up to Squid Game’s intrigue.
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Cast members are the inarguable highlight of “The Challenge.” On the one hand, the show is distinguished by its scale. .... As the show continues beyond its initial flex and can concentrate on a rapidly shrinking number of stars, “The Challenge” comes alive on a much more intimate scale.
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I had my doubts to begin with, but Squid Game: The Challenge not only lives up to the original show, but with the new twists, challenges, and the real-life prize fund at stake, it's even more intense than the hit show.
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Not only does Squid Game: The Challenge qualify as damn good reality television, it even serves as an unexpectedly effective adaptation of the original K-drama. The game show uses the language of modern reality television to realize, in its own strange way, the themes in Dong-hyuk’s parable of capitalism grinding human beings into dust.
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With money at stake, rather than life itself, some of the cooped-up politicking in the middle episodes smacks wearily of Big Brother. Other passages of play lean too heavily on popularity contests. But by the final few episodes the tension, intrigue and antagonism are bubbling to the boil. I’ve seen eight of the ten episodes and am agog to discover how ruthless the last dollar-driven survivors can be.
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It was reasonable to assume that Squid Game: The Challenge would be a cash-in, a cynical by-product of the original’s success that would miss the point entirely, and perhaps it does. But as a gameshow, as the spectacle it sets out to be, it is very hard to look away.