Think Takeshi’s Castle-like colourful obstacle courses, except with a catch:

These children’s games all have deadly consequences if you lose. And they are unspeakably brutal.

450+ players start, but at the end of game one, Red Light Green Light, players who failed to stop moving on Red Lights have all been…executed by sniper rifle fire.

Later, a tug of war match takes place on a platform a hundred feet in the air. The losers…go splat.

There’s definitely a metaphor in there somewhere about the powerful and the poor duking it out for survival.

Per BGR, a reviewer asked some of these philosophical questions:

“Are happy endings possible in this world that, like our own, puts so many in no-win situations and still dares to pretend they have a choice?”

…“Can justice exist in a society so unequal in its doling out of power?

“Squid Game doesn’t offer an escape from the horrors of the real world. Within its limitations as a fictional drama, it gives us something far rarer: An affirmation that they exist, and that we’re not alone in finding them nightmarish.”

If you’re not already convinced, perhaps the trailer will do it for you:

I, for one, am hooked.

[sources:bgr&forbes]