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Squid Game: The Challenge seems like it's set to live up to the brand name – the Netflix game show, based on the hit Korean drama, is earning rave reviews.
Squid Game, which became Netflix's most-watched show ever, follows a group of people with financial struggles who are invited to take part in a mysterious survival competition with a hefty cash prize. They must compete in a series of traditional games, but with deadly twists, risking their lives for ₩45.6 billion (that's the equivalent of around $38 million).
Squid Game: The Challenge, however, starts out with 456 real-life contestants. The stakes are (obviously) not as high, and the prize money isn't quite as hefty as the reward in the original series. It's no small sum, though – the winner will take home $4.56 million, the largest single cash prize in game show history.
According to The Guardian's four-star review, the show "not only works, but may turn out to be the most gripping reality TV since The Traitors."
"Squid Game had no shortage of twists, yet this might be the biggest one of all: 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," reads Entertainment Weekly's review.
"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. That reality television itself is an artifact of late-stage capitalism only underscores the point," says Vulture's review.
However, others aren't so sure. "The fear of death and anti-capitalist themes may have been replaced by a rabid consumerism (an apt metaphor for modern America, if not an intentional one), but Squid Game: The Challenge is obviously an epic of its genre," says The Independent's reviewer. "Like most epics, it’s overlong, overblown, and thinks it’s much smarter than it really is. But as a showcase for human desperation, and an illustration of the random brutality of chance, it just about sticks the landing."
