TAGGED AS: Netflix, streaming, TV
The worldwide phenomenon is back, as Squid Game returns to Netflix this week for another thrilling season. Three years after the Korean drama first arrived on the streamer, this continuation is receiving similarly favorable reviews, confirming that season 2 was worth the wait. Fans of the original season will enjoy the revisited premise, especially the violent games played by desperate contestants, as well as some new directions for the show. However, many reviews point out that season 2’s storylines wind up unresolved as the series mostly sets up the concluding Squid Game: Season 3.
Here’s what critics are saying about Squid Game: Season 2:
Squid Game Season 2 is a worthy follow-up expanding on the ominous themes of its predecessor.
— Aramide Tinubu, Variety
By all accounts, it’s just as good as the show’s first outing.
— Aaron Pruner, CNET
This new set of episodes is also richer and more cohesive than what came before, without ever betraying the roots of where it came from.
— Pierce Conran, South China Morning Post
It ups the ante of just about every stake and shock in the first season by losing itself to the spectacle.
— Kate Sánchez, But Why Tho? A Geek Community
Not only a continuation, but an evolution — and in the process, an escalation… the new episodes retain the thrilling spirit of the first season, but its many individual departures build to something new and fascinating.
— Siddhant Adlakha, JoySauce.com
This show remains incisive, thoughtful, and rightfully pissed off at the status quo.
— Elijah Gonzaliez, Paste Magazine
It’s a thorough letdown… lacking in the fun and whimsy that kept the first season from wallowing in its backdrop of misery, and entirely lacking in new details or insights on the nature of the Game.
— Daniel Fienberg, Hollywood Reporter
(Photo by No Ju-han/Netflix)
Brace yourself for many shocking surprises and long stretches of white-knuckle tension.
— Pierce Conran, South China Morning Post
There’s an unexpected twist around every bend, ultimately altering (or rather, magnifying) what the show is about at its core.
— Siddhant Adlakha, JoySauce.com
Boasting several mind-blowing twists, these seven episodes advance the story to what will undoubtedly be an electric conclusion when Season 3 debuts in 2025.
— Aramide Tinubu, Variety
You can see the plot twists coming a mile away even when a new game is introduced — and if you don’t, the show flashes lights in your face to make sure you’re prepared for the incoming twist.
— Therese Lacson, Collider
The games are just as surreal and perverse.
— Laura Martin, BBC.com
Like Red Light, Green Light, they are incongruously barbaric. This is no place for spoilery details, but I can say that each game generates gut-twisting, yell-at-the-screen suspense, even on a second watch.
— Kristin Baldwin, Entertainment Weekly
The variety of games play reaches into childhood but also looks beyond it and attempts to exploit every relationship and person to the fullest… The ruthlessness it pulls out of people is higher, as is how they try to force comradery simultaneously.
— Kate Sánchez, But Why Tho? A Geek Community
The individual games range between “similar to what we’ve seen” and “variations on a theme,” but what has changed is the downtime between them.
— Siddhant Adlakha, JoySauce.com
The games feel different this time… After each game, all the surviving players can vote on whether to continue, and these moments of counting hundreds of X’s and O’s are extremely tense.
— Andrew Webster, The Verge
These games eventually go to fresh places that recreate some of the first season’s cold dread as we witness new depraved challenges, but it’s still not quite as thrilling.
— Elijah Gonzaliez, Paste Magazine
There’s no evidence that anybody has given the M.C. Escher day-glo set a fresh coat of paint, and the new games themselves feel barely on-theme.
— Daniel Fienberg, Hollywood Reporter
(Photo by No Ju-han/Netflix)
Things eventually culminate in a bloody massacre that pushes Squid Game further into horror than it’s ever been.
— Andrew Webster, The Verge
The highs are nail-bitingly tense, often euphoric.
— Debopriyaa Dutta, High on Films
The show’s signature brutal violence, blood, guts, and gore are still hyper-present, but the terror among the players, including Gi-hun, who has experienced it all before, remains palpable.
— Aramide Tinubu, Variety
There’s lots of bloodshed, no impact.
— Daniel Fienberg, Hollywood Reporter
Season 2 devotes itself to elevating the first by throwing a wrench into every element of the machine we thought we understood.
— Kate Sánchez, But Why Tho? A Geek Community
The show’s second season doesn’t really depart from [the original] premise, but it remixes known elements just enough to feel fresh, with musical motifs that take exhilarating form.
— Siddhant Adlakha, JoySauce.com
One of the most interesting aspects of Season 2 is that it moves beyond the players…[It] illustrates how easily people can inflict pain and violence on others when they are emboldened by a sliver of power.
— Aramide Tinubu, Variety
What Season 2 does best — apart from turning the risk-and-thrill meter to a 100 — is cement Gi-hun’s interiority as a changed man.
— Debopriyaa Dutta, High on Films
(Photo by No Ju-han/Netflix)
With a much leaner seven-episode run at his disposal, creator, writer, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk explores the layers of this universe with rich storytelling that doesn’t simply take the cruelties and inequalities of this system to task.
— Shannon Miller, IGN Movies
This is a deliberately disjointed tale, meant to ramp up an itch for the next season. The gamble is not yet over, and the results of this zero-sum game leave too many unresolved strands in stasis.
— Debopriyaa Dutta, High on Films
Season 2 feels more like a “part one” than its own story, and that’s partially by design… a means to an end that we have yet to see.
— Laura Babiak, Observer
It’s not as tightly written, falling into commonplace TV woes as it struggles to get to the point. Thankfully, though, there’s still enough here thematically to largely make up for these shortcomings.
— Elijah Gonzaliez, Paste Magazine
Too often it forgets what makes it tick—and, just as frustratingly, fails to resolve its many storylines by the conclusion of its too-short seven-episode run.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
It becomes a commentary on how frequently democracy forces people to vote against their interests, either as individuals or a collective, which can be applied to South Korea but really any democracy.
— Daniel Fienberg, Hollywood Reporter
This latest season has a timely focus on how capitalism overlaps with flawed democratic processes.
— Elijah Gonzaliez, Paste Magazine
It mostly thwarts repetitiveness by finding new angles to examine what seemingly ails modern-day Korea: capitalist exploitation, the erosion of morality, and class inequities.
— Aramide Tinubu, Variety
Squid Game Season 2 turns the spotlight on us. Those of us who tuned into this new season…What happens when we are the problem?
— Kate Sánchez, But Why Tho? A Geek Community
The show never stoops to sermonizing, yet there’s no mistaking its censure of its protagonists for their responsibility for their predicaments, both before and during the games, and that angle lends the material welcome, added complexity.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
(Photo by No Ju-han/Netflix)
Lee Jung-jae really proves his mettle this season, especially when you compare his performance in the series premiere to where he ends up at the end of Season 2. He’s a delight as a protagonist.
— Therese Lacson, Collider
Lee Jung-jae is a good enough actor to make Gi-hun’s one-note haunted aspect a fitting development of the character… [His] performance remains sturdy, if less entertaining than what attracted audiences in the first place.
— Daniel Fienberg, Hollywood Reporter
It’s the role of a lifetime for Lee Jung-jae, whose expressive face conveys the horrors of what he’s witnessing; the sole voice of reason in an insane world. He won an Emmy for best male actor for the drama in 2022; surely more will be on their way for the show at the next ceremony.
— Laura Martin, BBC.com
Lee Byung-hun really impresses as the increasingly conniving Front Man.
— Laura Babiak, Observer
Hyun-ju is a wonderful addition to the cast. A trans character, her growing relationship with Geum-ja is not only heartfelt but a window into understanding the importance of communicating across generations.
— Kate Sánchez, But Why Tho? A Geek Community
One of the new players is a transgender woman, Hyun Ju… She ends up one of the most surprising and meaningful characters.
— Siddhant Adlakha, JoySauce.com
Thanos is a lightning bolt of unrepentant chaos in an already electric environment, and [Choi Seung-hyun] has found a way to imbue pitch-perfect physical comedy, rage, and tragic recklessness into a character that makes the viewer simultaneously hold their breath in fear and beg for more.
— Shannon Miller, IGN Movies
Of the new faces, Jo and Kang come close to making their characters memorable.
— Daniel Fienberg, Hollywood Reporter
(Photo by No Ju-han/Netflix)
Ace cinematographer Kim Ji-yong’s dynamic and kinetic camerawork adds a thrilling edge to the show’s many pulse-pounding set pieces.
— Pierce Conran, South China Morning Post
Hwang Dong-hyuk, who has written and directed all of the show’s sixteen episodes, remains a master at twisting screws at just the right moment, keeping his camera observant, but ready to strike with sudden pans and push-ins when it’s most appropriate.
— Siddhant Adlakha, JoySauce.com
What Squid Game still has going for it is its visual imagination. Its themes of class struggle are rendered with flair, and not just in the pastel abattoir of the game sets.
— James Poniewozik, New York Times
Squid Game Season 2’s only flaw is how it ramps up… The pacing in the first two episodes could be better.
— Kate Sánchez, But Why Tho? A Geek Community
Perhaps the biggest issue with this latest run is that its pacing is frequently lethargic, extending circumstances that could have been conveyed in four or five episodes into a seven-episode season.
— Elijah Gonzaliez, Paste Magazine
The only problem? The painful wait for the simultaneously shot Squid Game season 3, due out in 2025.
— Pierce Conran, South China Morning Post
86%
Squid Game: Season 2
(2024)
premiered on Netflix on December 26, 2024.
