Ranking the 'Squid Game: The Challenge' Games (So Far) – IndieWire

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We shouldn’t be allowed to call “Squid Game” dystopian now that Netflix has built the torment nexus, but the sheer scale of the streamer’s new reality series, “Squid Game: The Challenge,” is impressive. Big reality elimination challenge shows like “Survivor,” “Big Brother,” and “The Amazing Race” feature contestants in the double, not triple, digits. While “Squid Game: The Challenge” settles on squibs instead of actual bullets, the logistical hurdles involved in blowing up narrative sequences and making them practical as games — for hundreds of players — are legion. 
Filmed over 16 days at a series of six interconnected studios in London, “Squid Game: The Challenge” features representations of the unnervingly cheerful “Squid Game” work of production designer Chae Kyoung-sun and the iconic costumes created by designer Jo Sang-gyeong, as well as inclusion of composer Jung Jae-il’s score and a penchant for recreating the deliciously painful slo-mo editing of games perfected by editor Nam Na-young. 
But the artisans on the Korean scripted series worked within the constraints of narrative production. Sequences could be shot in pieces and optimized for the filmmaking and storytelling impact on the pre-selected group of characters the show follows. VFX can support things like the giant piggy bank and the glass bridge (yet to be seen in the reality series), to say nothing of the specificity with which cinematographer Lee Hyeong-deok’s camera and Park Hyeon-soo’s sound team can attack a sequence like the Red Light/Green Light game.
“Squid Game: The Challenge” production designer Mathieu Weekes had to build everything to a degree of functionality that fiction series never have to bother with: from actually making the giant piggy bank (and securing it to the ceiling of the dorm when it weighed over 1,500 pounds) to programming the creepy 13.7-foot tall dollbot that catches players out in Red Light/Green Light. 
“Her head had to turn at a very specific time frame and it had to happen every time,” game designer Ben Norman said of designing the doll. “And the thing we found was that with the size of the head and the speed at which it needed to turn, it had the potential of ripping off if it wasn’t calibrated perfectly! We had to figure out the engineering and work out the parts and motors and figure out not only how to drive it, but how to stop it. We’re talking fractions of a second, it’s so fast.” 
How effective is building out the deadly games from the Hwang Dong-hyuk series in the context of Western reality TV, though, and what are the challenges that the creative team had to overcome in creating them? Below is our ranking of the challenges we’ve seen so far in the first five episodes of “Squid Game: The Challenge”; four more episodes drop on Netflix November 29 and the finale streams December 6.
The Red Light/Green Ligh sequence in “Squid Game” is an incredible, shocking, horrifying (and horrifyingly beautiful) sequence; to actually run it at scale required the “Squid Game: The Challenge” production to take all 456 of its contestants to, according to Netflix, the largest indoor space in Europe, Cardington Studios — the total area of play from starting line to finish line was approximately 328 feet by 131 feet. It feels impossible for the reality series not to have recreated this game as closely as possible to the original, slow-mo “kills” coming hand-in-hand with Mozart’s ‘Lacrimosa’ Requiem in D Minor.
But the sheer scale of it, even with player confessionals interspersed, makes the game trickier to lean into without the shock and dread of the scripted version. The production has denied claims of contestants suffering frostbite while filming in that gigantic U.K. warehouse, but even in the edit that audiences can watch, this first and most faithful recreation from the original “Squid Game” demonstrates just how bad, and morally dubious, an endeavor this is. The scope of running this game is impressive and required a huge technical lift. But the actual interesting bits of “Squid Game: The Challenge” come when the show gets to do its own thing tailored to the conventions of Reality TV, instead of recreating the original’s anti-capitalist horror as bloody (inky?) spectacle. 
This social challenge for the “Squid Game: The Challenge” dorm is a spin on a staple of challenge shows like “Big Brother.” The guards bringing in a rotary phone is functionally the same as bringing in a big red button: Someone will press it, eventually, and good or bad things will happen to them. It’s unfortunate that the same contestant, Hussain, answers the phone twice and that the task he’s given — he has two minutes to convince someone else to take the phone or he’ll be eliminated — creates the kind of behavior that even an intro-level psych course can see through. The editors do their best to build up the suspense, but it seems pretty clear that anyone who signed up for a “Squid Game” reality series knew enough to be a step ahead of this one.
It seems possible that there were several other pairs of contestants sent into the dorm kitchen to initiate smaller scale “chore” challenges, aka peeling carrots and getting the chance to eliminate a contestant or playing Ddakji — the traditional Korean children’s game that’s a bit like pogs with folded paper squares. Calling in just pairs of contestants, particularly spry oldster Rick and his younger pal Steven, does mirror a relationship from the original series but feels slight, given how mixed in they’ve been along with everyone else at this point in the competition. The stakes for that encounter also turn out to be low — Rick wins a bar of chocolate — and it’s an important head-fake to the audience to make us think that food-related tasks can have unambiguously positive benefits for the players. But the fact that this only happens a couple times within the first five episodes makes the kitchen games feel paper-thin.
Maybe the coolest credit anyone can ever have is “Project Manager of Cookie Creation,” and project manager of cookie creation Lucy Rock, along with Sr. Development Chef Amon Kadim, needed to fabricate hundreds of Dalgona wafers in advance of the “canon” “Squid Game” challenge when usually the honeycomb confections are only made to order seconds before they’re eaten. The cookie team tried 19 recipes before landing on one that would give them the ability to create cookies of uniform depth, in order to keep the game fair. Rock said, “Honeycomb is also hygroscopic — it draws in moisture as soon as it hits the air — so we needed a mixture that would let it cool, but not get sticky the longer it sat out.”
So, the version of Dalgona in “Squid Game: The Challenge” is technically one of the more impressive feats the show’s managed yet. But from a competition perspective, it has the same problem that most of the wide-scale challenges do: without core characters to focus on, the camera gravitates to the players in the most distress, which can be difficult to watch. Also, it turns out that the image of people furiously licking and spitting on cookies is pretty gross!
Turns out, democracy doesn’t work. That feels right for a “Squid Game” show. The “come to a consensus or everyone can vote to eliminate one other person” challenge demonstrates not only the utility ranked-choice voting but also how “Squid Game: The Challenge” tries to inject real interpersonal stakes and character relationships while there are still over 70 contestants. It is less successful than the jack-in-the-box challenge, however, because it does rely on dozens and dozens of people all standing in a line in order to vote. But again, its technical simplicity allows the camerawork to hone in on specific contestants and the producers to develop narratives, something that all reality competition shows desperately need.
The most effective of the “dorm” challenges thus far is arguably the simplest, with the suspense of luck and timing creating a bridge across Episodes 4 and 5 of “Squid Game: The Challenge.” This concept of having a jack-in-the-box reveal an elimination/chance to eliminate someone else is classic reality show stuff, offering volunteers the chance at advantages along with the threat of elimination, but it’s effective. It’s also an example of a way the show works against the number of contestants, creating scenarios that force the spotlight onto only a few people and making the stakes more legible to the audience. Jack-in-the-boxes and “Pop Goes The Weasel” as a tune are both creepy as hell, so “Squid Game: The Challenge” proves that sometimes you can do a lot with a little. The fact that the challenge allowed for a rare piece of interesting and strategic gameplay makes it all the more exciting.
A lesson for all future contestants: nothing about any reality competition challenge is ever genuinely a treat. But it says something about the canny structuring of the game design in “Squid Game: The Challenge” — and possibly something about the quality of the food being served in the dorm — that the twist behind the picnic challenge comes across as so deliciously insidious. This isn’t the first time that Norman uses food in order to lull players into a false sense of, if not security, then at least openness. The guards leave it up to the players how to pair up to receive their treats on picnic blankets, and the edit mines a ton of suspense out of the fact that there’s an odd number of players. Everything points to the twist hitting only the odd man out. But it’s the pairs (including mother-son duo Trey and Leann) who have to eliminate one another in one of the most wrenching “canon” games left to come.
Maybe one of the smartest moves “Squid Game: The Challenge” pulls is to nix a purely physical contest (tug of war) for something with a lot more suspense and create an original challenge that would catch out players relying too much on knowledge of the narrative series. Games of “Warship” definitely fall more into the world of American kids powering through a rainy day at the beach than the bygone childhood era that Oh Il-nam (Oh Yeong-su) longed for, but Norman and the game design team get extra points for keeping “war” in the name of the game. The construction of the battle maps and ships for players to stand inside is a suitably whimsical contrast to the cool black and blue, situation room lighting for the challenge. It’s also maybe the show’s best game for building suspense for individual characters over the course of a sequence, as we watch team captains agonize about where to send missiles and players in hit ships silently squirm, praying their entire boat isn’t sunk.
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