When Squid Game landed on Netflix users’ screens in 2021, the response it generated was unprecedented. Audiences all over the world were captivated by the story of the Korean thriller drama, which depicted a reality-show-style horror of people playing children’s games to gamble their lives for the payout of a lifetime. The show was a nail-biter, filled with drama, thrills, and gore, and it left people guessing right to the end.
Season one’s closing left the door open for another season, and season two is finally here three years later! But there’s more to the story, and season three, set to debut on June 27, 2025, will pick up from where it left off.
If you loved Squid Game and can’t get enough of the mind-bending twists and turns, here are 10 other equally brilliant shows. Grab your favorite blanket and a bowl of buttery popcorn, and settle in!
Battle Royal
This legendary film debuted in 2000, one of the first of its kind that paved the way for similar movies and shows like Squid Games that fit into the survival games genre. The story follows a group of ninth-graders who are randomly chosen by the Japanese government and placed on an isolated island where they must fight each other to the death. Each student is fit with an explosive collar and told that only the last one alive is allowed to leave – and all they’ve got to help them along is a map, some food, and various weapons!
Ready or Not
No bride imagines spending her wedding night playing a childish game with her in-laws, especially not one that turns out to be as sinister and bloody as this one. Ready or Not follows a young woman who must find ways to survive during a seemingly innocent game of hide-and-seek as she discovers her new family’s horrifying rituals and habits one by one. What has she gotten herself into?
Alice in Borderland
Alice in Borderland follows a storyline resembling Squid Game. A group of misfits are uprooted from their unsuccessful lives and transplanted in a mysterious location called Borderland, a post-apocalyptic version of Tokyo, and they have to beat a series of death-defying games to save their lives. Also similar to Squid Game, the participants have to follow bizarre instructions to solve trivia and puzzles and evade the mysterious entity who is pulling the strings. But rest assured that Alice in Borderland is very much its own show owing to its sci-fi futurism and the original manga from which it is derived. The show already has two seasons, so you’ve got plenty to binge!
3%
If you weren’t the biggest fan of the gore in Squid Game, 3% might be more up your alley. This Portuguese dystopian series has all the twists and turns of Squid Game, but no one dies. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t devastating ends awaiting the characters. In the world crafted in 3%, every individual is given a series of tests the year they turn 20. Pass, and they get to enter an elusive island paradise called Offshore. Fail? The participants must remain in poverty and squalor for the rest of their lives! The show gets its name from the premise that only 3% of the participants will pass the crafty tests and get to live in the affluent Offshore society.
Would You Rather
This 2012 film is another fight-to-the-death type film where the innocent children’s game gets a masochistic twist. Eight desperate people are trapped in Shepard’s mansion and forced to play sadistic games with the promise of a massive cash prize at the end. The participants don’t know that only one will survive, but it becomes increasingly apparent as the games become more deadly.
The 8 Show
The 8 Show also comes from South Korea, and this psychological thriller plays on themes such as social hierarchy, human nature, and greed. It follows the premise of a game show where 8 participants can earn obscene amounts of money. Initially, it seems simple enough. Participants must remain in the show for as long as possible, and their prize sum increases every minute they spend in the game. But things aren’t as innocent as they seem. As the show progresses, characters discover the truly disturbing nature of what they’ve gotten themselves into!
Belko Experiment
No matter how much you dislike your work and colleagues, I can guarantee it’s not as bad as it is for the characters in Belko Experiment. Eight co-workers are locked in their corporate high-rise and ordered by a mysterious voice to kill each other in order to survive. Their weapons are pieces of office equipment like staplers and hole punchers, and they have no choice but to participate – because if they try to leave, the explosive trackers planted in their heads will blow their brains out anyway!
All of Us Are Dead
The Koreans seem to have a knack for creating incredible dystopian survival stories that captivate audiences because All of Us Are Dead is yet another one in the psychological thriller genre that will leave you at the edge of your seat! This apocalyptic horror series is set amidst a zombie outbreak, which is inadvertently triggered by a bumbling science teacher who accidentally releases a deadly virus. The main characters, students of an elite high school in a fictional city set in present-day Hyosan, must figure out where the virus came from and how to get things back to normal while protecting themselves from the lethal zombie virus at the same time.
Escape Room
Escape rooms were all the rage a few years ago, but unlike those fun team activities, where you know you’ll get out at the end whether you crack the code or not, the consequence of failing to solve the puzzle in this psychological thriller is far more dire. Characters in Escape Room quickly discover that they better start thinking because what awaits them when the clock strikes zero is death!
Circle
Set in a futuristic world, 50 strangers wake up in a darkened room only to find out that one of them will be killed every two minutes or if they try to leave. The film gets even more disturbing when the characters realize that it’s up to them to decide who dies next. This sci-fi thriller plays on human nature and the complex emotions each of us battles with. The characters are forced to come up with the answer to an impossible question: how do you determine if one life is more valuable than another?
