Boss Fight and Netflix Games debuted The Squid Game: Unleashed at Gamescom 2024, and the team behind the 32-player party battle game resurfaced at The Game Awards 2024 to announce that the game will be free for everyone, even if you don't have a Netflix subscription. The game arrives on December 17 (Squid Game season 2 premieres December 26). Earlier this week, Polygon sat down with game director Bill Jackson to talk about Released and the adaptation process Squid Game in a video game that leans on the dark humor of the original show, but hopefully adds more fun to the equation than the TV show's characters could ever hope to have.
On the one hand, the Squid Game Characters on TV shows never know how games work before they start playing. They are simply thrown into a deadly situation and have to figure out how to survive as they go, often with several casualties involved in the process. In video game form, Jackson emphasizes, players will be able to face these challenges over and over again and will therefore have the opportunity to improve them each time and even compete to climb the leaderboards. “In that world where everyone plays, you can really improve and move up the rankings, get a next league and move up to better competition,” Jackson told me on our video call this week. “Or you can be a casual gamer and just hang out and not worry about it. And it really depends on you. So it's still for everyone.”
Of course, “everyone” doesn't mean this game is family-friendly; Squid GameAfter all, it has blood. But the video game also has a somewhat cartoonish aesthetic to help alleviate that aspect (which is yet another reason why it's a less harrowing experience than the show). “You don't want to create a world where players don't want to be,” Jackson said. “You want a place where they want to be. So that started to lean us towards a more stylistic art style. And yes, we had some older, darker versions of that art style that were rejected while we worked out the problem.”
Image: Boss Fight/Netflix Games
When it comes to representing “the brutality of the world” of Squid Gamecontinued Jackson, “There are times in this game where you can be thrown into the air in a pretty graphic way, and if your character hits the wall, there may be a blood splatter on the wall.” But the game's physics will still be good, he assured me, because this is also a skill-based game: “We wanted the control to be a little more precise instead of feeling what we used to call 'floaty.' We wanted you to be able to have a little more direct control over the character. […] We didn't want the characters to feel unreal and their physics to feel unreal, so it feels accurate in that. It's a fun game and more precise than the floating balls or capsule shapes you're probably used to in the genre.”
Released will include deadly schoolyard games from the first season of Squid Game; Some of these games will be very familiar to any gamer who has watched the show, while others had to be adapted to fit the video game format. For example, the Dalgona game, also known as the honeycomb game, in which Squid Game The characters have to carve a candy into a specific shape; takes on a different form The Squid Game: Unleashed. “What we do is inspire a level with that,” Jackson said. “And with Dalgona, you're kind of skating on one level. And then you fail. It's great.
“So it is inspired by [Squid Game] sometimes, or it is direct in some cases. And then there are completely new ones that are inspired by something else or real childhood experiences,” Jackson continued. “They're basically the juxtaposition of a childhood experience that maybe everyone around the world has had, along with this kind of brutal punishment for making a mistake.”
Image: Boss Fight/Netflix Games
Image: Boss Fight/Netflix Games
For Squid Game In Season 2, Jackson and his team also created levels based on the games that will be featured there, but players shouldn't worry about spoilers. Released We won't be releasing that content until later, Jackson assured me: “A week after Season 2 goes live in the series, there will be Season 2 games in our game.”
All of this is possible because the game developers have been able to be in direct communication with the Squid Game team during the course of this process. “The good thing is we have incredible collaboration and access to those things,” Jackson said. “So even when we see the script, we can say, 'These work,' like I mentioned, 'These are straightforward and easy to do.' “We don't know how to do this one” or “We have to inspire something from it.” And that conversation happens at that level. […] We are collaborating with the actual creators and the marketing team to understand how this will all fit together when we are finally able to release it in our game. But we're not going to spoil anything. “It won't happen until season 2 has been revealed to the world.”