The Best Books, Movies, Video Games, and Podcasts to Check Out After Watching 'Squid Game'[html]
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When Squid Game hit Netflix in 2021, the world felt the impact. Emerging from a pandemic, people were broke, bored, and ready to break bad, and the show’s sharp satire of capitalism hit just right. The premise—people in various levels of life-destroying debt sign up to play a series of deadly children’s games in exchange for the chance at a life-changing amount of cash (kept on display in a giant piggy bank, in one of the show’s many brilliant visual touches)—straddled the line between sadly plausible and nightmarishly bizarre, but anyone could sympathize with the desperate protagonist, Seong Gi-hoon (Lee Jung-jae).
The show has finished its third and final season, and we’ve already offered up the best series you can watch to keep those bleak vibes going. But if you need more bleak in your life, you have other options. Here are the books, movies, video games, and podcasts you can turn to when you’re done watching (and re-watching) Squid Game.
The best books like Squid Game
Under the bright primary colors and friendly shapes, Squid Game is a story about money, desperation, and mob mentality. Lucky for you, plenty of books offer those same themes along with similarly gripping tension.
The Plotters, by Un-Su Kim
Like Squid Game, The Plotters is set in contemporary South Korea, and like the show, the novel tells the story of a flawed man who comes to realize he’s been playing a rigged game. Reseng is an assassin who has unquestioningly followed orders his whole life, killing people according to orders handed down by the mysterious “plotters.” When a colleague is killed for disobeying an order, however, Reseng’s faith is shaken, and he begins investigating just who, exactly, is issuing those orders. What he finds won’t surprise Squid Game fans one bit.
Hit, by Delilah S. Dawson
If the interrogation of an unfair economic system is what resonated with you while watching Squid Game, then Hit is for you: When Valor National Bank buys the national debt, it also gains the right to kill the people who owe it money—which is just about everyone. People like Patsy are given a choice: Pay their debt (impossible), be killed right there and then (undesirable), or work as a bounty hunter killing other debtors. It’s violent, messy, and filled with trenchant commentary on the broken system we live in.
Docile, by K.M. Szpara
The way debt warps and dehumanizes us is a major theme in Squid Game, which makes Szpara’s novel the perfect choice. In the near future, debt has legally become inheritable, trapping whole families in a cycle of financial servitude that is owned by a small handful of the ultra-wealthy. People can choose to become literal slaves for a period of time in order to work of some or all off their debt—but their temporary “owners” can do whatever they want to them during their servitude, so most opt to numb themselves with a drug called Dociline that keeps them calm and insulated from their suffering. Fans of Squid Game will recognize the sweaty desperation on display here.
The Running Man, by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
King’s 1982 novel was definitely before its time, and has a setup similar to Squid Game. In the far-future of 2025 (!), Ben Richards is struggling to pay his bills and buy medicine for his sick daughter in an America devastated by economic ruin. Desperate, he signs up to be a contestant with the government-run reality game called The Running Man, where he’ll be hunted by trained assassins. If he can survive for 30 days, he gets $1 billion—with bonuses for killing hunters.
The Family Experiment, by John Marrs
Marrs’ novel (part of his Dark Future series) hits those Squid Game vibes in a different key. As the world’s population soars and the economy worsens, most people can no longer afford to have children. A company offers a grim, Black Mirror-esque solution: You can ‘grow’ a virtual child and interact with them in the metaverse. To promote the technology, they launch a reality show where ten couples raise a virtual child from birth to the age of 18 in just nine months—and then must compete for a chance to keep their virtual child, or risk it for the chance at a real child.
The best movies like Squid Game
For all its bright colors and menacingly silly design, Squid Game offers up a suffocatingly dark, dystopian vision of the world. If you want more of that, here are some feature-length movies that will hit that dark, sweet spot.
Cube (1997)
In the midst of all the violent strategies and desperate gambits on Squid Game, you get the sense that it’s also a kind of experiment to see just how far (and low) people will go to survive and get paid. In Cube, five people find themselves trapped in a series of square rooms connected by hatches in each wall, floor, and ceiling—many of which are booby-trapped in horrifying ways. As the group works its way through the rooms, there’s a similar vibe as their creativity and willingness to sacrifice each other comes into play. Stream Cube on Plex or rent it from Prime Video.
The Platform (2019)
Squid Game is a trenchant social commentary, examining the morality of modern society and the impact of inequality. That makes The Platform the perfect movie pairing. In this film, a man named Goreng agrees to spend six months in the “Vertical Self-Management Center,” where pairs of prisoners live on different levels. Once a day, a platform laden with a rich feast descends from above and stops for two minutes—prisoners can only eat during that time. The people placed on top can eat what they like, while the people on the lower levels are lucky to get anything. Goreng eventually goes on an odyssey to discover the secrets of who’s behind this cruel system. Stream The Platform on Netflix.
The Belko Experiment (2016)
One of the great pleasures of Squid Game is watching well-rounded characters fight for their lives using every skill and advantage they have. In The Belko Experiment, a standard group of office drones suddenly find themselves trapped in a fortified building and inform the employees that they must kill two people within 30 minutes, or several of them will be killed at random. The bloody chaos that ensues will be music to the ears of any Squid Game fan. Rent The Belko Experiment on Prime Video.
Escape Room (2019)
One of the great thrills of each episode of Squid Game was finding out what bizarro version of a children’s game was going to be repurposed into a crowd-thinning slaughter. Escape Room offers a similar vibe: Characters forced to survive deadly escape rooms using their brains and physical skills means a whole new mystery challenge every time they make it to the next room. Rent Escape Room on Prime Video.
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