How the Squid Game: Unleashed team turns the dark source material into skill-based thrills

Boss Fight and Netflix Games debuted Squid Game: Unleashed at Gamescom 2024, and the team behind the 32-player battle-meets-party game emerged again 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 on December 26). Earlier this week, Polygon sat down with game director Bill Jackson to talk about it Unleashed and the adjustment 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 characters in the TV show could ever hope for.

To start with the Squid game TV show characters never know how the games work before they start playing. They simply find themselves in a deadly situation and have to figure out how to survive along the way, often involving multiple victims in the process. In video game form, Jackson points out, players will be able to face these challenges again and again and therefore have the chance to get better at them each time – and even compete to climb the leaderboards. “In that world where everyone is playing, you can actually get better and climb a ladder, get to the next league and move on to a better league,” Jackson told me during our video call this week. “Or you can be a regular player and just hang out and not worry about it. And it’s really up to you. So it’s still for everyone.”

Of course, that “everyone” doesn’t mean this game is family-friendly; that’s it Squid gameAfter all, it has blood. But the video game also has a slightly cartoonish aesthetic to soften that aspect (which is another reason why it’s a less gripping experience than the show). “You don’t want to create a world that players don’t want to be in,” 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 previous dark versions of that art style that were removed when we fixed the issue.

Image: Boss Fight/Netflix Games

When it comes to depicting ‘the brutality of the world’ Squid gamecontinued Jackson, “There are times in this game where you can be thrown through the air in a fairly graphic way, and when your character hits the wall there can be a splatter of blood on the wall.” But the game’s physics will still feel good, he assured me, because this is also a skill-based game: “We wanted the controls to be a little more precise instead of feeling what we used to call ‘floaty’. We wanted you 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 exactly like that. It’s a fun, more precise game than the floating ball or capsule shapes you’re probably used to in the genre.

Unleashed includes deadly schoolyard games from the first season Squid game; Some of these games will be very familiar to all players who watched the show, while others had to be adapted to the video game format. For example, the game Dalgona, also known as the honeycomb game, in which Squid game characters must carve out a specifically shaped candy – it takes on a different shape Squid Game: Unleashed. “What we do is we inspire a level with that,” Jackson said. “And with Dalgona you skate the form at a level. And then you fall through it. It’s cool.

“So it’s inspired by (Squid game) sometimes, or in some cases it is direct. And then there are completely new ones that are either inspired by something else or by real childhood experiences,” Jackson continued. “They’re basically the combination of a childhood experience that maybe we’ve all had around the world, coupled with these kinds of brutal punishments for screwing up.”

Image: Boss Fight/Netflix Games

Image: Boss Fight/Netflix Games

As for Squid game Season 2, Jackson and his team also created levels based on the games introduced there, but players don’t have to worry about spoilers. Unleashed won’t release that content until later, Jackson assured me: “A week after Season 2 goes live on the series side, there will be games from Season 2 in our game.”

That’s all possible because the game developers have been able to be in direct communication with the Squid game team during this process. “The great thing is that we have incredible collaboration and access to things like that,” Jackson said. “So when we see the script, we can say back, ‘These work,’ like I said, ‘These are direct, easy to do.’ “This one, we don’t know how to do it,” or “We have to inspire something from it.” And that conversation is happening at that level. (…) We’re working with the actual creators and with the marketing team to understand how this will all fit together when we finally get to launch it in our game won’t happen until season 2 is revealed to the world.”

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