The central tension of the show has always been rooted in the deadly consequences of playing the show’s twisted versions of children’s games. In the past, Squid Game has turned Red Light, Green Light into a massacre machine, throwing marbles into a breeding ground for lethal deception, and literally put lives in people’s hands with Tug of War. The new season gives still more traditionally harmless games a murderous twist.
Before the season gets to the island for the start of the competition, the Salesman merges double-handed Rock, Paper, Scissors with Russian Roulette. After capturing Woo-seok (June Suk-ho) and Mr. Kim (Oh Dal-su), two of the men tasked by Gi-hun to find him, he forces them to each throw out a choice in Rock, Paper, Scissors with each of their hands before taking one choice back and determining the winner based on the final selections. The loser got a gunshot to the temple, with the chance that the hammer could come down on an empty chamber. As we saw, the split-second nature of having to observe what your opponent played and choosing which of your hands to take back led to Mr. Kim acting on instinct alone, instincts that convinced him to spare his younger flunky.
Later, the season introduced a six-legged pentathlon in which six contestants each tie one of their legs to another’s while moving through a course that has them playing five games—Ddakji, Flying Stone, Gongi, Spinning Top, and Jegi. Outside of Ddakji, the other four were all new additions. But none of those produced heart-wrenching results like the final new game introduced in the second season: Mingle.
In Mingle, contestants stand on a spinning platform surrounded by a number of open rooms. When the platform stops spinning, the announcer speaks out the number of people that must be grouped together and in one of the rooms by the time the timer stops. Anyone left out of a room when the timer is out gets shot dead, along with contestants in a room with the incorrect number of (alive) players. Alliances are formed and broken within minutes, depending on what is asked of them to survive, and the mad dash to doors turns into contestants physically trying to keep others out of their rooms, effectively killing them. This was the first game of the season that made it abundantly clear to the contestants that teamwork is a survivalist illusion, and saving yourself ultimately will come down to killing others.
