Squid Game Season 3 has landed on Netflix, and with it comes three deadly new challenges. One of those is Hide and Seek, but unsurprisingly, it has a brutal, gut-wrenching twist.
From beginning to end, Hwang Dong-hyuk has proven to be one of the finest TV show writers out there, with Squid Game not letting up for a second. As we said in our five-star review, “Season 1 was phenomenal. Season 2 was better. Season 3, rather extraordinarily, is the best.”
While it serves up biting social commentary and complex moral dilemmas, at the core of the Netflix series are the games. From Red Light, Green Light to Mingle, they have always weaponized childhood nostalgia.
But Season 3’s Hide and Seek dials the horror up to eleven by forcing players to become the monsters themselves. Warning: spoilers ahead!
Squid Game Season 3 turns players into killers in Hide and Seek
Up until now, Squid Game has followed a disturbing but consistent logic: players are killed when they lose the game. They only turn to eliminating each other through failure, desperation or betrayal – not because they’ve been explicitly ordered to do so.
But Hide and Seek tears up that unspoken rule. This time, murder isn’t a side effect of the game. It is the game.
Here’s how it works: players are split into two teams. The blues is given a set of keys and one clear goal – use them to escape the arena within 30 minutes or survive until the time runs out.
The red team, meanwhile, are given knives… and a horrifying mission. They must find and kill at least one member of the blue team before time is up. If they fail, they’re executed by the guards.
It’s a simple setup, but one that flips the entire moral structure of Squid Game on its head. No longer are the contestants simply pawns in a twisted system, dying by chance or under pressure – half of them must now kill to survive.
There’s something uniquely unsettling about this change. In Red Light, Green Light, the players were slaughtered en masse by a robotic child. In Glass Bridge, the deaths came down to luck. But here, one person’s survival depends on another picking up a weapon and stabbing someone in the gut.
Don’t get me wrong – some of the contestants (you can probably guess who) relish this opportunity, going beyond the criteria to pass. But for the most part, it’s a decision none of them asked for.
And it’s not the only sinister twist: the game also adds an interactive element for the VIPs. At the end of the round, they get to dress as pink guards and take out the remaining red team members.
For the first time, they’re not just spectators lounging in golden masks and sipping champagne from their human furniture – they’re participants, treating the experience like their own private human safari.
Then there’s the Front Man’s motives. Ever since Seong Gi-hun re-entered the games, it’s like Hwang In-ho has been trying to break his belief in the good of people.
At the end of the Squid Game Season 2, he ensured Gi-hun watched his best friend die, telling him it was all his fault. Hide and Seek feels like yet another attempt to strip him of any remaining hope he might have.
In this sense, it’s not just another challenge. It’s Front Man’s cruelest move yet, forcing good people to do evil and attempting to eradicate what’s left of Gi-hun’s humanity.
Squid Game Season 3 is streaming on Netflix now. If you’ve watched it, check out our breakdown of the ending, every Squid Game challenge ranked, and find more TV shows out this month.
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