When Squid Game premiered on Netflix in 2021, it took the streaming world by storm. The dark and violent South Korean drama quickly shot up the TV charts, and three years later, it’s still the most popular original that the streamer has ever produced. It seemed all but impossible that the second season would ever achieve the same viral success and critical acclaim as the first, and based on the early reviews, Squid Game season 2 doesn’t quite reach the same heights.
As of Thursday afternoon, Squid Game season 2 has an 83% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and 63% from users. Those are both significantly lower than the respective 95% from critics and 84% from users the first season garnered three years ago.
“The outlandishness of the plot requires an even larger suspension of disbelief, and narrative threads are left dangling at the unsatisfying end of the seven-episode season,” Kelly Lawler said in a review for USA Today. Meanwhile, James Poniewozik called it “just a vehicle for more of the same high-design carnage” in his review for the New York Times.
Lawler’s complaint is seemingly a common refrain among critics. While the first season consists of a taut, thrilling nine episodes, season 2 has just seven episodes. Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has said in interviews that he had to cut the season in half due to it having too many episodes, and it sounds like the result is an unsatisfying conclusion for season 2.
That said, there were more positive reviews than negative. The Independent wrote that the new season “excels for many of the same reasons as before.” People dubbed it “a solid, logical, well-scripted bridge.” The Verge said this season “cleverly expands the Squid Game universe while offering up a thriller that plays out like an even more brutal remix of the original.”
Thankfully, if the season’s biggest problem is that it feels incomplete, viewers won’t have to wait nearly as long for more episodes this time around. Netflix has already announced that the third and final season is slated to launch before the end of 2025.
