Last weekend I was excited to take part in Squid Game The Experience at the Excel in London. Having been. Fan of the Netflix show, I was excited to step into the world of Player 456, and the Front Man and put myself against other players as I sought glory.
There was a lot I liked about the experience, and there was a bunch of things which I wasn’t as impressed by. Generally, I enjoyed the experience, but even after a few hours reflection, I can see a load of ways in which they could make the experience feel more like the TV show, and just make it better generally.
As a heads up this review will break down all of what the event had to offer, so you can judge if you think it would be worth your time and money. As such it will feature heavy spoilers for the experience. This includes some spoilers for the TV show as I’ll be discussing how the experience could have been closer to its source material.
When you first go in, you’re only allowed in 15 minutes before your booked time slot. As it turned out, this time slot wasn’t an indicator of when the event would start as we ended up waiting in a queue for at least another 30 minutes anyway.
When you first enter, the environment of the experience does feel like you’re in a version of the South Korean night market where some of the early scenes of the show take place before Gi-hun AKA Player 456 enters the games. They use this as a place where you can rent a locker, which uses a QR code and is a lot more fiddly than the old school put in a pound and remove the key to loop around your wrist lockers you’d get in swimming pools as a kid. There were also merch stands and a bar area, but these are clearly more for you to explore once the event is over.
You are given a wrist band which has an NFC chip on and throughout the event you scan this to either show you have successfully completed a game or that you have not managed to score points.
You get in queue and eventually are called upon to get your player number and a bib to wear. These are basically one size fits all (there may have been two size options) and are white with a green square with the Player number on. I think there was a point on the TV show where the characters had to wear bibs but think this came in season two where players where divided into red and blue teams. In the Experience you are also divided into red and blue teams, but you’re not given bibs to match the team you’re on.
Personally, if they weren’t going to give you set team bibs, they should have been mostly green, and not white. This would have better brought things to be like the TV show.
You then go and stand in front of a camera to take your player photo. These are then displayed to show who is doing best during the games, because obviously as an experience every player has to have the chance to play every game and aren’t eliminated and killed…thankfully! The machine taking the photo said press a button, but I couldn’t take if it was a touch screen or a physical button, but either way, my photo ended up with me awkwardly looking down whilst I smiled like the Chester Cat.
Once all players have their numbers, you’re given a little speech by a facilitator who was a lady in sports style shirt with pink and black vertical stripes…kind of like a referee jersey. There were two of these facilitators during the experience and they are there to guide the experience and run the games. Truthfully, these facilitators feel like typical escape room attendees and whilst I understand why they are there, they do massively take away from the atmosphere of this being a Squid Game experience. I can understand that having the hosts where the full body pink uniforms with the face shields with either a circle, triangle or square symbol on the face may have been too warm or limiting for the hosts/actors playing the parts, but what we got was too far removed.
Suggested change: make the uniforms look like a practical adaptation of the pink guard uniform. Short sleeve, but fully pink with pink trousers. Have the shape symbol put somewhere on the uniform and then give a Robin style eye mask which would have kept the sense that the guards are anonymous. Story wise this would actually make it seem like a VIP was joining in to oversee the players meet their doom as happened in season 3 of the show. You could go the extra mile and give them water pistols just to add to the effect.
After a brief safety talk the players are led into a room that looks like the bunk bedroom from the show. This is where you are split into teams and it’s also where a Korean actor dressed in a business suit complete with briefcase comes in to tell you the rules and not to physically or verbally attack one another. He is clearly based on the recruiter who plays ddakji with potential players before they enter Squid Games.
After this, the two teams, red and blue are taken into their own rooms and then play identical games as one another. This is clearly just crowd control and so the makers of the experience can run two groups of players concurrently.
GAME 1: Glass Bridge
The first game was a version of where players had to cross the bridge made of tempered glass in the TV show. You line up in four lines and are each faced with twelve squares in front of you. These squares are transparent, and you can see lights underneath them. The idea is that they will light up for maybe three seconds and reveal a pattern of either red or green lights underneath each square. You have to remember which squares go green and avoid stepping on whichever are red.
I think this event is meant to be timed and each player scores more points for completing crossing the bridge the fastest. The timer in our room wasn’t working on the big screen, but may have been on the facilitator’s tablet which they were controlling the event from.
I did manage to cross the bridge successfully without stepping on a red square, and upon completion you then scan your NFC chip to score points or not.
After the game it was revealed the rankings of who was in the lead, and out of the blue team of around 20 players I was pleased to see I was ranked second. Not a bad start.
Suggestions of improvement:
The facilitator didn’t make it clear if being fastest would score more points, or how the ranking would be achieved. They also potentially slowed down many players by telling then to rhythmically take a step…step…step… I think my fast time would have only come by the luck that it was an easy pattern to see and I took multiple steps when I knew it was safe to.
Also, for all this game was, actual participation in the activity couldn’t have been more than 10 seconds to cross the bridge. There is the enjoyment of watching others you are with take part, and the general atmosphere and anticipation for the activity was good, but yeah, one event down and you’ve done about ten seconds of interactive stuff.
GAME 2: Marbles
Game number two felt like a mash up of the cookie game and the marbles games from season 1 of the TV show. Four players had to stand around a circular table with a well in the middle. In the centre of the well is a shape such as triangle, umbrella, star, etc. We should have realised that star was trickier shape based on what happens on the TV show, but alas we didn’t and stood there. Then the game was that each player is given a pot of four marbles.
You then have to throw, and not drop, but throw a marble to land in the centre of the shape in the well. This was tricky, and the advice I’d give is that simply throwing the marble won’t work. You either have to bounce it off the opposite side and hope it rolls back into the shape or throw it upwards into the air to limit its momentum. The trick I found worked to get the marble in the shape was to bounce the marble off the outer rim of the table.
I won the game, but did so only managing to get the marble in the shape once. If you manage to do this, you collect up all the marbles currently on the table. If you manage to have all the marbles you win, or you can win by having the most out of the four players.
This game lasted four minutes, and was the bulk of the activity you’ll do in the entire experience as you can keep playing for the whole time, unless of course someone wins all the marbles earlier.
Suggestions of improvement:
This game was fine for what it was, but with multiple tables playing concurrently, it did mean we had to police ourselves to be fair and avoid cheating. It’s a simple children’s game, so you don’t want to over tech everything, but a simple web cam or marbles with sensors could have made this have the sense that a facilitator was overseeing who won or not.
GAME 2.5 Ddakji
After this round I had moved down to fourth in the rankings, but didn’t quite understand why. I’d won my table, so unless others had won all the marbles it didn’t make sense to me.
I think then as a time filler, two players were invited to play ddakji. This is the famous game from the show where you have to slam down coloured envelopes onto one another to try to flip over your opponents.
It was said they could get bonus points. This obviously isn’t fair as who got to play was just the choice of the facilitator. After neither player was able to win, more were invited to play, and we eventually did for only three attempts to turn over the envelope.
I think this was just filler and for most players the envelope was placed awkwardly half way between carpet and hard floor and it feels like the facilitators should have known which surface the game should be played on.
Suggestions of improvement:
This game should have been done as part of the first room to decide who is in red or blue team. Or just to put a red against a blue directly to score a bonus point. This would have more closely linked it to the TV show as the first challenge the players are faced with set by the recruiter.
GAME 3: Tug of War
The next proper game was based on the tug of war. This is where things started to get hokey. It was suggested to us that we were competing against the other team in the next room, but instead of it actually being a game of tug of war where each team pulls on one end of the same rope, instead the players each got five seconds to tug a vertical rope coming from the ceiling.
It was quickly apparent that the other team weren’t doing this at the same time as us, so at best it was just down to which team managed to score better based on the pulling moving a. Little flag across the ceiling which was said to be connected to the vertical pulley.
This event was garbage. Each player only got five seconds on a timer and therefore five seconds of contribution. I’m not even sure how they could know which player contributed in what order – unless the facilitator was putting the order into their tablet – which I doubt. As they’d struggle to get each player in order with only five seconds to select who is going next.
So, this made the points feel questionable.
It was said that the red team beat our blue team, but wasn’t clear how or why, and this determined who would be in the front row in the next game which was Red Light Green Light.
There was also a weird awkward moment where our facilitator disappeared, apparently for a lunch break mid experience and so we were handed over to the other host. Maybe that’s how it’s meant to be for the final two rounds, but if so, saying they’re off to lunch just made it seem unprofessional. We were also told to join the other team in the other room which felt weird as they’d struggle then changed their minds and it was all a bit awkward.
Suggestions of improvement:
Just have the two teams play tug of war – give gloves and warn about rope burn, but what they had for this game was rubbish.
GAME 4: Red Light Green Light
Finally, we come to Red Light Green Light which is the most famous Squid Game game. I can see why this was later in the experience for the sake of it being a crowd pleaser but should have been first based on the TV show.
This was one of the more substantial games you had to play, but only lasted about two minutes. The room it was set in was painfully small though and as a result of that, the voice over that would say ‘green light’ would be followed by ‘red light’ only two to five seconds later…if that.
The team that were said to have lost the tug of war had to stand in the back row, and unfortunately that included me, so immediately this puts you at a disadvantage as you have to hope you’re not stuck behind a slowpoke.
Unlike the TV version of Red Light Green Light which is a high tech version of Grandmother’s footsteps or What’s the Time Mr Wolf, complete with motion sensors, the version you play in the Squid Game Experience is downgraded to be as regular Red Light Green Light. Instead of getting shot by an army of snipers, you have just one guard in full pink jumpsuit and visor who assists the facilitator in pointing at people who they spot moving. If you’re seen moving, you’re told to go back to the start.
Other than being stuck behind someone, I moved every time they said green light, and this would not have been long enough to complete the run. I even took to keeping an eye on the facilitators and moved whenever they were facing away. The time was said to have run out so with the facilitators attention turned, I dove across the finish line. Some may say this was cheating, but considering in the actual Squid Game you had characters push each other off the glass bridge and literally kill each other, in the Squid Games you have to use every advantage you can get.
And with one game to go and so far less than seven minutes of actual interactive activities having taken place, I could have easily highlighted that the customers were being cheated far more than a player taken a short cut.
With my somewhat dodgy victory here, I was now ranked number 1 of the blue team, and number 3 overall. All I’d have to do is win in the final game and I felt I was in a good position to win Squid Game overall.
Suggestions of improvement:
Maybe the tech is too expensive, but if people have NFC chips and there are real motion sensors in the world, couldn’t this be played automatically where players are eliminated based on motion detection rather than being spotted by just two people. With the final few seconds, the facilitator encouraged people who had already crossed the finish line to call out anyone moving, but this isn’t a game at a school disco, and being called out by bratty ten year olds and people who are your actual competition feels unfair with this actually being a competition of sorts.
GAME 5: Musical Chairs
The final room saw all players stand around a circle and effectively play musical chairs. Instead of running to sit on a chair when the music ran out, you’d have to stand on a symbol. There were three rounds to this, which once completed would take the active gameplay of the whole Squid Game The Experience to maybe a full eight minutes…but only maybe.
I made it through the first round, and got eliminated on the second.My elimination came form the facilitator coming over and asking me and the guy who jumped on my feet to name a number from one to ten, and whoever guessed correctly for what they were thinking would win and the other be out. The fact that I’d be eliminated this way was hokey though as there was no way to know if they were just picking someone at random. Still, as much as my breakdown of this event would give the sense that I was taking it too seriously, I didn’t care when I was told I was out.
The player who was winning overall actually didn’t get to take part in this game of musical chairs and was a defacto finalist.
Suggestions of improvement:
If they wanted it to be musical chairs, it should have actually been musical chairs, as the standing on the shape symbol thing was too easy for players to push and cheat. Also if they didn’t want physical pushing or violence between players they needed to have more staff adjudicating.
FINALE GAME: Rock, Ppaer, Scissors
The winner of this game was a kid, and was put up against two adults to decide who the final winner of the whole competition would be in a game of rock, paper, scissors. One was the player leading the leader board and they said another was a guy whose smart watch was interfering with the NFC chips and so whose score was wrong. This was really poor if true, and not sure why they’d admit to that.
So, it came down to two rounds of Rock, Paper, Scissors to find the champion. I mean, this fits as much as any of the games included in Squid Game, but was anticlimactic.
To add some drama to the proceedings, an actor came out dressed as The Front Man and they played a voice over of him explaining the rules.
The winer was the guy who was already in the lead, so good for him, but before it ended he was given the choice to share his prize with all players or just keep it for himself. He chose (as I would have) to keep it all himself, but we have no idea what this was, other than it would be something from the gift shop on the way out.
Suggestions of improvement:
Rock, Paper, Scissors is more luck based than skills based, so it does mean the winner of the whole thing could have just been decided by a random pick if they were going to do it that way. Even something like a hoop toss or cornhole would have been better as it would have required skill to win.
Other Changes
So, anything else I’d change? Loads, but mostly these could be minor changes to make the event better and closer to the TV show it was meant to emulate.
- The facilitators should have been dressed as guards in full or adapted guard uniforms.
- The games included and order of them could have been better designed.
- More games where players do things concurrently would help add to the value of the experience.
- Other than in the entrance lobby there was no giant glass piggybank which filled up with money – this could have featured to indicate points scored between the red and blue teams.
- They should either make it so the points actually are counted (if they’re not) or show something to make it clear how they are being calculated if they are genuine. Lots about the scoring didn’t seem to make sense and seemed random or faked.
- It was also too easy to cheat on the games if you wanted to.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Other than this, I can say that the experience was fun, and if you push yourself to get into it and enjoy the atmosphere, you will have a reasonable Squid Game based experience. To give Squid Game The Experience less than three out of five feels a bit unfair, but to give it more would be disingenuous. It’ll be fun for fans of the show, and it did last well over an hour for our run at it, but it has much less content of interactive stuff than even the most disappointing escape room. It’s main strength is its atmosphere and the fact that it is like doing an escape room competing against thirty or forty people.
Let me know in the comments if you have played Squid Game the Experience at London Excel, and if it lived up to your hopes of playing the Netflix show in real life! For more reviews of places to visit check out our travel section. For more movie and TV Show stuff, check out our movies section on the site.
