'Squid Game 3' Review: Returns To Form With a Brutal & Brilliant & Bittersweet Finale

No Precaps, No Recaps, Just Carnage

Unlike most contemporary storytelling that holds your hand with recaps and precaps, Squid Game 3 throws you directly into the furnace. It picks up precisely where Season 2’s dying moments left off. That alone clues you in, this was clearly shot as one continuous 13-episode season that later got bisected into two parts. No time is wasted with expository babysitting.

The stakes? Oh, they’re dialed up to eleven and then some. Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), our weary Player 456, is left stunned, unsure why he’s even alive, let alone still entangled in this madness. It felt like he was done for, shot in cold blood by the ominous Front Man, In-ho (Lee Byung-hun). But nope. The game pulls him right back in. And once again, catastrophe strikes in slow motion.

Players continue to be eliminated with gut-punch intensity. Relationships unravel and rewire themselves in real time. Morality? Dismantled and tossed in the bin. What emerges instead is a pure, undistilled study of human chaos. It is terrifying, magnetic and occasionally so absurd it becomes brilliant. This could have easily been a case of repetition of something we have seen too many times now to be wowed by but it never does despite the hiccups that were constant in Season 2.

Officer Hwang and the Never-ending Loop of Ridiculous

Let’s address the elephant on the island. Wi Ha-joon’s Officer Hwang Jun-ho continues to wander through this narrative like a man stuck in an overcooked side quest. Shot by his brother. Survived. Back again. Looking for the same island he already knows exists. Somehow. The pursuit feels more and more like a narrative cul-de-sac that refuses to be demolished.

There is a cartoonish lack of logic in how his subplot keeps unfolding and re-folding into itself. By the time you get to Season 3, you wonder if he is actually in Squid Game or accidentally wandered in from a totally different K-drama. And yet, even with its over-the-top lack of realism, his arc adds a strange, genre-bending absurdity that contrasts wildly with the otherwise tightly controlled despair of the main storyline.

To think that funnily, he continues to live the tale and now has other challenges is even more baffling. Perhaps one of the most underwhelming culmination arcs and imagine, we have seen Game of Thrones as well and it still pales in comparison.

Dong-hyuk Returns to His Roots and We All Win

This is where Hwang Dong-hyuk, the series creator, deserves applause, confetti and a box of existential tissues. With Season 3, he brings the narrative full circle—not by giving us answers, but by reviving the elements that made Season 1 compulsive viewing. That rising tension. The unpredictable kills. The mind-bending games. The moral spiral. It all returns with a vengeance.

Dong-hyuk doesn’t just craft plot twists. He builds a slow-brewing psychological time bomb. You know the ending will be bonkers, and yet the journey still shocks you. Because it is not about where we are going but how hideously delightful the road there is. The direction feels sleeker this time, more mature even, and yet it retains the raw messiness that gave Season 1 its visceral identity.

But where he truly flexes is ensemble management. The cast is massive. We are talking fifteen-plus players with weighty arcs, emotional pivots and deep conflicts. And somehow, it all flows. It is like watching a symphony of chaos being conducted by a man who thrives on narrative madness. It should feel bloated. It does not. It feels rich.

Games That Make You Gasp and Gawk

Every time a new game begins, the familiar dread sets in. You do not want to watch, but you have to. And this time, one game truly stands out as a masterstroke of conceptual horror.

A jump rope game involving two gigantic robotic dolls—yes, Yung-hee is back, but in a new, more sinister avatar—is sheer brilliance. Imagine this: two towering dolls face each other, metal rope swinging like a wrecking ball, contestants forced to keep jumping, timing their moves to millisecond precision while advancing toward a so-called “safe” zone.

It is theatrical, horrifying and oddly poetic. That game alone is worth the price of admission. The creators do not simply escalate violence; they escalate tension and spectacle.

Bittersweet Goodbyes and Shocking Cameos

What really drives the final nail in—and simultaneously opens a brand new Pandora’s box—is a certain cameo toward the end. It is earth-shattering. Not for who shows up, necessarily, but for what it means.

This might be the end of the Squid Game journey. At least for this particular narrative timeline. But the way it concludes leaves you with delicious ambiguity. There is closure, but there is also potential. Multiple spinoffs? A prequel? A warped multiverse where old players return with new agendas? All possible. None confirmed.

What is certain is that the final moments are emotionally shredding. Korean storytelling rarely bows to neat endings, and Squid Game 3 continues that tradition. It leaves you with a head full of questions and a heart that feels like it’s been through a meat grinder. You feel gutted. And yet you feel alive. That strange paradox of being emotionally wrecked and still satisfied is exactly what this finale delivers.

You want to hate it. You love the fact that you want to hate it. You want to scream. You want to clap. You want to replay that final game just to make sure it actually happened. That is the beauty of Squid Game. It is a consistently perplexing experience. Just like the games themselves.

Bloody, Brilliant and Worth Every Second

Squid Game 3 is not perfect. It continues some of Season 2’s narrative drag, particularly with Officer Hwang’s baffling arc. There are blanks. There are questions with no clear answers.

But it is also everything you want a final season to be. High-stakes. Morally jarring. Emotionally relentless. A poetic descent into hell. With candy-colored sets.

This is not television. This is televised warfare of the soul. This is game theory meets gladiator arena. This is human psychology in a meat grinder.

And the best part? It ends in a way that ensures the conversation will continue long after the final episode fades to black.

So go ahead. Binge it right now. Let it wreck you in the best way possible.