They said that one game can change your life but what if the game not only changes lives but also takes life itself? This drama released last December 4th of 2023 is actually banging the suspense/thriller genre yet again. The story is about a group of students who got stuck alone during a trip without their teachers. They were left alone in a school like facility which was supposed to be a retreat. A mysterious message asking them to join a mafia game got them hooked only to discover that this game is not just a game but a real game that can affect all of their lives.

In the game, each of the members were given a position or role and each round, they need to know who among them are the Mafias. Aside form the Mafias, there are also Citizens, Police Officer who has the access to know the position of the person he/she chooses and Doctor who can heal at least one participant in a limited span of time. The game is easy, if you actually think of it, but little did they know, the game actually kills the participants who were chosen wrongly.

The entire game evolved on the students and how they deal with the pressure of knowing that any of them can be Mafia. Some of them managed to get allies and some of them created some enemies along the way. If everyone thinks that you’re not what you claim you are, then they have the ability to vote you out of the group and accused you of being a mafia, then and there, once everyone chose you, there’s a weird instance that your brain will be controlled by some kind of mystery that makes you kill yourself, executing yourself out of the game.

In the middle of flashbacks, they are showing some footages that tangles them into a situation in the past that they never thought could be the reason why they are all slowly dying, one by one. While they are also in the game, they try their best to collect some clues and information as to who is behind this game and what could be the reason why they are killing people.

The series is rather gruesome and unbelievable but in a good way. There are scenes that you might find disturbing because they reached to the point that they had to choose someone that they can kill only to be able to live. There were series more gruesome as this but I think what really got me is that it was supposed to be a school trip and yet, all of a sudden they are in an abandoned place where it seemed like it was made out of a movie scene.

I mean this is a good thing since there’s so much cliché happening when it comes to horror films and dramas. With all the slasher movies coming back in the limelight, I guess it is really time to take a step forward for suspense/thriller films to be in the game again.

It’s been a while since we saw some interesting films under this genre. Well, the last movie I liked was The Call which starred Park Shin-hye, that was 2020 and after that, most of the thriller/suspense/ mystery movies are just randomly alright but not too exciting.

Ending explained: Spoiler Alert!

This is rather surprising but at the end of the series, in the last episode, they showed that this is all a simulation. In which the parents of a late classmate of theirs had planned everything and made sure these students will feel whatever their daughter felt when she killed herself and no one has helped her.

The game was developed by the parents and all the students are somehow feeling the pain of dying without dying in reality. They have been doing this for a very long time, trying to make sure the character they made will always win the game, however, under a mysterious circumstance, citizens won the game and they want to figure how the students’ brain did that exactly. The main question is, how can they escape this hell? In the end scene, one of the students woke up and discovered everything, only to realized that she cannot escape and kept on coming back on the game.

All in all, I would definitely recommend this series, not only to entertain, but to actually make sense of the whole series, because it is rather still a mystery for me on how two people were able to manage to do such thing. I would definitely want to have a season 2 because we all deserve an ending for this. I will give this 83% wonderroanne rating.