Pop Spotlight

Squid Game is the Netflix’s newest streaming sensation, a chilling Korean show about working-class people who would rather complete in a bloody battle royale than be slowly crushed under the boot of capitalism. Naturally, this got the TikTok set thinking about how they would hack it in their very own Squid Game, namely the Dalgona Candy Challenge.

On the show, players are tasked with carving shapes of various degrees of difficulty out of a Korean honeycomb candy similar to toffee. Each player is given a flat dalgona in a tin, which features the outline of the shape, and can only use a needle to chip away the excess candy. They must do so without breaking the final shape before the clock runs out, or be shot.

TikTokers have tested the game out to mixed results, sometimes cooking up their own dalgonas then getting to work with a needle (or toothpick, or knife, whatever they can find) as music from the show plays. Some are far more successful than others, but we’re not sure these quick videos are an accurate gauge of how well they’d fare in the real deal, given that they don’t have AK-47s aimed at their heads.

Squid Game features a cast of debtors, thieves, and disgraced professionals competing against each other in a series of childhood games for an ever-growing pot of money. Every time a player loses, the prize money gets bigger — and said loser dies. It’s a series on par with books like The Hunger Games and Stephen King’s The Long Walk, or the 2000 film and novel Battle Royale. The show, which premiered on September 17th, has proven so popular that a South Korean internet provider sued Netflix due to the untenable traffic surge.

Dalgona has also become a global craze as the show’s popularity continues to surge, earning accolades from the likes of music the Kid Laroi, who tweeted: “Squid Game is most definitely worth all the hype. 10/10.”

Let’s hope the TikTok set sticks to candy, as some of the show’s other challenges are quite a bit more deadly.