Alice In Borderland is a fun, bloody reminder that there’s no “keeping politics out of games”
Netflix's latest streaming sensation is a surprisingly thoughtful treatise on the art of creating games—and neck bombs
Games Features Alice in Borderland
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Over the holiday season—and in a cunning (and, in my case, effective) gambit to scoop up some of that precious binge-heavy holiday downtime—Netflix released the second season of bloody Japanese TV series Alice In Borderland. If you haven’t seen the show (which released its first season back in 2020, and which is based on a manga that ran from 2010 through 2016), the hook is pretty straightforward: A bunch of people get transported into an alternate universe version of Tokyo, where they’re then forced to play sadistic, murder-based games in order to survive.
It’s not hard, obviously, to see why Netflix snagged the show a few years back, and why it pushed out another season at a time when it might catch a bunch of bored eyes: Alice’s similarities to Korean streaming mega-hit Squid Game are undeniable. That’s all the way down to the frequent uses of children’s games (including “Tag” and “Hide And Go Seek” in the case of Alice) with lethal consequences, taking the simplistic and innocent and then jamming a bunch of bombs and sky-lasers and literal, no-fucking-around tigers into it.
What’s interesting about Alice, though—and the reason it deserves some inches in a column dedicated to gaming—is the way it puts its focus on the act of game design itself. Whereas Squid Game largely anonymized the creation of the games its hapless participants were run through—the better to tie each contest into the faceless and indifferent cruelty of the capitalist system they were meant to evoke—Alice In Borderland (eventually) puts its designers front and center. That’s especially true in the show’s second season, where Arisu (Kento Yamazaki) and his friends graduate from more basic games into elaborate spectacles organized by the “face cards”—mysterious denizens of the Borderlands who not only design the games, but are also active players within them.
Even before Arisu faces off against The King Of Clubs or The Queen Of Hearts, though, he’s already cottoned on to a fundamental principle of game design, one that oh so many “keep politics out of games” types oh so deliberately miss: Game creation is an act of communication. Of transmitting ideas, values, and assumptions to the people who end up playing them. From his very first game, Arisu—an obsessive gamer who finds himself in a very dark version of his element in the Borderland—notes that every game contains a “signature” of its creator, detectable in the ways it’s meant to be played. It’s a recurring theme of Alice that no game can be won until you understand the principle that it’s trying to demonstrate; Arisu wins out time and time again not because he’s especially strong, or even tremendously brilliant, but because he has a talent for sussing out the minds of each game’s creator before calamity can strike.
And that’s a big part of what makes Alice compelling, even when it occasionally loses its way through over-the-top violence or drawn-out melodrama. (I like the show, but do I “80-minute final episode” like it? Eh.) Each game is a mystery that Arisu or one of his friends has to unravel, usually with a ticking clock and a bunch of neck bombs putting pressure on the process. The victories, then, are ones of empathy even more than physical prowess—and despite the inherent, deadly cruelty of some of the games in question. (The communication doesn’t have to be nice, after all.)
That whole ethos is also a powerful rejection of the idea that games can exist without messages, even if that message is as simple as “running around and jumping is pretty fun” or “You need to think for a minute before you start shoving people through murder doors.” That’s a big part of why games are fun, after all: They connect us on intuitive, often non-verbal levels, serving as art that we don’t just perceive or receive, but actively participate in and create. Beneath all the gore and angst, Alice In Borderland gets that: That asking (or, uh, forcing) someone to play a game with you is to invite them into your world.
14 Comments
I enjoyed this a fair bit. Squid Game never hooked me because it all felt very impersonal, which I understand is part of the point of it. This show made me care about the characters though, even the ones that were super hateable (except Niragi, fuck that guy). The finale was way more drawn out than it needed to be, you’re 100% correct about that, but I cared enough about the characters to want to push through and learn how things end up for them.
Season 2 does not mess around though. Not even 5 minutes in and we both simultaneously blurted out “Well, THAT escalated quickly!”
I really enjoyed the second season and the thing at the end after they win the games, wow, that shit got DARK quick. And then finding out where the games took place was cool. Really good finale. Lightyears better than the finale of Into the Badlands, which I just finished on Netflix, that fucking SUCKED. Like 100% they were expecting another season, which never happened. Binging it also remined me why I stopped watching it on AMC, the kung fu just wans’t good. To much Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon floating around or jumping up on something for a stupid pose before continuing the fight.
Alice in Borderlands is OK. Really don’t think it is in the same class as Squid Game (see the comparison a lot) but the first season was decently fun to watch. I do think the direction is really heavy-handed with a lot of games and scenes dragged out – it has the pacing of a bad anime at times, with characters emoting for minutes to find the strength to keep going.I was somewhat disappointed by the second season although everything with Chishiya was very entertaining. Thought King of Spades and Queen of Spades were a bit lame and thought the King of Clubs game, while entertaining, was overly drawn out. It was also disappointing to see some of the more physical games (dodgeball, climbing ropes) be relegated to a montage. And agree that the finale had no need to be longer.
I stopped to check the Internet about half way through the first season to see if this was an adapted manga because it had the writing and the tropes that made me sick of watching anime, and if course it was. Like you said, it was just ok. Second half of the second season was a slog
The buzz on this show seems oddly delayed. I wonder if seeing it get a second season pushed more people to check it out. The comic was good, so I’ll prob. give it a watch at some point. Somehow William’s reading re. game design as communication never occurred to me, but it makes total sense!This weekend is for some Elden Ring, methinks. After a long, lazy lull of little-to-no AAA or console gaming, I worked up a bit of mental energy to hop back on and I’m hooked again. After a light bit of googling “where the fuck are those characters I haven’t seen in forever”, I’ve mopped up a few of the NPC questlines (Nepheli’s ending was pretty satisfying). I feel like I’m close to the point where I’m locked into an ending, so I’ve been putting off climbing the mountain until I’m confident there’s nothing left to miss.On the PC front, I’ve just acquired a new monitor. I’m still using a 1060, so idk that I’ll be able to take much advantage of the increased resolution when gaming; but the extra real estate is very nice for work and it lets me do away with a horrible second screen I’ve been using.
Finished this the other night, almost fell asleep during the finale (The scene with the queen of hearts is like 20 minutes long!!) I enjoyed the show a lot though. Some of the games were fascinating, and some of them (shown in the montage) were weak and dumb. The episodes with Chishiya are the best ones this season, and the games he plays in are worth slogging through other stuff.
Hot Take Alert: I get why people compare it to Squid Game, but this show is better than Squid Game.
What do you mean by “latest sensation”? Did they just add this to USA Netflix? Cause it’s been on Canadian Netflix since late 2020 or so. Not very latest at all.
I think I’m eventually going to pick up another month or two of Netflix to catch up on a targeted list of series I keep hearing people talk about, or that seem like good watches for me, but going 15 years without cable before I got Netflix for the first time, I realized that I’m out of the habit of turning on the TV and looking for something to watch, as though the TV being on for 8 hours a day in the background is its default state. Which isn’t some big, smug statement. It’s just a habit I fell out of, and now I’m perpetually behind on 90% of what people are talking about at work.And this sounds good. This article makes me want to watch it, where nothing really compelled me to watch Squid Game. It’s going on the big mental list.The past week I finally knocked Cultist Simulator off the “maybe I’ll get back to this” list. I’d previously done 3 playthroughs and realized they were 99.9% the same. Managing a giant board with well over 100 cards and moving things around to prevent 4 types of death while making 3 types of progress toward forfeiting your humanity in favor of becoming a nightmare creature of some description is actually very satisfying. The experimentation and research needed to get this comfortable with the game mechanics makes victory feel earned, like I’m playing Nethack or something. But the portion of the game that you have to do differently to get a different ending is tiny, and the game has achievements for 40 different variations on that tiny portion of the playthrough.So when I got two new endings this week after doing what felt like the same playthrough twice, I happily pulled up a guide on using the console to directly trigger every ending without putting in the work, just to get rid of the nagging feeling that I was missing anything significant in those remaining 40-ish achievements. And I probably will come back to this game every several months, even though I’ve already gotten my money’s worth. I actually really enjoy it. But now I don’t have an achievement meter suggesting I’ve seen less than half of what the game has to offer, which is objectively false. I appreciate when an achievement list is used as a set of signposts for content I might’ve otherwise missed, but Cultist Simulator’s is fucking balls.Now working on My Time at Sandrock, building conveniences, necessities, and life-changing upgrades for the residents of an idyllic post-apocalyptic desert town. There’s something very cool about a series of games that makes life after The Big One peaceful instead of desperate. The desert world’s a big contrast from the forested cliffs of the first one, and it’s cool that they altered the game’s mechanics to address dust storms and drought, but kept the “yeah, the world basically ended, but we’re just kinda getting along while we rebuild” vibe of the first game. Based on the quest I’m doing right now, I’m probably going to be opening up a huge swathe of the map shortly, and that was always my favorite part of the first game. The map feels big enough for this type of game, you’re comfortable with the idea that the canyons and cliffs in the background are just background, then after 10-15 hours they give you a new mode of transportation and say, “Well go on, explore the rest of the world.”
I picked up the new Saints Row over the holidays, knowing it had a lot of problems, but hey, I had to give it a look eventually.So far? Well I can see the flaws. I’ve had a few glitches, though nothing game-breaking so far. Maybe the PS4 version is more stable than others. The world has too much empty space for a game of this type- it’s all well and good for BotW but sandbox games like this and GTA should just have you pinballing around doing stupid shit. There is at least fast travel and I like the weird little scavenger hunts.It’s growing on me? Storywise you start out being an employee of a PMC who also does crime on the side which seems weird (it’s the story of us becoming a gangster but we’re already a hardened criminal? I think there was some internal conflict as to what the story was gonna be.) This lasts for a few missions until finally you get fired, and here I started to feel the old magic- the first mission after you get fired has the on-screen objective “wallow in your own failure” and has you struggling to get out of bed, unsuccessfully toasting a waffle, and finally just giving up and slumping on the couch. It’s the kind of clever use of the format that we saw in the early scenes of Saints Row IV (particularly the “Leave it to the Saints” section), and when the mission went from that to the Boss finally going into business for themself and their roomies, it felt pretty strong.Maybe it’s worse later, and it’s definitely not up to the heights of 2-4. Despite being substantially delayed there just apparently was not enough time to fix up the engine and also develop more content, and also I guess Deep Silver couldn’t afford the music rights for a good “Mix” style station so the radio selection is underwhelming. But then the first game had that problem and many more besides, and I’d rank this above that, at least so far. The driving and shooting feel quite nice, Volition are still good at the fundamentals. I’m sticking with it for now.
Is this more “fun” then Squid Games? I never finished SG because it got to fucking depressing to watch. I didn’t want to watch people being awful to each other over and over again
Ehhh. The people are just as terrible, but they meet their ends in more entertaining ways. And while Squid Game went from “I want to win” to “I want to survive,” Alice sort of headed the other way, which felt less depressing.
All I know is that I want an Ann and Kuina spinoff where they kick ass.
and make out, which they shaded at…do Japanese shows generally not have LGBTQ characters? Because there were a few characters that seem like they were meant to be lgbtq and the show didn’t have the courage
I’ve definitely seen queer and queer-coded people where they get close to intimacy, but I think it’s generally left to manga. I also know trans characters should be played by trans actors, but considering some of the depictions I’ve* seen of trans (and gay) people in anime and Japanese games, this was absolutely the best.*It’s possible there have been better handled characters in Japanese media and possibly performed by trans actors, I just haven’t seen them.