How fun! Alerted to this on the Discord:
This game stars six Korean celebs – some you may recognize, some new ones (Bother’s Bar mascot Hong Jinho, Jun Hyanmoo, Park Jiyoon, Henry, Lim Banggeul, NS Yoonji) and together they play a game that’s part Whodunnit murder-mystery dinner and part One Night Werewolf.
Someone has been murdered (fictionally) and the six contestants pick roles of six people who might have been the murderer. Each of them gets some time to learn the character, their motiviations and movements. One of them however is the murderer and is aware of all the clues that point to them and throughout the course of the game must try and throw suspicion onto the other characters.
Each case spans two episodes, the first one is largely exposition – the characters explained, they get to go around the crime scene looking for clues, some discussion. The second episode for me is where the real meat lies – by this point the contestants are more into their characters and take playing detective more seriously. At the end, they all vote on who they think the murderer is. The person with the most votes goes to “jail” and we’ll find out if they’ve been correctly convicted or not – a correct conviction by the majority means that majority gets to take bags of gold coins, if the murderer walks free they get to take all the bags of coins that would have been won by the incorrect majority.
It starts as a game of exploration, becomes a game of logic and ends up being a really fun game of bluff.
It’s very stylishly done (i.e. uses the Tron Legacy soundtrack) and has a fun live viewer participation poll element.
I don’t think it’s as good as The Genius, but I certainly think it would have an easier chance of translating to the West.
It has since been rebooted and sold to other Asian countries. Right now a lot of open questions – are these existing episodes or (more likely I think) New for Netflix ones? And also there’s no date. Still though.
Korea had 2 seasons in 2014-15 during geniusmania, a third season in 2017 which was a bit too late so kinda lost momentum, and then a “reboot” season in 2024. The reboot season went back to 2 episodes per case (which they hadn’t done since halfway through season 1), which is a bit meh IMO.
The China adaption has been a big success, very popular and a season every year since 2016. Also has developed lots of characters, and a long-term plot ala Busted.
To an extent that you can argue about, this show was the genesis for the Jubensha craze, best explained by PMG in their video last year.