Summary
The Game: You Never Play Alone has an undeniably predictable ending, but it does at least manage to wrap almost everything up in a comprehensive way.
You could have predicted the ending of The Game: You Never Play Alone after the first couple of episodes. I’ll provide a bit more clarity, naturally, but the gist of it is that the creepy dudes did it because they’re creepy dudes. As I said in my review, The Game doesn’t really do subtlety. Still, there is quite a bit more to Kavya’s fight against sexist injustice, with one or two mysteries still at least partially lingering by the climax.
In general terms, the story follows Kavya, a successful video game developer who begins to receive extremely targeted and dangerous harassment both online and in person. Her crimes include being a woman in a male-dominated industry, which is upsetting to sexists. She’s also married to a man, Anoop, who is also a successful game developer, and the assumption is that her own career success is down to her piggybacking on his talent. Classic business.
Kavya’s Attacker Revealed
Kavya is repeatedly attacked and stalked by a mysterious masked man throughout the series, but the turning point comes when, during a struggle following Tara’s hospitalisation after a failed suicide attempt, Kavya is able to briefly unmask her assailant. She takes the information to the police, and Inspector Banumathi pushes her to figure out where she recognises the guy from.
Eventually, Kavya recalls having glimpsed the dude as an employee of an internet company. This crucial clue allows Banumathi to connect the attacker to the death of Madhesh, one of the suspects in Kavya’s harassment case, who had been found dead when the police had gone to question him. Security footage from the area reveals the same internet employee entering the building. Kavya confirms it.
The man’s name turns out to be Siddharth, a noxious employee with a long list of sexist shenanigans under his belt who had grown up around a deeply misogynistic and abusive father, obviously learning the habits from him. Siddharth had evidently killed Madhesh out of fear he would expose the gang to the police, and now he’s on the run.
Clearminds83 Exposed
Kavya is a victim of an online gang of weirdo misogynists, with three men, in particular, having orchestrated most of the attacks and harassment. One of them was Madhesh, who’s dead, and the other is Siddharth, who’s on the run. The third remains unidentified, known only by the username “Clearminds83”.
Dani, Kavya’s friend and colleague, helps to join the dots here by identifying a specific phrase frequently used by Clearminds83 that is also used by another colleague, Vikram. Banumathi also suspected Vikram, but needed to prove it first by confirming his movements on the night of the first attack.
Vikram is notable for having been in the running for the same indie award that Kavya won for her game, Honey Ruin, When she confronts him about the attacks after hearing from Dani, Vikram reveals that he believed she won the award solely on account of being a woman and, driven mad by jealousy, connected with Madhesh and Siddharth to retrieve the trophy he felt was rightfully his. They had more sinister ideas about what to do with Kavya, though, having already been conducting a hate campaign against her purely on the basis that she was a successful woman.
Tara’s Blackmailer Is Foiled
Of course, it isn’t just Kavya who suffers in The Game: You Never Play Alone, and the ending has to round up what happens not only to her but also to her niece, Tara, and her husband, Anoop. Tara, in particular, falls victim to a slightly unsophisticated blackmail scam in which a 23-year-old named Dev poses as a 17-year-old, love bombs teenage girls into sending him nudes, and, armed with these, extorts the girls into paying him what is essentially a ransom.
Falling for this scheme leads Tara to attempt suicide, which causes Kavya and Anoop to become aware of what was happening to her. Through Banumathi, the police backtrace an intimate uploaded video of Tara, leading them straight to Dev’s location. He and his accomplices are arrested, and their ring is shut down. It isn’t strictly related to Kavya’s harassment plot, but it’s a nice reminder that women of all ages and at all levels of society are often subjected to the same kind of bitter exploitation and harassment by loser dudes.
Kavya Gets Her Revenge In A Fitting Way
Siddharth can’t leave Kavya alone, even after having been identified, so tracks her to the beach house she owns with Anoop with the intention of killing her and proving that women should stay in their lane (or something). Anne and Vikram are also present, which turns out to be bad news for both of them, even if the latter’s efforts to heroically save the day go some way towards rectifying his involvement in the initial attack.
Siddharth manages to badly hurt Anne, though she survives, and also wounds Vikram when he attempts to intervene and goes after Anoop. It’s Kavya who has to take matters into her own hands and fittingly batter Siddharth with the stolen trophy – in self-defence, of course, which means she won’t face any criminal charges. Vikram, on the other hand, won’t be so lucky, despite his efforts to redeem himself.
While this ties almost everything up, the plot against Kavya seemed to go right to the very top of her employer, Moon Bolt, with the boss man, Roshan, and another employee named Gautham, having seemingly also been involved in the plot. Madhesh was paid 700,000 rupees, converted from Euros through Roshan’s European business contacts, to attack Kavya, on account of the usual deeply innate sexism. Gautham was inclined to collaborate thanks to a failed romantic connection with Kavya that was never pursued after a single night. Moon Bolt ends up being acquired by their European investors at the end of The Game: You Never Play Alone, and Roshan is removed from his position. Since the head of Omni Force, the acquiring company, is a woman, this seems like pretty poetic justice to me.
