Summary
The Game: You Never Play Alone is operating in familiar territory, and despite being crisply edited, it builds to a predictable conclusion.
Coming as a surprise to precisely nobody, the video game industry is pretty aggressively male-dominated. That’s a reality that is, thankfully, beginning to change, but in Rajesh M Selva’s seven-part Netflix series The Game: You Never Play Alone, there’s still plenty of work to be done. Fuelled by a misogynistic culture, relentless online trolling, and increasingly dangerous real-world harassment, it’s an effective cautionary tale that can’t help being a bit too predictable in its twists and its messaging to constitute more than a relatively standard streaming offering.
It starts well, at least. A woman is found unconscious on the beach, presumed dead. What happened to her? Nothing good. She’s found by a group of fishermen, discovered to be alive, and transported to the hospital. Cue an explanatory flashback for necessary context, and, after we’ve caught back up, a spiralling series of events suggesting that the initial attack was just the tip of the iceberg.
The woman is Kavya (Shraddha Srinath), a game developer at the same company where her husband, Anoop (Santhosh Prathap), works. Anoop is a big deal on the back of a mobile game called Mask Mayhem, an invite to which was curiously used to lure Kavya to the scene of the attack that left her knocked out on the beach. Kavya is no slouch in the game development department either, having just won an indie award for her own title, Honey Ruin, but that hasn’t staved off any questions about her credibility. The general idea, in the office and online, is that Kavya is coasting on her husband’s success and is undeserving of the accolades she’s receiving. When she lashes out during an interview along these lines, trolls decide that she has become a valid target for harassment that quickly crosses the transom from digital to physical.
A female police officer battling with her own share of workplace discrimination and injustice, Bhanumathy (Chandini Tamilarasan), begins investigating Kavya’s case and finds its misogynistic underpinnings to be entirely familiar. The same could be said of the show overall. There are, of course, relevant themes here, not least of which being how discrimination continues to pervade certain cultures and industries. But the presentation of this undeniable truth nonetheless lacks depth and becomes, after a while, detrimentally predictable, with late-game “shocks” that aren’t especially shocking to a viewer well-versed in similar stories.
The mistake made in the script, co-written by Karthik Bala and Deepthi Govindarajan, is that simply being in the right, morally speaking, is enough. The thematic points don’t necessarily backdrop a narrative but are, themselves, the story. There’s a more insidious version of a similar plot that is more subtle and obscure and would no doubt be more engaging across seven forty-ish-minute episodes. The Game: You Never Play Alone is not it.
It’s certainly worthwhile on its own terms, though, boasting some solid performances – Shraddha Srinath is particularly effective at displaying an escalating panic without becoming hysterical – and effective craft, especially in the editing. I know I say it all the time, but more shows could stand to be shorter, brevity being an especially underrated quality these days. Seven seems an odd number of episodes, but it’s obviously the precise number needed to tell the story crisply. That, if nothing else, should be commended. It’s just a shame that the ultimate payoff doesn’t yield any major surprises.
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