Alice in Borderland (2020) Review: Death Games With a Heart

Is Alice in Borderland worth watching?

Yes. Alice in Borderland is one of the best survival-game series streaming, a gripping Japanese thriller that treats its deadly puzzles as tests of character rather than excuses for gore. Its empty Tokyo is an unforgettable setting and its games are genuinely clever. The reservations are pacing, which slackens between the showpiece rounds, and a mythology that sometimes promises more than it delivers.

What is Alice in Borderland about?

Arisu (Kento Yamazaki) is an aimless young man who would rather play video games than face his family’s disappointment. One evening, while he is out with his two closest friends, Tokyo seems to switch off. The streets are suddenly deserted, and the only sign of order is a series of arenas where survivors must play games to stay alive. Winning earns a visa, a few more days of life; losing, or refusing to play, is fatal. Arisu soon crosses paths with Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya), a self-reliant climber who has learned to survive alone, and the cool, unreadable Chishiya (Nijiro Murakami).

Alice in Borderland is directed by Shinsuke Sato, adapted from Haro Aso’s manga. It is a Japanese production in Japanese. This review covers all three seasons, 22 episodes in total; the series ended in 2025, and the first two seasons form a complete arc on their own.

An empty Tokyo that looks like a nightmare

Sato’s most striking achievement is the setting itself. The famous Shibuya crossing, standing silent and overgrown, is one of the defining images of streaming television, and the show keeps finding new ways to make familiar city spaces feel wrong: a shopping centre as a hunting ground, an apartment block as a maze. The production has a cinematic scale rare for streaming genre fare, and the visual effects mostly hold up.

The games are cleverly designed. Each is marked by a playing card, with the suit signalling the type of challenge, from physical endurance to logic, teamwork or betrayal, and the number signalling difficulty. That simple system lets the audience anticipate what kind of test is coming, and the best rounds are real puzzles viewers can try to solve alongside the players.

Players worth caring about

What separates Alice in Borderland from many death-game stories is that it takes its characters seriously. Yamazaki makes Arisu’s transformation from drifter to reluctant leader believable, and his gift for patterns and games becomes a source of both hope and guilt. Tsuchiya, whose physicality suits a character defined by strength and nerve, gives Usagi a quiet ferocity and a grief that the show handles tenderly.

Murakami’s Chishiya is the scene-stealer, a detached observer whose motives are never quite clear. The series uses the games to ask why these people want to live at all, a question it pursues more thoughtfully than its lurid premise suggests.

Where the momentum dips

The format has built-in problems. Between games, the pacing can sag into flashbacks and long conversations that restate what the audience already knows. The violence, while never gratuitous by the standards of the genre, becomes numbing in places. As the series moves beyond its core story, the mythology behind the Borderland grows more elaborate, and the answers do not always feel as satisfying as the questions. The tension reliably returns, but viewers may notice the machinery.

Who should watch Alice in Borderland?

It suits fans of survival thrillers, puzzle-box mysteries and Japanese genre filmmaking, and anyone who enjoyed the wider death-game boom. Seasons are short, so the first two can be watched in a long weekend on Netflix. Expect frequent, sometimes bloody violence, deaths of characters, and some nudity and sexual threat, so it is firmly adult viewing.

For more puzzle-driven genre television:

• Dark, a German series that similarly rewards viewers who like to solve along with the characters.
• Severance, for a mystery built around a sinister, rule-bound system and the people trapped inside it.

The verdict

Alice in Borderland is a superior survival thriller: stylish, inventive and more moving than it needs to be. Its pacing and mythology are not as sharp as its games, but its empty Tokyo and its fiercely committed performances make it an easy recommendation for genre fans.

Rating: 4/5