I’m not sure I’d last very long in the Squid Game universe.

The iconic Netflix series puts challengers through their paces with games like Red Light, Green Light, Tug-of-War and Marbles, which all take on a deadly twist. And now those challenges are being recreated for a new – thankfully lower stakes – reality show, Squid Game: The Challenge, which will see real-life competitors try to win $4.56million.

While it might be a bit difficult to construct a mile-high robot shooting lasers from its eyes in the comfort of my own home, I was keen to get in on the challenge myself. So I decided to try the Dalgona Cookie Challenge.

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In the Netflix series, players in their green tracksuits are handed a cookie each, impressed with a faint shape. They have to remove the shape without cracking it, by any means possible. Some try stabbing the cookies with a thin needle, others break it off by hand, but the easiest method seems to be by licking away the sugary treat to leave the final shape behind.

Squid Game
Squid Game contestants were taskd with removing a shape from a sugar cookie

Those who fail… get shot in the head.

It already wasn’t looking good for me. I found a simple dalgona recipe online, which only required sugar and baking soda to make, and got to cooking. First you heat three tablespoons of sugar in a pan, wait until it melts to a liquid, and add a tiny pinch of baking soda.

That’s where things quickly started to go wrong. It’s incredibly difficult to stop the sugar from burning even on a low heat, and by the time it was ready to spread onto some greaseproof paper, there was no time to arrange the mixture into anything resembling a circular cookie shape, because it was already starting to set.

Cookie
My efforts were decidedly more burned than the Netflix series'

Instead, I smoothed it out into a rectangular shape as best I could using a spatula, and, short of any cookie cutters, used the edge of a drinking glass to impress a circular shape on the treacly mix before it hardened. After a few minutes, both the cookie and I were ready.

My first tactic was licking the edges away, since it worked so well on screen. But the mixture tasted so strongly of burnt sugar that I could only persevere for mere moments before giving up, and started to hack away by hand.

So far, so good. This is surprisingly easy, I thought! I would have won the big bucks no problem! The circular shape held, and it seemed almost impossible to go out of the lines. And then… disaster struck.

Squid Game
And yep... I would have been instantly killed

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A tiny corner of the circle snapped. I could practically feel the helmeted guards turning their weapons on me. Thankfully, it was just me alone in the kitchen, so I decided to give myself a second chance and continued gently breaking off the edges.

I got about a quarter of the way around my circle before a whole chunk of the centre broke away, scuppering my chances of survival. That’s that, then. I wouldn’t last a minute in the hallowed halls of Squid Game.

Hopefully a series of contestants this month will succeed where I failed in games like Trick or Treat, War and Circle of Trust.

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