If you finished Squid Game and felt the floor drop out, anime had the answer years before Netflix did. Death games. Forced choices. Hosts who cheat. Players who break. The genre runs deep — and in 2026 it just got a new entry: EXORCISTA: Games of Souls by Victoria Unikel, a dark anime anthology where every fallen public figure dies in real life and wakes up in Content Hell to play for their soul.
Below: 15 anime like Squid Game, ranked by how close the DNA is to the death-game core. Where the stakes are real. Where one wrong answer ends a life. Some are decade-old classics. Some launched this year. The list starts with the newest entry and works backward.
Why Squid Game broke the death-game genre wide open
Squid Game wasn't the first death game on screen. But it was the first to make the mechanic itself the story. Six children's games. One bullet for failure. The audience watches the rules, then watches the rules be broken. Anime got there first — and went harder.
The list below is sorted by stakes pressure: the higher up, the more "every choice could be your last." Streaming links and where to watch are at the bottom.
#1 EXORCISTA: Games of Souls (2026)
The newest entry — and the only one on this list with a single silver-eyed collector who walks in at the end of every game and takes the loser home. The premise: a different fallen public figure each episode dies in the real world and wakes in Content Hell, where a personal demon runs a different lethal game. The host always cheats. The host always loses. Exorcista is the only constant.
Game in EP1: Russian roulette in a glowing game-show set. The victim — Madison Cole — scammed 12 million followers with a $997 "manifest your future self" course. Stole $12 million. Owed $4.2 million. Then she died in her Bel Air penthouse. Then she opened her eyes across from Mammon, wearing a $5,000 hoodie that splits open to reveal demon robes underneath.
Game in EP2: Chess against Azazel, the demon in a white designer suit with chrome eyes and an orange Bitcoin tattoo. The victim — crypto CEO Jake Morrison — stole $200 million from 12,000 investors. His own mother mortgaged her house because her son said it was safe.
Why it ranks #1 here: the host is the antagonist, not the prize. Win and you get nothing back. Lose and you're collected — soul number one of one thousand. Three YouTube Shorts per episode. New episode every two weeks. Free to watch.
→ Watch EP1 The Influencer (3 parts, 4 minutes) · EP2 The Greedmaster — May 22
#2 Alice in Borderland
Three friends fall through a Tokyo subway station and wake up in a parallel city where every game has lethal consequences and a deck of playing cards tracks your survival. Closer to Squid Game than anything else on this list — same "what if the rules were the entire universe" feeling. Live-action adaptation on Netflix, but the manga and anime versions hit harder.
→ Alice in Borderland on MyAnimeList
#3 Death Note
The most famous psychological death game in anime. A high school student finds a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it. A detective hunts him. The game is mental — every conversation is a move, every meal could be poisoned. No game arena. The whole world is the board.
→ Death Note on Wikipedia · Death Note on IMDb
#4 Future Diary (Mirai Nikki)
Twelve people each get a diary that predicts their own future. Last one alive wins the title of god. The diaries betray each other constantly — one tells you your enemy's location, another tells you what your enemy is about to do, a third tells you what your enemy thinks you're about to do. The gimmick spirals into one of the most unhinged death-game runs anime has ever produced.
#5 Btooom!
Twenty-two players abandoned on a tropical island, each given a different type of explosive. To leave, you take eight crystals from other players — which means killing eight others. The protagonist is a video-game champion who recognizes the explosives because the game on the island is the game he plays online.
#6 Darwin's Game
A mobile app invitation. Click to install. The next time you open it, you're fighting another stranger to the death using a randomized superpower. Online death game with offline consequences. The protagonist has the power to mimic any other player's ability — which makes him both very valuable and very, very hunted.
#7 Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor
Adult bracket. Indebted gamblers thrown onto a cargo ship for a mass game of rock-paper-scissors with three cards each. Lose all your cards, lose your kidneys. The drawing style is grotesque, the hopelessness palpable, and the rule explanations are some of the most satisfying problem-solving sequences in any medium.
#8 Tomodachi Game
Five friends owe a debt. They play a series of games that test whether they really are friends. Each game is small — a quiz, a trust exercise — but the loser of each game personally pays a portion of the collective debt. Friendship turns into a knife very, very fast.
#9 Liar Game
A series of escalating money games where lying is encouraged and trusting anyone destroys you. The protagonist is the only player who tells the truth, which means everyone underestimates her, which means she breaks the entire system. Less violent than the others on this list — the violence is what the games do to people's minds.
#10 Doubt
A mobile dating game spills into the real world: six players locked in a building, one of them secretly designated "wolf," everyone else "rabbit." Find and execute the wolf to escape. The wolf, of course, will execute you first. The barcodes on each player's body track the kills.
#11 King's Game
A small-town high school class starts getting late-night text messages signed The King. Each message gives an order. Disobey the order in 24 hours and you die. The orders escalate from "kiss the person next to you" to things you'll spend the rest of the series unable to forget.
#12 As the Gods Will
The classroom version. A normal Tokyo high school turns into a series of children's games run by gods — daruma-san, lucky cat, kokeshi doll — except the games kill anyone who fails. The aesthetic is the closest thing in anime to Squid Game's deliberately off-kilter playground design.
#13 Gantz
The dead are reanimated by a mysterious black sphere and sent to fight aliens. Earn enough points and you can resurrect or get advanced weaponry. Lose and you stay dead. Cosmic horror crossed with corporate gamification. The animation is dated; the existential dread is not.
#14 No Game No Life (lighter alternative)
For when you want the structure without the body horror. Two siblings get pulled into a world where every conflict — including wars between civilizations — is settled by games. They never lose. The kill count is metaphorical. Comes recommended for anyone who finds the rest of this list too heavy.
#15 Magical Girl Site
The cuteness trap. Schoolgirls are recruited by a website that gives them magical girl powers — and then makes them murder each other to absorb each other's powers. Marketed as a lighter shojo title; functionally one of the most brutal entries in the death-game genre.
Where to watch each (streaming guide)
- Crunchyroll — Future Diary, Btooom!, Tomodachi Game, Darwin's Game, As the Gods Will, Magical Girl Site, Death Note (rotating), King's Game.
- Netflix — Alice in Borderland (live-action), Death Note (rotating).
- Hulu — Death Note, Future Diary.
- YouTube — free — EXORCISTA: Games of Souls full playlist on @TheExorcista.
- Manga only — Doubt, Kaiji (anime is incomplete; the manga finishes the run).
Check Livechart and AniList for current streaming availability — rights rotate often.
What to watch first if you only have 60 minutes
Three episodes, three different angles on the genre:
- EXORCISTA: Games of Souls — EP1 The Influencer (4 minutes total, 3 Shorts). The cleanest "single death game per episode" structure on the list. → Watch EP1
- Alice in Borderland — episode 1 (live-action, ~50 min). The closest tonal match to Squid Game, ported to a Tokyo no-one-knows-the-rules-yet setting.
- Future Diary — episode 1 (~24 min). The fastest way to feel the genre's psychological gear.
That's the full crash course. Bookmark this list — it's updated each season.
A note on EXORCISTA: Games of Souls
The reason it's #1 isn't proximity bias — it's that the show was built specifically to do what Squid Game did to children's games, but to modern internet personality archetypes. Each episode targets a different real predator-trope: the influencer who scammed her followers, the crypto CEO who rugged his investors, the predator who monetizes anxiety. The villain isn't the system. The villain has a name and a face and a soul that gets collected.
It lives on YouTube, free, three Shorts per episode, new episode every two weeks. Created by Victoria Unikel and produced by VUGA Media Group. The official series site is gamesofsouls.com.
→ Watch EXORCISTA: Games of Souls EP1 · EP2 May 22 · Russian Roulette soundtrack album