Squid Game on a Chromebook: Controls, Round Select, Fullscreen and Fixes

Most of the people who play Squid Game on this site do it on a Chromebook between classes, and the game happens to suit that machine well: it is 6 MB, it draws to a plain 2D canvas rather than WebGL, and it never asks for a key. This is the short version of everything worth knowing before you press PLAY.

There are no keyboard controls

The game reads the mouse button and the pointer position, nothing else. On a Chromebook that means the trackpad: press and hold to run in Round 1, press and drag to cut the candy, tap repeatedly for the rope, tap ODD or EVEN, tap either half of the screen on the bridge, and press and hold the round pad in the final. Tap-to-click is fine for everything except the tug of war, where a physical click is quicker; if you have a USB mouse, plug it in for that round.

Choosing your number and your round

After PLAY the game shows a three-digit player number. The arrows either side change it — hold one and it scrolls — and CHOOSE locks it in. Under the PLAY button on the main menu there is a second pair of arrows that reads Round 1 through Final Round; whichever it shows when you start is the round you begin on. Use it. Playing the bridge or the final ten times in a row teaches more than ten full runs that end at the doll.

Fullscreen and sound

The gear button in the top-right corner opens the options: a speaker for sound and an arrows button for fullscreen. On a Chromebook the game scales to the window, so fullscreen mostly helps the candy round, where a bigger outline is easier to trace. Sound matters more than it looks: the light-on and light-off sounds arrive a fraction before the doll's animation finishes, and the rope creak and the countdown beeps at five seconds are the only warnings you get.

Quitting a run

The door button next to the gear ends the run, but only after an 'Are you sure?' box. There is no save and no continue: a run is one sitting, and closing the tab is the same as dying. If you need to leave, note which round you were on and use the round selector next time.

When it does not load

The game shows a number that counts to 100 while it loads its sprites and sounds. If it sits on one number, reload the page once; the build is served from this domain, so a stall is almost always the school network pausing a download rather than the game. A message saying your browser is not supported means the page could not create a canvas, which on a Chromebook happens only when a hardware-acceleration flag has been switched off in chrome://settings — turn it back on. If the sound is missing, click anywhere in the game once: Chrome does not allow audio until the page has been clicked.

What to play next

If you like the elimination format, the games on the Survival & Elimination shelf are the closest relatives: Short Life and Level Devil for traps, NuggetRoyale and YoHoHo for last-one-standing rounds. The Party & Mini-Games shelf has the two-player one-button games — 12 MiniBattles, Sumo Party, Drunken Duel — that work at one keyboard with the person next to you.