Squid Game: The Challenge episode 10 recap — Who won the $4.56 million prize?

Squid Game: The Challenge episode 10 is the nail-biting finale of the Netflix reality competition series where we saw one player walking away with a huge cash prize.

Three contestants remain after entering the dorm as a group of 456 players, and we've seen plenty of twists, turns, and betrayals as players left the competition, missing out on the jackpot.

While, thankfully, they still walk away with their lives unlike the original Squid Game, we're sure they were devastated to not be crowned the winner!

But what happened in the final and who won? Here's what you need to know...

Who won Squid Game: The Challenge?

The final episode of Squid Game: The Challenge mirrored the tense scene in the original series where the remaining three players were invited to enjoy a feast, a welcome treat given the diet of rice they'd been surviving on.

Mai (Player 287), Sam (Player 016), and Phill (Player 451)  are the three remaining players who swapped their tracksuits for tuxedos while they dined, but the game wasn't over yet and two people still needed to be eliminated from the competition.

At the end of their meal, instead of being handed knives and invited to kill a player (which would be a bit extreme to be fair), the players were given a choice.

Each player was told to push one of the three buttons presented in front of them. The button would either turn green (which meant you went through to the next round), red (immediate elimination), or grey (which had no consequences).

Mai volunteered to go first and pressed the triangle button, which turned grey. Unfortunately for Sam, who went second, his button went red and he was immediately eliminated.

Sam was understandably gutted that pure chance had ripped away his chance at winning, and Mai and Phill went to bed in the dorms for one final night, with even more anxiety ahead.

The next day, Phill and Mai played a game of rock, paper, scissors which would determine who would play the next challenge. 

The person who won the round had to fish out a key from a box that contained many keys. From the bunch only one would open the safe containing the golden bank card with the prize money that everyone coveted.

As they kept trying keys and playing rounds of rock, paper, scissors, you could see they were starting to get stressed. As Phill pointed out: "Seeing less and less keys in that box, I know that there's a greater chance that the next person who grabs one is going to open the safe."

Ultimately, Mai manages to open the safe and sees the glorious glowing light inside, and she begins to cry, with Phill congratulating her for the win. The two embrace and Mai gets to go home with the huge prize.

In her exit interview, she exclaimed that "anything is possible" and the episode ended with a glimpse of Players going back to their everyday lives, sans $4.56 million...