A clever mafia‑game concept undone by a twist so random it resets the entire story — literally.

Drama Name: 밤이 되었습니다 (It’s Night)

Where To Watch: Viki, Viu, Netflix, Apple TV← *Click for direct link*

Average Rating: 8.2/10 (Mydramalist)

My Rating: 5.0/10

One Sentence Description: A drama that hooks you with mystery and tension, only to reveal a backstory that raises more questions than answers.

Trailer:

Disclaimer: This review is 100% my opinion — I’m not here to hate, just to share my thoughts! Also, SPOILERS AHEAD, so proceed with caution if you haven’t watched yet. Watch it, come back and let’s see if you agree. Let’s keep the discussion respectful and fun! 💕

CONTENT WARNING:I hope you’ve already seen this show and know what the deal is. But in case you don’t, I felt like I should add in a little warning. This show has slight mentions of Suicide. And since this is a review, I do also talk about this (in relation to the show only). Please be aware of that before you continue and be mindful of it. Stay safe ❤️

Simple Description

Night Has Come follows a class of high school students trapped at a youth centre during a field trip, forced into a real‑life mafia game where every vote, every role, and every rule has deadly consequences. Welcome to the mafia game — except this time, losing means dying (for real).

⚠️Length Note: This post includes a detailed (and long) story breakdown. Want to skip straight to the review? Jump to the Review

The Review

The Good

Short, Sweet, and Easy to Binge

I mentioned this in Extracurricular (review here!), but whenever I have very little or nothing good to say, I usually talk about the length, the acting, or the scenery. In this case, it’s the length. Night Has Come being only 12 episodes with every episode finishing under 30 minutes made it surprisingly easy to zoom through. Before I knew it, I was halfway done, and after blinking a few times, I’d somehow reached that disappointing ending. I’m glad it at least had the length going for it because there’s something refreshing about a drama that knows how to keep things moving. I actually appreciate that this one didn’t drag itself out longer than it needed to.

Mafia, But Make It K-Drama

Even though I talk about this more in The Bad, the game itself was actually done pretty well. One thing I love about Korean dramas and praise all the time is how creative they can be, and turning the game Mafia into an actual drama was a pretty clever idea. It gave the story an easy way to create tension, suspicion, alliances, and betrayals without needing some complicated explanation for why everyone was suddenly fighting for their lives. And except for that random ending, it was genuinely an interesting watch. 

I’m much more into romances or at least dramas with some romance, so it’s difficult for me to finish something with little to no romance, but this actually managed to keep me interested anyway. Maybe it was because the episodes were so short, but I was surprised by how quickly I kept pressing play. That’s not easy to do, so I’ll give Night Has Come credit where it’s due.

The Bad

The Twist That Came Out of Nowhere

I think my biggest pet peeve with psychological thrillers is when they think introducing the big twist at the end, with absolutely no buildup, is enough to make the drama or movie hit the way it needs to. But I’d argue the opposite. Nothing dulls a reveal more than a story that refuses to leave breadcrumbs. The best thrillers hit precisely because on a second watch, you start noticing all the tiny hints that seemed insignificant but were actually crucial. This drama? It reminded me of Forgotten (review here!) and The Silenced (review here!), where the ending comes flying out of left field because the show spent 90% of its runtime hinting at something completely different. 

And unfortunately, Night Has Come gave us almost nothing to work with. All we knew was: mafia game + haunting problem. That’s the setup we were given from episode one all the way to episode eleven. Then suddenly, in the final episode, we find out it’s all VR and none of it is real. To be honest, I’m not blind to the subtle hints that were introduced throughout the drama with the CCTV, the ghost, and the “feelings” Yoon Seo got, but those hints were too ambiguous to really lead us anywhere. To be honest, I was thinking that maybe some psycho man was controlling all of this and hiding around the school because that was me using the hints they were giving us. So I won’t sit here and say there were no hints, but they failed to lead us anywhere and they definitely didn’t lead us to the ending that we got. I don’t know about y’all, but that completely ruined the show for me. I didn’t know what I expected at the end but it definitely wasn’t that. And that was the problem.

But… Why Mafia?

I actually read a comment asking this, and I had the exact same question. Out of all the games they could’ve chosen, why Mafia? Why that game specifically? I know I complimented the game above, but it really was such a random choice. Especially when you consider what the game was apparently supposed to accomplish. If the parents were going to torture their daughter’s classmates, I would’ve expected the game to somehow force them to remember what happened and relive the truth over and over again. Instead, we got a mafia game that didn’t really have a meaningful connection to the original incident.

It makes me think of Forgotten (here) again — something done half‑right. Like how they used the same house where everything happened (being vague for spoilers). Even though they didn’t use it meaningfully, the idea was clever. Night Has Come could’ve done something similar with the game itself. Maybe they’re trapped in the same school where everything happened. Maybe they’re forced to reenact the events surrounding Se Eun’s death. Or maybe it’s an entirely different game where the bullies are repeatedly punished for what they did. There were so many possibilities that would’ve made the game feel intentional instead of something they picked because Mafia happens to work really well for a survival thriller.

Then on top of that, why were the bullies the Mafia? On one hand, I understand it because they were the perpetrators. But then why was Jung Won on their team? If the game was meant to ensure that Jung Won, who was essentially the game-version of Se Eun, won, why were the bullies on the winning side? And since they played the game so many times, they must’ve won multiple times. Why would the perpetrators ever have a chance to win in the first place?

And if the citizens were supposed to represent the bystanders or people who didn’t really know what was happening, why were they the ones being killed? Yoon Seo is a perfect example because she didn’t know what was happening, yet she was still put in the same position as everyone else. I even read a comment suggesting that simply being Se Eun’s classmate meant you had to be punished. Whether you knew what happened or not, you suffered anyway. And honestly, that interpretation makes the whole thing even more messed up because now the game isn’t even really about justice. It’s punishing everyone indiscriminately.

And continuing with the comments I read, if Jung Won also had her memories wiped, why was she being punished too? If she was trapped in this game without knowing what was happening, she had to repeatedly watch her friends and classmates die just like everyone else. And if she was simply a robot designed to participate in the game, then why not program her to remember what happened but not care about the consequences? There are so many questions surrounding the drama and the game itself that I could genuinely keep going forever. And the worst part is that these questions only came up at the very end when that pathetic VR was revealed. At some point, I started spending more time trying to figure out how the game was supposed to work than actually enjoying it.

*Bonus: I also read a comment that said since Da Beom killed two citizens in the final episode, why didn’t all the mafias just kill everyone at night? and I agree. I appreciated the rules they were given but it made no sense to me that they were killing one citizen a day — like it was a rule — only to kill multiple at the end. The comment went on to say that the mafias should’ve thrown all the citizens phones out the designated zones and called it a day. And I was sat at that, let me tell you!*

Characters With No Depth, No Growth, No Anything 

I feel like a lot of these points are based on comments I read and agreed with, but at least we have the same minds (We’re besties fr fr 🤞). I saw multiple comments pointing out that none of the characters really had backstories or development, and I agree wholeheartedly. 

We had:

• Yoon Seo and Jun Hee, who radiated “main character template” energy
• Kyung Jun, the bully with no reason
• So Mi, the girl-bully with no reason
• A bunch of extras who got one moment to shine before dying

I mean, what was up with Kyung Jun? At least in Head Over Heels (review here!), the main bully had somewhat of a backstory. What was Kyung Jun’s? And what about So Mi? What was her issue? I’m not asking for every character to get a ten-episode psychological breakdown, but give me something. Instead, this drama felt like a game where every character was assigned a specific role and that was basically all they were allowed to be.

Then we have Yoon Seo and Jun Hee, who were supposed to be the typical main leads but honestly brought very little to the table. They gave Jun Hee some PTSD, which I actually would’ve appreciated if they had fully explained it. He had this water trauma that was just left hanging in the air, and I kept waiting for the drama to actually do something with it. 

Nobody really grew and nothing meaningful changed from the moment we met these characters to the moment we watched them die. And if anyone deserved more development, I actually think it was Jung Won. Why couldn’t we see her actively trying to save more people? She seemed pretty comfortable killing everyone from beginning to end, so I wanted to see some kind of internal struggle. If she was basically an NPC, let us watch her fight against the coding they put her in. Show her remembering pieces of herself, questioning what she was programmed to do, or genuinely trying to break out of it. That would’ve been interesting.

And honestly, that sums up one of my biggest problems with Night Has Come. The entire drama felt like a game where every character was given a specific role and then never allowed to exist outside of it. The bully was the bully. The nice main characters were the nice main characters. The quiet characters were the quiet characters. The extras were there to have one emotional moment before getting killed. There was so much potential to make these people feel like actual teenagers with complicated feelings, relationships, fears, and histories, but instead, most of them felt more like pieces on a game board than actual characters.

The Backstory Needed a Translator

So what really happened in the past? From what I could piece together, I’m guessing Da Beom had a crush on Se Eun, put her face on a female entertainer, got bullied into spreading it, and that eventually made Se Eun a target and led to her taking her own life. Did I get everything? Because I genuinely had to piece that together myself. I can’t tell you how confused I was during the first watch. And if I’m still asking questions about the basic history of the story by the end, something went wrong somewhere.

And then we get to the point where we ask: why did everyone forget what happened? Like, come on!! If the parents truly wanted revenge, what good is it if the students don’t even know what they’re being punished for? How are they supposed to understand the consequences of their actions when they don’t even remember the original incident? This feels like the perfect example of what happens when you react based on emotion instead of logic. By the time everyone finally started figuring out what happened with Se Eun, half the students were already dead. And then I’m sitting there wondering how long ago this even happened. Where were all of their parents? Did nobody notice their children were missing? Did nobody think it was strange that an entire class of students had disappeared? And how did those students get lured there? Kyung Jun and his group and So Mi and hers were arrogant and rude, there’s no way they would’ve gone to Se Eun’s house or wherever they were. Like… What was really going on in this show?

The Villain You Couldn’t Completely Hate

I feel like with a game like this, where the characters are actively killing each other, it’s easy to stop caring about the villains and think, “They didn’t have to be so brutal.” But that wasn’t necessarily the case here. Da Beom had every reason to be angry. He was bullied relentlessly by Kyung Jun and his group, tried to die multiple times, and had no one around to actually help him. So while I obviously can’t excuse murder (nor his brutality), I also can’t sit here and pretend I didn’t understand where his hatred came from.

I’m actually really glad that Da Beom called out Jun Hee, too. Jun Hee was introduced as the most likable character, the genuinely good guy everyone could trust, and yet he knew Da Beom was being bullied and did nothing. I feel like we all learned in middle school that being a bystander makes you part of the problem, so watching Da Beom confront him about it was honestly satisfying. Jun Hee and Yoon Seo were the typical main characters everyone would naturally love, trust, and listen to, and yet neither of them did anything while Da Beom was being tortured. Murder is always wrong, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend I wasn’t satisfied watching Da Beom get the revenge he wanted— especially when he finally got Kyung Jun.

Kyung Jun Didn’t Die Quick Enough

I couldn’t STAND Kyung Jun. He was actually the worst! Watching him stay alive for basically the entire drama was genuinely torture. He was so hardheaded and cruel for absolutely no reason, and after he killed that guy at the beginning, I spent the rest of the drama wondering when someone was finally going to take him out. Every time he survived another round, I was like, “Oh, we’re still doing this?” 

This is also where some actual character development or a backstory would’ve helped him. Not to justify his actions, but to understand them. And if you’ve read my other reviews, you already know I say that a lot. I don’t need a tragic childhood that magically excuses everything a character does, but I want to understand what made them become this person. Instead, Kyung Jun was reduced to “the bully who brutally bullies people because he’s a bully,” and that was basically it.

What I Would Do

Make it a Murder Mystery

If I were rewriting Night Has Come, I’d scrap the mafia game and turn it into an actual murder mystery. Creating the mafia game was creative and done well, but it ultimately didn’t serve the bigger picture in a meaningful way. So that would be fixed with a murder mystery. Here’s how I’d do it:

The students would enter believing they’re participating in a survival game, except they’re told there’s a murder to solve (we won’t find this out until the big reveal at the end though). They have seven days to figure out who was responsible for the death of one of their classmates before the game ends. What they don’t know is that the victim is Se Eun, or Jung Won, and she died before the game ever began. Their memories of the incident have been suppressed, not completely erased, so they remember Se Eun as their classmate but don’t remember her death, the bullying, the video, or their own involvement. The game isn’t creating the mystery from nothing. It’s slowly forcing them to remember something they already know.

What About Those Flashbacks?

I think the biggest fall of the drama was introducing the truth in the final episodes. It made everything feel rushed and robbed us of the excitement of trying to figure things out for ourselves. So this is where I’d make the mystery something the audience can actually participate in. At the beginning of each episode, we’d get a short, seemingly random flashback from the past. Maybe we see a girl crying alone in the classroom, someone filming something on a phone, Jun Hee standing outside while someone is being bullied, or a student saying, “Don’t tell anyone.” We don’t get the full context, and we may not even know who we’re looking at. Instead, that flashback would reflect what the present-day episode is about and give us a small piece of the larger mystery. Then, as the students find a clue that triggers another memory, we return to that moment later and see more of it from another perspective. Eventually, all those seemingly unrelated flashbacks start connecting until the audience realises we’ve been watching pieces of Se Eun’s final days the entire time.

The important thing is that the game never just gives us the answer. Every clue triggers another memory, and every trial corresponds to something that happened to Se Eun. That means viewers paying close attention could start putting the pieces together before the characters do. We might suspect Da Beom because in flashbacks we keep seeing him with the video and looking like he’s responsible, only to later discover he was being brutally bullied himself and was forced into making it. We might suspect Jun Hee because he’s repeatedly shown standing nearby, only to realise his crime was that he kept watching and doing nothing. The mystery would constantly change the meaning of what we thought we already knew.

So…Who Actually Dies?

I’d also keep the death-game aspect, but I wouldn’t actually kill anyone. When a student “dies,” their avatar is eliminated from the simulation and they’re transferred to an observation room where they can watch the remaining students. That way, the game never has to conveniently kill an innocent student just because the plot needs to keep certain characters around. Instead, the innocent students are removed first because they have nothing left to uncover. Bystanders remain longer because the game still needs them to confront their inaction, while the direct perpetrators remain until the end because their stories contain the biggest missing pieces. That way it removes that morally grey area where innocent students aren’t being punished simply because they happened to share a classroom with Se Eun. 

Eventually, the remaining students realise something horrifying: they’re not actually trying to survive. They’re trying to finish the investigation. The people who have been “killed” aren’t dead, and the game was never about seeing who could last the longest. It’s about uncovering the truth. I’d also keep the mafia-style rule that guilty students can’t knowingly expose each other. They can confess their own actions, but if they try to reveal another person’s involvement, the game interferes with their memory or distorts what they’re trying to say. So if Da Beom remembers who pressured him into making the video, he can admit, “I made it,” but he can’t simply point at someone and say, “They made me do it.” The clues have to expose the rest.

Character Development Anyone?

This would also give these characters something they desperately needed: lives outside of the roles they were assigned. Jun Seo and Yun Seo’s only personality were being the main characters, Kyung Jun and So Mi’s personalities were being the bullies and so on. It got boring and made the characters difficult to root for/fully hate. It often felt like every character was an NPC and coded to be a certain way. Like how lame is that? Like I mentioned above, Da Beom would initially look like one of the biggest villains because we see him making the video, but the flashbacks slowly reveal that he was being bullied and pressured into doing it. He had a crush on Se Eun, and although he didn’t intend for the video to spread the way it did, he ultimately stayed silent instead of taking responsibility or trying to stop it. That doesn’t make him innocent, but it makes him complicated.

Jun Hee could have a similar realization. He’s the beloved class president everyone trusts, but the flashbacks reveal that he repeatedly stood by while Da Beom and Se Eun were bullied. His arc would be realising that being a good person isn’t just about not doing bad things. Sometimes it’s about what you do when someone else is doing something bad.

Yoon Seo would be especially heartbreaking because she genuinely was Se Eun’s best friend and genuinely didn’t know what was happening. Maybe she notices that Se Eun is acting strangely and tries to talk to her, but Se Eun says she’s fine. Yoon Seo respects that and gives her space, never realising how serious things are until it’s too late. Her eventual trial wouldn’t ask, “Are you guilty?” because she isn’t. It would ask, “Have you learned?” She’d be forced to relive that moment and decide whether she’ll walk away again or stay and keep asking questions. That lets her grow without turning her into a clueless main character just to make sure she’s “different” from everyone else. 

And What About the Ending?

This is where I’d finally introduce the detective, but I’d plant breadcrumbs long before the reveal. Throughout the game, there could be little signs that someone outside the simulation is watching: a strange message that references the real investigation, an object that shouldn’t exist in the reconstructed school, a distorted voice asking questions the students don’t understand, or brief cuts showing someone reviewing their statements. The detective would properly enter the story a few episodes before the finale, investigating Se Eun’s death and explaining that the official story never made sense. She discovered contradictions in the students’ statements and used the experimental VR reconstruction to recover their suppressed memories. That way, the detective isn’t a random twist we pull out at the very end. We’ve been watching her investigation alongside the game without realising how closely the two are connected.

On Day 7, the remaining students finally reconstruct the entire incident and discover the most important part of the mystery: there was no single murderer. One person bullied Se Eun. Someone spread the rumors. Someone filmed the video. Someone encouraged it. Someone laughed. Someone pressured Da Beom. Someone knew and stayed silent. Someone lied when adults asked what happened. And someone simply watched Se Eun walk away and did nothing. They weren’t all equally responsible, but they all played a different part in the chain of choices that led to her death. That’s why the game was never really asking, “Who killed Se Eun?” It was asking, “How did all of you contribute to what happened to her?”

And that’s where I’d bring Se Eun back into the story. She isn’t actually a ghost murdering her classmates. She’s the reconstructed consciousness at the centre of the game, guiding them toward the truth about her own death. The innocent students are given the choice to leave once they’ve uncovered everything, while those who contributed have one final choice: confess publicly or remain silent. If they confess, the game ends. If they refuse, it continues. The final person left standing wouldn’t necessarily be the biggest bully, either. It could be the person who knew the truth and spent the entire time protecting everyone else from taking responsibility. The real villain isn’t necessarily the person who directly killed Se Eun. It’s the person who made sure nobody ever had to admit what they did. And that person would be Da Beom. Not because he cares to protect their bullies but because of something deeper: guilt and fear. Fear because people may never believe he was forced and guilt because if it wasn’t for his video, none of it would’ve happened. He’d be a tragic coward who loved Se Eun and because of it, ultimately ruined her.

Final Thoughts

In the end, Night Has Come was a waste of potential. I think the biggest issue isn’t that they turned the Mafia game into a drama, but the justification and reasoning behind the game. I genuinely enjoyed watching the students run around trying to survive while figuring out who the Mafias were. That part worked! But then the ending came along and summed everything up as “a VR game created by parents who wanted revenge,” and suddenly everything came crashing down. There were too many holes, too many unanswered questions, and too many problems with turning this into a revenge plot introduced at the eleventh hour. The short episodes were a blessing, but that also meant the truth behind Jung Won and the classmates needed to be introduced way earlier. 

The drama was essentially just the Mafia game and nothing else. Yoon Seo being haunted by that ghost was actually pretty interesting, and because it was introduced early, I assumed it was going to become something important. Except… it ultimately wasn’t. I still don’t understand how a ghost could exist inside a VR game when Jung Won was supposed to be the ghost. Regardless, this drama really suffered from trying to make the Mafia game work as the centre of everything. Once we knew it wasn’t a reality they had somehow been trapped in, we needed to go back to the drawing board and figure out how the game actually connected to the real world. Instead, the VR explanation created even more questions than it answered.

Because at the end of the day, this could’ve worked really well. A survival game mixed with a tragic story about bullying, guilt, and a student’s suicide could’ve been incredibly compelling. The Mafia game could’ve been used as a way to force the students to confront what happened, with each round revealing more about Se Eun, Da Beom, the bullies, and the bystanders. Instead, it feels like the writers were so excited that they had a Mafia story that worked that they forgot they also needed an overarching story that worked as well. None of the characters were really anything beyond the roles they were assigned, the VR plot fell apart almost immediately once it was revealed, and nobody grew enough to be worth rooting for.

Like I said, Night Has Come wasn’t a bad drama. It actually had a pretty entertaining game at the centre of it. But a good game isn’t enough to carry an entire story, especially when the explanation behind that game raises more questions than it answers. Like, I didn’t need Night Has Come to be perfect. I just needed the game, the characters, and the revenge story to actually feel like they belonged to the same drama.

And we’re done! This was supposed to be up and ready by last Friday but I was travelling and let me just say, I got to the airport for a 3pm flight and didn’t get to the hotel until 2am the next morning… Safe to say I wasn’t able to do anything because of it. But what matters is that this is out now and I truly hope you enjoyed this read.

I referenced a lot of comments I read and I just want to mention it a bit more. I love reading comments on MyDramaList because they can be so funny. And they also help me to put some of my thoughts into perspective/ help me to remember points I forgot. You guys are great and once this blog becomes a hit, I can’t wait to chat with you on here! I’m not entirely sure what drama I’m going to review next but I might stick with thrillers for the next couple of posts… or maybe not. I really don’t know hahaha!

Anyways, See you next week! 💕

Aya

I’m your K-drama bestie 🎬 In-depth reviews of romance, thrillers & more—plus what I’d change! Let’s fangirl(or fanboy) together! 💕