There’s also a lot of hopping about in time, sometimes repeatedly within an episode, and it’s not always clear what order events happened in. Those long, lingering reaction shots, spinning camerawork and slow-mo can be a bit cheesy and run counter to the largely action-packed plot. I watched the first few episodes with a friend who hadn’t seen K-drama before and it was interesting to see how frustrated she was with the slow moments. This show is genuinely exciting, thrilling and even at times quite scary, with some good fighting scenes and special effects.

A death in the game becomes a death in real life. Then after just a couple of episodes, everything changes. While there’s lots of ominous music and hints of something dark and terrible, for the most part it feels like a typical set-up of love triangles and business rivalry. There are ex-wives and hapless assistants (including the adorable Seo Jung-hoon, played by Min Jin-woong). There’s a fight over buying the rights to the game from Se-joo’s family between Jin-woo and his biggest rival (and former best friend) Cha Hyeong-seok. There’s also some mystery about Se-joo, namely why both he and his business partner Marco have disappeared. some tourist flailing his arms around mysteriously and pulling strange faces). It’s pretty impressive, makes good use of the Granada setting and provides a source of some comedy as the camera view switches between Jin-woo’s point-of-view and what the rest of the world sees (i.e. The bulk of the first two episodes is establishing the game – in which users walk around real Granada collecting virtual weapons and fighting virtual warriors (think Pokémon Go but with almost realistic graphics). When he gets there, he finds no sign of the man he was supposed to meet (who turns out to be Se-joo), but he does have an e-mail with a game attached to it – a game designed to work with J-One’s augmented-reality contact lenses.

He receives a mysterious phone call begging him to go to a certain hostel in Granada to discuss a business deal. Then along comes Yoo Jin-woo (played by Hyun Bin of Secret Garden) – the CEO of a tech company called J-One. She has a Korean best friend who’s in love with her and a secret talent for playing classical guitar. She supports her younger sister Min-joo (who is still at school) and her brother Se-joo (a freelance game developer) by working two other jobs in addition to the hostel management. Park Shin-hye ( Doctors, Pinocchio, Heirs) plays Jung Hee-joo, a woman running a hostel for Koreans in Granada with her grandmother. Honestly, this was beautifully filmed, well acted, had an original sci-fi thriller concept and unexpected plot twists, but I wound up disappointed overall. It got lots of online hype (and apparently a petition for a second season), which I’m a bit bemused by. For a while Memories of the Alhambra (a 2019 joint production of tvN and Netflix) was being heavily trailed on Netflix (at least, it was being advertised at me, but I guess I’m the target audience).

Seo jung hun memories of alhambra