Is The Last Passage Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

After choosing to end his own life, Huiseo Yun wakes up adrift on a wooden raft in a bleak, desolate sea, no longer among the living. He's not alone there, either: a monstrous creature stalks the waters, and a mysterious woman resembling a grim reaper pulls him from danger. Huiseo has landed in Samdocheon, an afterlife reserved for those who died by suicide, where the dead face one of three paths: fading into permanent unconsciousness, living out a quiet, complacent existence on an island, or earning a chance at reincarnation. Which path Huiseo ends up on, and what he has to survive to get there, drives the story from there.

What it does well

The biggest strength here is how seriously the afterlife itself is built out. Samdocheon isn't a vague spooky void; it has real internal logic, competing paths for the dead, and consequences that make Huiseo's situation feel like an actual moral crossroads rather than just a survival gauntlet. That structure gives the horror elements somewhere to matter beyond immediate scares, and the monstrous threats Huiseo faces feel like extensions of the setting's own rules rather than random danger dropped in for shock value. The grim-reaper-like woman guiding him also gives the story a consistent way to unpack that mythology gradually rather than leaving readers to piece it together alone. Practically speaking, the series has proven it can sustain an audience, too, running long enough to move into a second season with over 100 chapters and a large, active WEBTOON following.

Where it falls short

The premise is heavy by design; opening on a suicide and building an entire afterlife mythology around it is not a small ask of readers, and no amount of thoughtful worldbuilding changes the fact that it won't be the right read for everyone. Beyond that, formal critical coverage hasn't caught up to the series' actual audience size, so it's harder to weigh outside consensus against the platform's raw engagement numbers. And as is common with long-running afterlife or mythology-driven horror, some of Samdocheon's bigger rules unfold slowly, which can leave the earliest chapters feeling more like setup than payoff.

Verdict

The Last Passage earns its darkness by taking its premise seriously rather than using it as a shock hook, and the mythology it builds around Huiseo's situation gives the horror real weight. It's a heavy, mature read that demands going in with the right expectations, but for readers who want horror built on genuine stakes rather than easy scares, it delivers.