Eight people accept a cruise, that is really a way to dump them on an island that's been converted into essentially Murderworld, for the amusement of, well, whoever is watching I guess. The contestants have to navigate a labyrinth of traps and puzzles and human threats (both the other contestants and people besides that).
Thompson's protagonist is Jenny, a CIA agent there to shut this whole thing down, as it's apparently been going for some time. Although the married couple running the show insist the CIA sent Jenny there to die, because of something horrible they did. I don't know which is true, because Thompson leaves a lot of things unsaid. Jenny spends most their time working with Nasir (the guy freaking out in the above image), who was involved in weapons trafficking charges (which he insists were bullshit.) Whether that's true or not is also unclear. Nasir certainly seems incompetent and largely helpless, but he's also one of the only ones who survives to the end, so maybe that's an act.
Each of the contestants gets a specific weapon. Jenny, who has a lot of scars that could be from knives, gets a combat knife. Another guy gets a katana, one gets a flamethrower because he likes to set fires and killed his parents with an accidental fire. Nasir gets a Game Boy. The reason is never explained, nor does it ever prove useful in any way during the entire story.
Thompson uses the fact we don't know much about any of these characters to increase the unpredictability. Characters you might expect to fight bitterly instead become kindred spirits. Nasir seems quick to say whatever he needs to stay alive, then change sides at the drop of a hat. The labyrinth is interpersonal relationships as much as it's a physical place full of flowers with drugged scents and animatronic singing critters that pop up just to mess with the players. Even the machine gun toting squad that appears halfway through are actually players in a different game.
Mostly the story boils down to a lot of brutal fights. Some characters take to it like fish to water. Others get into the groove as they fall prey to some of the labyrinth's more underhanded dangers. Jenny doesn't go out of their way to pick fights, but also doesn't hold back once it starts. No stranger to violence, and one who accepts it as a necessity at times. That said, I think Underwood takes the brutality too far at times. Not in the sense of shock value; the idea behind this is the audience gets to watch these people who have apparently done awful things die horribly. Shock value is the point of the "show."
More because some of these people take damage that really ought to have killed them much sooner. In issue 2, Jenny fights the flamethrower guy. He takes a slash to the neck from the combat knife, gets half his face scraped off on jagged metal, and ends up with said jagged metal jammed into the back of his skull. He survives for another 3 issues, a span of at least 30 hours, without any apparent first aid or impairment.
The comic ends on another cliffhanger, as the surviving contestants know one of them took a knife off the wall, but we don't know which. I don't know what the point is, beyond violence begetting violence, often in ways you don't expect (the ones running the game clearly never grasped what impact it was having on their kid), and that every interaction with another person is taking a chance. You're never going to know them entirely, what they're hiding, what they're capable of. Who is on your side and who isn't. Seems like the life of an animal, the maze they navigate every day until they lose.
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