Among Us (PC)

Some games come out and are popular with players, others might become critical darlings, but every now and then a game turns out to be a phenomenon, and in the case of Among Us, it wasn’t even after its release. Coming out in 2018 as a simple indie title with barely a splash in the public conscious, it wouldn’t be until 2020 when its potential was fully realized as creators on Twitch and Youtube realized the social deduction game was a great host for solid and continuously shifting content. With a global pandemic also leading to people staying at home, the rise of Among Us gave them an online game they could play with their friends despite being apart, and soon Among Us achieved astronomical popularity. The fact this all happened to a game by an indie developer that seemingly had missed its time back at release makes this comeback story feel all the more special. While the game’s popularity is still high and there may still be more developments in its overall story, Among Us also seems to have a pretty stable and simple core that won’t likely undergo radical changes, making it a game as easy to get into now as it would have been back in 2018 if its spark had caught fire then.

In a round of Among Us, you and a group of other players are all placed together in a map with a small list of individual tasks each crewmate needs to complete. If all of the little astronauts can complete their tasks, they’ll win the round, but despite everyone looking the same save for the color of their suits and any superficial costume changes made through the customization menu, at least one other randomly selected player is actually an imposter. The imposter cannot complete tasks and is actively trying to keep the other crewmates from completing them, their goal instead being to murder the other astronauts without being caught and ejected. This is where Among Us’s most thrilling and suspenseful content comes from, the imposter needing to both blend in to avoid suspicion while finding their moment to strike without risking detection.

An air of tension will hang over the proceedings of Among Us because of the looming presence of an imposter, and you can even change the game settings to have up to three of them potentially lurking around during a round. The only times crewmates are able to speak about their suspicions and potentially vote out other players are during emergency meetings that have limits on when they can be called and how many times they can be performed and when someone has found a body of a crewmate and reports it. Once everyone, crewmate and imposter alike, have been called to the meeting, the discussion begins, and Among Us truly finds its juiciest moments as the web of suspicions and lies is slowly built. The imposters will want to deflect blame and implicate others since ejecting a player counts as a death, the thinning numbers advantageous as they can collaborate to construct falsehoods like phony alibis or stronger accusations. The crewmates meanwhile have to try and logically determine who could be responsible for a kill while gauging them against emotionally rooted suspicions.

Naturally, these meetings can vary wildly in quality based on who is participating in the game, but they also can invite a plethora of strategies. Perhaps staying quiet will avoid people pointing the finger at you, but avoiding conversation might also be identified by others as a good strategy to avoid self-implication for an imposter. The tension of knowing other players are out to get you can lead to some people accusing others simply out of the paranoia, and the way you defend yourself even if you are innocent may come off as desperate or sloppy to other players trying to judge your behavior. In the game itself only text chat is natively used for this and it actually can still carry a lot of the dramatic weight you’d hope to find in a social deduction game, clever manipulators taking root just as often as hopelessly bad deceivers give themselves away. Playing together with friends with a voice chat program outside of the game can definitely add new layers to the experience as you can use your knowledge of someone’s personality to gauge their believability and certain tells can emerge when conversing vocally instead of by text, but that doesn’t mean playing with random players lacks its own spice. Being thrown in with a group of strangers truly raises the overall anxiety that any one of them could be an imposter out to get you since you have no history of behavior to reference, and when they speak in text chat that personality profile you’re building for them could be a ruse or could just be some level of awkwardness that makes an innocent seem suspicious.

Among Us’s playerbase will always be part of determining how fun a round is to play since so much of its appeal is tied to the discussion portions, and there are a few ways to game the system that can make things a little less fun like grouping together to give the imposters little chance to kill in secret. The tasks and inability to speak between rounds are constructed to get the group spread out and isolated though, and there’s always that danger you might trust someone as an escort only for them to do you in when the right moment arises.

The actual substance of what crewmates do during rounds is actually fairly simple and at times rather boring or repetitive. Tasks take the form of very simple minigames that aren’t meant to challenge you so much as they are distractions from what’s going on around you. The task fills up much of your screen with its visual component, creating a huge blind spot briefly so you can’t see if someone is sneaking up on you or making it so you miss a nearby murder. However, despite playing a vital role in giving the imposter opportunities to strike and forcing the group to split across the map to get these tasks done, the substance of these makes a lot of them feel like chores. Pulling a lever to empty a trash chute requires no thought, uploading data is literally about standing in place as you wait for it to complete, and while matching wires requires you to identify which one goes where, the fact the wire task has multiple steps and is available on all four maps makes its constant presence slightly irritating. The simplicity of many of them does mean the game’s skill barrier is low, and even ones like shooting down asteroids or reconstructing a broken crystal don’t punish you for mistakes so you can take your time doing them if need be. Of course, that leaves you vulnerable for longer, and some tasks are even made deliberately long just as a way to make you prime assassination material. While the tasks performed as a crewmate are always going to be rather basic and unexciting, it’s seemingly a deliberate aspect of the game since the focus isn’t on what you’re actually doing but the context around it and the atmospheric dread of knowing you need to isolate yourself or leave yourself open to do them.

Imposters are given more meaningful interaction choices when they’re running around trying to find someone to kill. The act of killing someone is quick and easy to run away from for the imposter even though the victim gets a silly kill animation to watch. Your victims do come back as ghosts though who can’t talk during discussions but can still complete tasks if they wish to stick around and help the crewmates potentially win. The killer can actually report the body themselves if they want to try to shift blame, but that also might implicate them if other players know each other’s whereabouts well. Crewmates can actually access certain terminals in different maps to see the vitals of other players, view people in certain areas with hidden cameras, and otherwise potentially gain some special insight the imposter might not be aware of, but the imposter has some tricks up their sleeves too. Vents only they can access are scattered around the map as quick escape routes, the imposter able to quickly navigate the map by traveling through them to put distance between them and the body or to help find players on their lonesome.

Sabotage is probably the more interesting tool, as an imposter can alter the map in certain ways without raising any suspicion. Certain things like a reactor meltdown require players to abandon their tasks and run to set things right or else they risk immediately losing when the timer runs out. These crises help to buy imposters time or move players around the map if shuffling seems advantageous. Each of the four maps also have a few other tools the imposter can utilize such as locking the doors to isolate players, turning out the lights so it’s easy to snag a kill in the dark, or disable comms so that players won’t know which tasks they have left to perform. The injection of chaos and guiding people to certain areas of the map help the imposter shake up crewmate strategies or force them into suboptimal situations, but depending on the group it can still be a daunting task to try and take down everyone. Two imposters feels like the sweet spot since their collaboration and wider reach can allow them to better set up their kills, but with groups capping out at ten players, one imposter might fail to find enough moments to strike to take down a big group while three can potentially overwhelm without as much need for interesting strategies or mindgames.

At the time of writing Among Us has four maps that all contribute to the action in different ways. The Skeld spaceship is the game’s first map and a solid host for match after match. It’s wide design requires a lot of traveling around the map and rooms have blind spots or tight corridors attaching them to funnel players into danger and keep the tension high. The player’s vision is actually a key part of the experience and can be toggled in a room’s settings to be wide or short range for crewmates and imposters to raise or lower the chances of kills happening in secret. MIRA HQ is a more condensed map up in the atmosphere but it contains an airlock that needs time to open and close, leading to some players potentially trapped on either side of it or even in it. It still feels like it leans more towards crewmate success than others since finding moments to strike as an imposter are less likely, but the Polus planetary base gives the imposter a lot of tools without feeling like they’re given too big of an advantage. Locking doors on Polus is common, smaller airlocks can restrict players in the corner of the map, and a lot more of the map is cordoned off into separate buildings that players aren’t likely to wander through unless they have relevant tasks in that area.

The self-descriptive Airship map is the only one that might be a bit too complex for its own good. Players get a random set of three spawn point choices after every meeting, certain areas can only be crossed one way at times, the electrical room is a maze, and tasks can require a lot of running around the largest map in the game. It does seem like The Airship is meant to be the difficult map, but some of Among Us’s simple appeal is sacrificed as the map demands more attention than usual. All of the maps play host to the action fairly well at least and the skew towards crewmate or imposter never feels impossible to overcome for the other side, especially since Among Us actually allows a good amount of room customization to alter the game rules. Beyond earlier mentioned features like player vision, you can also alter how many tasks need to be completed and what those tasks are. Short tasks can be done quickly and easily and long tasks are great for leaving players in danger, but visual tasks can be added as well that can clear a player as innocent since only crewmates can perform these tasks and doing one allows nearby players to confirm that you’re not the imposter. Player speed can be altered to help with traversing larger maps, cooldowns can be altered so imposters can kill more quickly or emergency meetings can be called more often, but perhaps the more important settings tie to task completion and ejection.

A bar at the top of the screen is meant to tell everyone how close crewmates are to completing all their tasks, but you can choose for it to update constantly, only when a meeting is called, or never. Imposters can blend in better when the meter isn’t constantly moving, and the tension of not knowing how close to victory you are can add more of that vital atmosphere to the action. Updating at meetings feels like a good compromise since you still get that visible progress but the imposters aren’t as likely to be revealed as only pretending to work, but another aspect can help keep the tension high. When you eject a player as a suspected imposter, the game has a message that tells you if they were or were not an imposter, the game ending if every imposter is booted out. If you disable this though, that means players won’t know until the end if they picked right, raising that paranoia as you can’t be sure if you did eject the right person. This is another way a two imposter game flourishes over a one imposter game since you won’t immediately win for ejecting the right player, and it also means you can’t be sure if the person who convinced you to vote for ejecting someone else was genuine or deceptive. Not every game is going to have a room full of people versed in clever deception or people who play into the suspense very well, so being able to tinker with the settings a bit so the game can provide some of that paranoia and mystery can help make up for a less than thrilling group composition.

THE VERDICT: A game of suspicion, interpersonal debate, and growing paranoia, Among Us is a social deduction game dripping with tension whether you’re a crewmate or imposter. Trying to safely complete your tasks or identify the killers allows the innocent players to still find things thrilling even though the minigames involved in their win condition are often borderline chores, and while the imposter will likely have a more exciting time trying to stealthily kill everyone, they too need to play into the social aspect to avoid being ejected before their job is done. The maps provide tools to both side of the conflict without ever skewing too far towards either and the setting customization does a lot to let players adjust things to what works best for their group or desired level of danger, but the game does inherently vary in quality based on its players and their ability to make the meetings layered. While not everyone can exploit the air of dread inspired by your inability to trust anyone or need to be the deceiver, Among Us still has a foundation that helps most rounds at least be somewhat entertaining despite hinging on player behavior over interesting interactive content.

And so, I give Among Us for PC…

A GOOD rating. With the right group of people or a familiar set of friends, Among Us can be hilarious, tense, or even a little fiery, but that reliance on the human side of play can also mean things can be bland, lifeless, or sluggish. It’s the old multiplayer conundrum that any game can be made much better if the right set of people play it together but worse if the wrong group comes together, but Among Us’s value as a host for multiplayer interaction still comes through because it can bake in a lot of the tension simply through things like limiting communication and establishing a scenario with suspicion spreads easily and trust is hard to earn. The tasks play their role as something to keep players busy and moving even if they’re lacking in entertaining designs, but the crewmates still get to have their moments when discussion time comes and they need to start weighing facts or providing their own observations to deduce who might be working against them. The imposter’s work has the thrill of trying to get away with murder and enough tools to mostly prevent crewmates from developing foolproof tactics against them, but they aren’t made so powerful that the crewmates feel like they’re struggling to hold their own in this affair. You’re bound to get rounds with lethargic imposters who add little, but you can also luck into ones where the imposter is a sly assassin that can feel incredibly satisfying to suss out. You may even be that killer who constructs the perfect set of murders to win the game, but rounds of Among Us are often quick and snappy as well so no matter how things go, you can usually dive in for another round with different parameters or people to try and see if you get a new experience out of it.

It’s easy to see how Among Us managed its meteoric rise in popularity. While its interactive components are often banal or downright uninteresting, it is a well constructed host for its social elements. It’s not overcomplicated but has enough to the gameplay to create scenarios that evoke unique player responses, the rules and maps not even needing to be different to lead to wildly varied rounds. The randomly chosen imposter keeps shifting the group dynamic even with familiar players while playing with strangers has an extra layer of tension hanging over it even if they might not be good at maneuvering the meetings in interesting ways. While not every round is going to provide some memorable moment or really play into the game’s work towards building tension, Among Us is built to provide more hits than misses because of how its pieces inherently enhance the social deduction experience.