A couple weeks ago my best friend introduced me to Among Us. Yes, the game that it seems everyone is suddenly talking about. It’s got fan-made songs, animations, fanfic… but some of you are probably asking, “What actually is Among Us?” Allow me to explain.
Have you ever played Mafia? Or Are You A Werewolf? Among Us is like the digital, slightly more complicated sci-fi version of those. In those games you have the “night,” when the killers (be they mafia or werewolves) choose a victim, and then the “day” where you find out which one person has died, and vote someone out. Either the citizens vote out the killers and win, or the killers murder enough citizens that they can’t be voted out by majority, thereby winning.
In Among Us the crewmates have another goal: complete your tasks. Each crewmate is given a random selection of assignments, like fixing wiring, downloading and uploading data, and entering their ID. Some of these, like the ones I just listed, can be found in any game of Among Us; some are specific to certain of the three maps. For instance, “Align Engine Output” wouldn’t be useful on Polus, which is a planet’s surface, but since the Skeld is a spaceship it makes sense. Neither of those maps have a greenhouse, but the airship by the name of Mira HQ does, so “Water Plants” is a perfectly reasonable task. A small handful of these are also “visual tasks,” meaning other players can see them, which, since imposters can’t do tasks, proves your innocence. Submitting a Medscan is the most well-known of these, but there’s a handful of others as well. Whatever your tasks are, if all the crewmates finish theirs they win the game. This simultaneously gives the imposters pressure to kill quickly and the crewmates an alternate objective, rather than solely focusing on the murder aspect of gameplay.
Though, admittedly, the murder aspect is important too. The imposters’ job is to kill all the crewmates (or, rather, enough that there’s the same amount of crewmates as imposters, just like in Mafia and Are You A Werewolf). They have a couple of tools to help them achieve this: a partner, depending on server settings (there can be 1-3 imposters in a max of 10 players), vents that allow them to move unseen between certain rooms, and sabotage. With this last functionality they can close doors to slow down their targets (on the Skeld and Polus, at least), sabotage communications, temporarily making the list of tasks inaccessible, turn off the lights (narrowing all the crewmates’ range of view), and cause a reactor overload or (on the Skeld and Mira HQ) an oxygen depletion, either of which left unchecked for long enough will automatically result in a victory for the imposters. Each of these has a different means of reversing them, but whatever the case they help to slow down the task progress and sometimes draw people away from a fresh corpse.
That’s important because, unlike Mafia and Are You A Werewolf, it’s not a matter of one voting session per death. Rather, a meeting is only called when someone comes across and reports a dead body, or presses the Emergency Meeting button that’s in the Cafeteria on the two ships and in the Office on Polus. This button is primarily useful for when you saw someone going into/coming out of the vents, witnessed a murder on the security cams, or watched someone’s vital signs terminate (each map has multiple means of monitoring; the Skeld has security cameras and Admin, which gives a headcount for each room; Mira HQ has Admin and a Sensor Log for each of three sensors you can pass in the hall; and Polus has security cams, Admin and a vitals monitor). As an interesting aside, crewmate’s ghosts can still complete their tasks to contribute to victory, and imposter’s ghosts can still sabotage. This is a compelling reason to stick around even after being voted out or murdered.
How many kills the imposters can manage without anyone noticing depends largely on location and how strategically they’re playing, but unless they’ve won, a body is eventually found and a meeting called. Then, of course, there’s the accusing phase. I won’t get into the strategies for that here, at least not this week (I don’t think I’ve ever done a follow-up on a game before but if y’all want one or I feel like it I may), just the process.
I don’t recall ever playing a game of Mafia or Are You A Werewolf with a time limit on voting, but each Among Us server has a set discussion time before voting opens, and a set time from there before voting closes (both set by the server host). As you can imagine, it’s a lot of back-and-forth pointing of fingers and “Where was the body? Any sus [suspects] nearby? Where was everyone else?” It’s also a race to get your argument in before people vote, since voting doesn’t happen all at once in Among Us; rather, you can submit your vote anytime after voting opens, and when the time is up or everyone has voted all the votes are revealed.
Once voting for a meeting has closed, there are a few things that can happen. If there’s a tie, nobody gets ejected. If skipping vote gets the most votes (yes, “skip” is an option, but no, not voting at all does not count as a vote to skip), then nobody gets ejected. If, however, any one player gets the most votes, they will be joining the ghosts. How depends on which map they’re playing: since the Skeld is a spaceship, ejections there occur by flinging them into the vacuum of space via airlock. Whoever’s voted out on Mira HQ goes skydiving without a parachute, and on Polus they take a quick stroll into a lava crater. Whether you get to see if they were an imposter or not at the point of ejection depends on the settings set by the host.
If it’s not clear by how long this post is, I enjoy this game immensely. I think it’s a brilliant, engaging twist on a concept I was already fond of. I highly recommend trying it, whether for free on mobile, for a small fee on PC, or, like I’m playing, on PC for free through an app player called BlueStacks that enables Android applications to run on PC (for info on how to get Among Us that way, click here).
