“Among Us,” the hit 2018 indie game that earned mainstream success after trending on Twitch earlier this year, wasn’t something that really appealed to me at first (I was busy playing “Fall Guys” where you play as a jellybean and destroy friendships until they are broken beyond repair). So when I tried it out on iOS, I was expecting lots of yelling and some sort of Fortnite-esque festival of toxicity.
Instead, I found an addicting, if simplistic, experience that lets you play either scurrying supersleuth or the sociopathic scoundrel of your dreams.
“Among Us” isn’t a particularly inventive game. If you have ever played “Mafia” at a middle school sleepover, you’ve played this game. In “Among Us,” you play as a jellybean-shaped astronaut on a spaceship with up to nine other players. Depending on the game, one, two or three of the players are “impostors” tasked with sabotaging the other crew members’ tasks to maintain the ship and murdering innocent crew members, all while avoiding suspicion from others. If the crew manages to vote the impostor(s) out before they become the minority or finish their tasks without all being killed, they win. If the impostors kill everyone or successfully sabotage the ship, it’s their game.
If someone sees a dead body, or is suspicious of another crew member, they can call a meeting where they discuss who may be the impostor. This is the only time in which players can speak to each other, either via a chat box or through an outside medium like Discord. And as someone who finds that petty drama equals time for popcorn, it’s always entertaining to watch people throw baseless accusations at each other, straining former alliances and forging new ones at the last second.
Being a crewmate is enjoyable enough. You’re getting to play detective, after all, in a sci-fi game of “Clue”. The grind does get repetitive after a while though, even with the game’s three maps and variety of “WarioWare”-style minigames/tasks. If you are killed off, you can still help complete tasks as a ghost, although you are no longer able to communicate with living players. There’s no feeling like yelling in the chat to the other dead person about why your killer is a piece of worthless trash.
But the real fun begins when you are tasked with murdering your crewmates one-by-one, and then slipping right between the cracks during an interrogation. There’s no feeling like slyly watching the other players blame a poor, innocent bystander for your remorseless crimes and their following ejection. As someone who cannot lie to save my life in real life, being able to do this through the anonymity of a phone and a screen name gave me quite a bit of pleasure.
Maybe I just want to watch the world burn.
The controls on mobile can be altered to either full touch-and-go or a virtual joystick. I prefer the latter, although I do find my fingers slip a bit too much for my liking. Perhaps the controls are less clunky on the desktop version.
If the springtime success of “Animal Crossing” illustrated the early feelings of the COVID-19 pandemic–a sense of “all of us in it together” and those sweet cottagecore vibes–, then “Among Us” is its counterpoint. Everyone is at each other’s throats, no one knows who to trust, all under the facade of cute colorful characters and a free-to-play game.
“Among Us” is available on the App Store and Google Play Store for free, as well as on Steam for $4.99.