A new game is “Among Us”
Shhhhh! One imposter is among us.
As a crewmate, your job is to complete tasks and avoid becoming a casualty. The imposter, disguised as a crewmate, is aboard your spaceship, and all of you need to finish your tasks to save the mission before they find and kill you.
Someone is brutally murdered (stabbed, speared, choked, the list goes on). You see the bone sticking out of an otherwise cute and colorful headless crewmate. You panic and hit the report button. All your fellow crewmates are dragged back to the cafeteria to have a discuss the identity of the imposter.
“Red sus,” someone ever so eloquently types into chat. Before you can respond, several people have voted already, presumably for you. The majority tips in your direction (your first mistake was choosing red). Along with any semblance of peace, the opportunity for your fair trial is thrown out the window of the spaceship; just like you.
You have been ejected.
“Red was not An Imposter,” a screen following your tragic death states. Your eyes light up with a well-deserved vindication.
The true imposter lives on, killing all those on the ship and sabotaging the mission. You are a ghost, still loyally completing tasks for the team that betrayed you. The rest of the players curse their screens. The show must go on.
Among Us has undoubtedly taken the world by storm. Despite being released in 2018, the game was recently popularized as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns that sent surges of people to their denominations of an App Store searching for a new, distanced way to connect with others.
The gameplay is simple; structured as an addicting virtual take on the game-night classic “Mafia,” players are assigned either the role of “crewmate” or “imposter.” As the game lobby fades, crewamates rush off to attempt to complete relatively simple tasks while the imposter sets out to sabotge the mission and murder the real team. Laced with emergency meetings, ghosts and votes to eject, the game progresses until all the imposters are exposed or the imposters outnumber the amount of living crewmates.
Among Us is not particularly topical or complex, but instead inspires a unique sense of companionship you can only create through the shared trauma of faux murder. All jokes aside, there really isn’t anything particularly stand-out about Among Us; no deeper meaning or heart-wrenching story with a fundamentally basic gameplay. It is simply accessible, well-paced and free to download on mobile; wide-reaching and welcoming to all who are looking for a bit of fun to lighten the burden COVID-19 has left for us all to carry. Whether you play with strangers or a group of friends, running around in what are essentially murder-avoidance circles has never been so mindlessly fun.
We’re not sure whether it’s the bright and happy graphics, the endless amusement of finding the dismembered remains of your close friends or the even rush of faux-productivity everytime you fix the wiring in storage, but Among Us is fun, flashy and just the right length for our attention spans. Just always remember our cardinal rules: don’t get killed, and red mad sus.
