I played Among Us by Innersloth for my social game critical play. My friends and I got together to play it on PC, but I believe there is cross-platform play available for the game as well. The target audience of this game seem primarily aimed towards younger audiences with its bright colors and cartoonish artstyle, but there is nothing that would deter older audiences from playing as well. The controls are intuitive and the “crewmate tasks” take the form of small minigames that children would be able to pick up on quickly.
There is a minimum of 4 players and a maximum of 15 players allowed in a single round, but I generally played with 6 or 7 people total (including myself). Any player can report a dead body or press the “emergency meeting” button in the center of the map, both of which start a timed discussion where people must decide to vote for someone they think should be ejected, but people can also abstain from voting, if they aren’t satisfied with the conclusion of the discussion. Crewmates also have small tasks that they are assigned to do, to promote movement around the ship (and to penalize having a “buddy” system where players follow each other around in hopes of catching the impostors when they make a kill — since the win condition for the members of the crew is to have all of their tasks completed). Of course, the crewmates also win if they sus out all of the impostors, similarly to Mafia. Impostors are not assigned tasks to complete; rather, they have a “murder” button, and their win condition is to eliminate the other crewmates until there are the same number or less crewmates compared to the number of alive impostors. The impostors can also “sabotage” the ship in various different ways depending on the map (from cutting the power to initializing nuclear fallout), which then sidetracks the crewmates to deal with the crisis and also funnels them into different, usually more obscure areas of the map. Rules such as movement speed, how many tasks crewmates get, whether someone’s role is revealed when they are killed, among other things, are customizable per lobby. I appreciate how Among Us adds new objectives, especially for the crewmates, so they feel like they can work towards victory even outside of the larger group discussions. It also makes time a more valuable resource, because if the impostors don’t work quickly enough, the tasks will get completed and therefore the crewmates would win (although this never happened in practice).
Overall, I had fun playing the game, regardless of whether I was an impostor or a crewmate. The simple crewmate tasks were easy but fun and satisfying to complete, and there was a heightened feeling of stress for me when I was the impostor, trying to pull off kills without getting found out (though I wasn’t always the best at strategizing for this). I enjoyed the fact that the “normal” crewmates didn’t have nothing to do and could actively work towards an alternative win condition, instead of just doing nothing and only being able to work towards victory during the discussions like in Mafia. This felt more satisfying, because usually the non-“impostors” don’t have as much to do in the game, making people only want to be picked as the guilty party and feeling slightly let-down when they aren’t. In these types of social games (it happened when we played Mafia in class as well), I tend to have a pretty terrible poker face, appearing guilty by the way I talk regardless of whether or not I’m “innocent” or “guilty,” so at some point, I decided to just stay silent during discussions. One unexpected success of mine was when I was the impostor for the first time, and I did a kill pretty much right out of the gate after players are released, when I hung back and killed the straggler. For some reason, the body wasn’t found that quickly, and I was able to get away with what I now realize was a pretty risky kill! There are no concrete improvements I would make to the game, especially to make it “better,” but I guess in general more variety between the tasks would be nice, especially when playing many rounds over a longer period of time. Overall, I really enjoyed playing Among Us, and I can definitely see why the game was so popular, especially over quarantine!
