Imagine putting Fall Guys in a blender with John Carpenter’s The Thing

September 27, 2020 2:57 PM

In Among Us (Windows/iOS/Android), you’re part of a crew working together to complete tasks across a station, but 1-3 players are impostors looking to sabotage the team’s efforts, ideally killing everyone in the process (yes, like Mafia). To survive, the crew needs to figure out who the impostors are. Despite launching in 2018, the game took two years before exploding in popularity, largely thanks to a Twitch stream that went viral. Among Us has inspired plenty of fan art, and is so successful (1.5 million concurrent players!) the devs have cancelled the sequel to focus on the original game.
posted by adrianhon (32 comments total)

Truly got a sense that this was a thing when eggdog among us came out.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:22 PM on September 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

I love watching people play this on twitch, but have not enjoyed playing it because it lacks a native voice chat. I hope one of the first things they work on improving is adding voice support during the voting rounds.
posted by Arbac at 3:24 PM on September 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

I’m a little obsessed with this but I haven’t gotten to play yet. My friends aren’t up for it, so I am going to have to go with randos. It’s so dang cute!
posted by Countess Elena at 3:34 PM on September 27, 2020

I've been playing it in a discord server and it is a lot of fun. I hope they don't add native voice chat - everything I read about games with voice chat seems to involve women and BIPOC getting harassed.
posted by mogget at 3:45 PM on September 27, 2020 [16 favorites]

I watched the waypoint crew’s stream of Among Us and it looked pretty hilarious. Reminds me of Space Station 13, but streamlined and honed down to the core.
posted by rodlymight at 3:46 PM on September 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

Just a heads up, there's edgy racism and sexism in the linked sodapoppin video. He names himself "hot girl" to join a game of girls and someone suggests tweeting the n-word as a joke. :/
posted by i like crows very much at 3:50 PM on September 27, 2020

That caught my attention too but I think he was referring to a friend/fellow streamer named "Vigor"?
posted by qntm at 4:10 PM on September 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

as the length of an online video game stream increases, the probability of occurrences of toxicity approaches unity
posted by glonous keming at 4:17 PM on September 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

qtnm, i think you're right. a lot of people in chat misheard the same thing, doh.
posted by i like crows very much at 4:39 PM on September 27, 2020

As someone who has been gaming for... a while... now, and who is also a very young-voiced woman, part of the reason I like Among Us *is* the lack of voice chat, so I can't be shrieked at by trolls.
posted by flibbertigibbet at 5:41 PM on September 27, 2020 [22 favorites]

flibbertigibbet: As someone who has been gaming for... a while... now, and who is also a very young-voiced woman, part of the reason I like Among Us *is* the lack of voice chat, so I can't be shrieked at by trolls.

I can certainly understand that. I normally really dislike voice chat in games, but I find the chatroom interaction to be really difficult to use when playing with a game of randoms and I don't have a reliable discord group of other players available to setup a separate voice chat. It's slow to chat and hard to coordinate. Watching people play on Twitch where they all talk to each other during voting and yell out where people were and what tasks they were doing seems a lot more fun and effective at figuring out who's who. I'd love to regularly play like that, and it's just not a possibility without a lot of additional planning and separate apps.
posted by Arbac at 8:36 PM on September 27, 2020

Then it's a difference in strategy - when I'm playing with friends, we're not trying to coordinate strategy, we meet in discord and start a game. We're playing together and against each other, not necessarily trying to figure out who the imposter is outside of the game.

If there's interest, we could try to meet in Mefi chat or Mefightclub and play together.
posted by mogget at 9:24 PM on September 27, 2020

I introduced Among Us to my friends (mostly non-gamers) on our regular Zoom meetup a few weeks ago, and they're enjoying it. Other than one person who appears to have missed the point and immediately runs off alone to do tasks.
posted by meowzilla at 11:31 PM on September 27, 2020

I watched the waypoint crew’s stream of Among Us and it looked pretty hilarious.

Nothing has dented my view of Austin as one of the smartest people writing in video games as seeing him be so confidently, forcefully wrong in that video.
posted by Merus at 12:07 AM on September 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

I've been watching this a fair bit lately. The Hafu - 5up - Yeti crowd tend to be highly skilled and non-toxic.

Hafu was also the winner of a streamer newbie chess competition mentioned previously here on the blue; GM Nakamura has played some Among Us with them. She usually puts her foot down about people who use shouting as a strategy and it helps a lot. 5up is one of the consensus best Among Us streamers (whatever that means right now). Yeti even has a player rating page.
posted by fleacircus at 1:23 AM on September 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

I watched the waypoint crew’s stream of Among Us and it looked pretty hilarious.

The very end of the last game in that stream was *chef's kiss*
posted by EndsOfInvention at 5:11 AM on September 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

The lack of voice chat is a feature, something you can game to win. My son set his username to 'me'. So when somebody thinks he's sus and says 'vote for me', they get voted off (this has actually happened).
posted by signal at 6:22 AM on September 28, 2020 [9 favorites]

I'm gonna try setting my user name to 'not me'. so when somebody says 'it's not me!', other people will be like, 'hmm, kind of sus'.
posted by signal at 6:23 AM on September 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

Our group has been loving this. We played a couple rounds where everyone named themselves a color, but not the color they are. So the green-colored player was Blue, the red-colored player was Cyan, and so on. Chaos.
posted by xedrik at 7:20 AM on September 28, 2020 [5 favorites]

Hafu is great, and her fiancee dogdog is too! Quite non-toxic in my experience.
posted by lazaruslong at 7:41 AM on September 28, 2020

My kids just downloaded this game on the weekend and SUPER into it now.
posted by fimbulvetr at 9:43 AM on September 28, 2020

The first game the Waypoint crew did (which I don't think is in that highlight video actually?) is fantastic because Austin's like "I've never played this game before" and then proceeds to win the game in two minutes flat by being chosen as the imposter and then murdering everyone IMMEDIATELY before saying "okay I don't think I get how this game works?"

Among Us is one of those games that I enjoy watching in small doses (especially when you get a good group together), but don't enjoy how it's taken over Twitch. That's not a knock against Among Us; that's a knock against Twitch fads (I am also hella tired of seeing Fall Guys everywhere). As for playing it, nuh uh; I haaaaaaaate Mafia/werewolf games or anything that requires me to lie. HATE them.
posted by chrominance at 9:57 AM on September 28, 2020

I've been enjoying the Twitch streams of hafu's crew and others. Agree it feels like a fad and everyone will bail out soon, but it's great for now.

I can't understand playing it without voice chat, the quickfire interrogation and chat to spot liars is the essence (and indeed joy) of it. Shouting can be avoided by playing with non-shouty friends.
posted by Klipspringer at 10:25 AM on September 28, 2020

Is it only multiplayer, or is there a solitaire (1 player vs software) version?
posted by doctornemo at 11:36 AM on September 28, 2020

Multiplayer only, for 4-10 players — and tbh seems like you need 9-10 players to get the best experience.
posted by Klipspringer at 11:40 AM on September 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

The young people I know who play it do a voice chat either on Discord or on their phones (using Instagram, I think) while playing.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:53 PM on September 28, 2020

doctornemo: "Is it only multiplayer, or is there a solitaire (1 player vs software) version?"

It kind of has to be multiplayer, no? Doing tasks and navigating the ship is just window dressing for the real game of persuading other players about who the Imposter is. Might as well make a single-player version of Werewolf.
posted by Rhaomi at 2:20 PM on September 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

I've been playing it for an hour or so a day since I saw this thread. If you get discouraged at first, keep playing until you figure out the vocabulary and flow of the game. You need to be an imposter at least twice before you really understand how to play as there's no tutorial. I'm still not quite sure how to sabotage.

I have found it non-toxic with the occasional expletives censored so it just becomes a lot of asterisks.

I'm guessing the game skews young or people are just stupid. I've been declared a suspect ("sus") for being weird in a game where you can't talk and only onscreen interaction really is moving around. When you get to the cut screen where you can chat it is really easy to get people worked up with painting them in a corner as a suspect with false accusations or motivations. I just make stuff up that might not even really be part of the game, "Why did you go to the admin after the med bay if you're not a suspect?" which as far as I can tell is completely non-sensical but still drives people mad. If you like to troll without being offensive the game is incredibly fun. I still laugh out loud when I get "BLUE IS FOLLOWING ME WHY" when all I do is silently follow a player. To be clear doing something like following someone has no impact on the game.
posted by geoff. at 12:43 PM on September 29, 2020

Interesting adjacent bite-sized story from Bijan Stephen at The Verge : “Among Us is behind a huge spike in Discord’s mobile app downloads”
posted by Going To Maine at 12:23 PM on September 30, 2020

So AOC and Ilhan Omar streamed Among Us a little tonight.
posted by fleacircus at 10:45 PM on October 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Is Discord or voice required? Do most people play with or without voice?
posted by polymodus at 10:47 PM on October 20, 2020

It's not required; there's a built in text chat. I'd bet that most games are going on in open lobbies w/ text chat. I haven't really looked into it but I think if you join a popular Among Us streamer's (like 5up) discord server you can find pickup games that use voice?
posted by fleacircus at 7:44 AM on October 21, 2020