Among Us | a Review
originally published on 13/12/2024;
Hello everyone, I am the space drifter, G.E.M.Simov, an entity that is somewhat suspicious, and as a means of relaying my trustworthiness, I will tell you about the game “Among Us”.
Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point from my own self, depending on my experience with it.
Gameplay
Among Us is a multiplayer, social deduction game, meaning that to play it, one must engage with other people. There are two factions - one is “the Crew” and the other is “the Impostors”. Due to the fact that there can be up to 15 total players in one “match” of Among Us, there can be up to 3 total Impostors, meaning that the perfect number of Crewmates to Impostors is 4 to 1.
The goals that each faction has are simple - the Crew wants to either complete their tasks or eject the Impostors. The Impostors want to whittle down the Crew to a quantity even to the currently active impostors or they want to successfully cause a sabotage that does not get addressed in time.
Now, it is evident that there are quite a few things showing up as terms in here, but all will be clarified with time. Before we go in depth on tasks, the whittling down of the Crew or sabotaging, we must turn towards the more basic things.
Before even starting a match of Among Us, the Player needs to enter a pre-existing lobby or create one. The fact that those can be local and online is very pleasant, allowing for easy set-up of games to play with friends. An additional bonus appears in the fact that when set-up, a lobby has default parameters in place, meaning that there is no lengthy process of actually setting the match up - all the Player needs to do is press the “host” button, and that’s that.
There is, of course, a very satisfactory number of things that can be changed - from the range at which kills can be performed, to the field of vision of the Crewmates, to the length of a voting session or the amount of information the Players have at their disposal. The customization of the experience is very real, allowing for a group of Players to make the game work for them, rather than having to adjust to the game, which is an incredibly good thing.
More of this - Players need to be given the opportunity to directly affect the rules of a game, as that is one of the things that makes games games.
Regardless, after setting up, the Players get their roles given to them at random, and they’re off. Movement occurs via the WASD keys, while interaction with objects can occur via dedicated key bindings or through clicking on things in the User Interface with the Left Mouse Button… And that’s most of it.
Now, onto some other, important things - the Impostors can kill Crewmates. Naturally, though, the Impostors want to avoid being seen killing Crewmates (by other Crewmates), because then they would be discovered and ejected. Ejections occur as a result of “Emergency Meetings” - those happen every time a dead Crewmate is discovered and the body is reported OR whenever the “Emergency Meeting Button” object in the game world is interacted with.
During an Emergency Meeting, there are two sections. First is the discussion section, during which, normally, the person who discovered the body or called the meeting explains what has happened (perhaps where the body was found or why the meeting was called) and potentially extend an accusation towards some other Player.
Emergency Meetings are the social part of the game, and, as such, are both the most enjoyable aspect of it, in conjunction with a friend group and the gameplay component, and also the least enjoyable aspect of it, when lacking a friend group. That is owed up to the fact that communication through written text - through chatting - is unbelievably inferior when compared to speech, and it also takes more time.
As a result of that, a quick-chat wheel is introduced, though it is even slower than actually typing out the words, due to the fact that it either requires the Player to learn where everything is situated, or it requires that the Player reads out what every option in the quick-chat wheel says, which, again, takes a lot of time.
The main crux of the Emergency Meetings is that they might appear too long, sometimes, but then most often, when the tension rises and folks get into the game, they are too short, even when plenty of time is provided to the Players. That’s, actually, not a bad design choice - as Emergency Meetings can be set up to last up to seven minutes - for it keeps the tension high and attempts to simulate the conditions of stress and hurry that are, supposedly, to be expected in such a situation.
After the first section of an Emergency Meeting passes, the second section - the Voting section - begins. During it, Players can continue to talk, but they are also provided with the option to vote for any one of the other Players or to Skip. If a Player has accrued a majority of the votes, that Player is ejected from the ship and, essentially, killed.
If the setting is enabled, after being ejected, a Player’s role will be revealed. Alternatively, the role might not be revealed. As previously stated, one of the victory conditions for the Crew is to eject all the Impostors. However, every ejection that does not eject an Impostor also contributes to one of the Impostors’ victory conditions.
So, how does one get to figure out if another Player is an Impostor or not? Either by seeing them kill a Crewmate, which is likely going to be a rare occurrence, or by recognizing that the Impostor is not performing Tasks.
Tasks are the other victory condition for the Crew. At the start of a match, every Crewmate is assigned a number of Tasks - that number is determined during the game’s set-up, so it could be anywhere from 0 (though any less than 3 makes the game nearly impossible for the Impostors to win) to 8. Regardless, while performing a Task, a Player will stand still, which can be taken as an indication that the Player is performing a Task.
Naturally, the Impostor can fake the performance of Tasks by also standing still at a Task’s location - and that’s part of the fun. The Impostor has the opportunity to mislead and misdirect the Crewmates. That can be even more effective when the Task bar - an element of the User Interface that displays a green bar that fills up a bit whenever a Task is completed, becoming all green when all Tasks are completed and the game is won by the Crewmates - is turned on from the game’s set-up.
But those are strategies that I am discussing, rather than mechanics. Regardless, it is a fact that the game was actively designed with this in mind - making it ambiguous as to whether the Player is actually performing a Task or is just standing still - as that allows for such strategies to appear.
There are also some specific Tasks that do have a visual component to them, which can be used as a means of confirming that whoever is performing them is, indeed, a Crewmate.
Now, some more specifics into what Tasks are - they are small mini-games that take a bit of time to complete, but are nothing too spectacular. Click a number of buttons in a specific order, connect the dots, pull a lever, click at the right time - nothing too complex, but engaging enough, considering that whenever a Task is being performed, the Player can not move, and the User Interface component depicting the task is very large… So large that it obstructs almost the entirety of the screen, rendering the Player blind and very vulnerable to an Impostor’s attack.
Lastly, there are also some other tools that can be utilized by the Crewmates to get more information - such as cameras, allowing them to see in other rooms, or a ‘vitals’ console, allowing them to see how many Players are in specific rooms, or a log depicting whenever a Player has passed by a certain corner.
These come in handy, because the Impostor has quite a few tools at their disposal. Most important of all - they can kill Crewmates by being close enough to them and pressing the “kill” button. Another very important tool is the ability to enter vents - vents are normally inaccessible for Crewmates and act as shortcuts, taking the Impostor from one room to another that is otherwise unconnected to it, all the while being virtually invisible.
One other thing that the Impostor can do is perform a sabotage. Those can range from a meager door coming closed for a few seconds to catastrophic reactor meltdowns that, if not arrested within thirty seconds, lead to a victory for the Impostor. The neat part of this is that the Impostor can work to prevent a sabotage - such as the aforementioned reactor meltdown - as a means of building up an alibi or just making sure they are not suspected due to their lack of involvement in the solution of the otherwise game-ending threat.
In short, there are a lot of things that both the Impostors and the Crewmates can use to gain the upper hand, to manipulate information and movement and to figure out who is who… Unfortunately, that was not all.
Had the game been simply that, it would have been far better than it is currently. As mentioned, regrettably, it is not just that. There are also additional, secret roles that are added. Some Crewmates can become Guardian Angels after being killed, who have the ability to prevent a killing blow if timed correctly - though it does need to be incredibly well timed, due to the fact that there is no wind-up or indication that an impostor is killing - it happens instantly.
In theory, this is not a bad change, as prior to that all that a dead Crewmate could do, after being killed, was roam around as a ghost and finish their Tasks from the afterlife. Similarly, dead Impostors can cause sabotages. However, in practice, this is a mediocre addition. It does not break the game, as the cooldown on the Guardian Angel’s ability is far greater than that of the Impostor’s ability to kill, but it can also prove to be thoroughly useless, due to the incredibly tight window that requires stupendous predictions to pull off well.
There are other possible roles, though. Crewmates can also be Scientists - who have the option to, at any time, pull up a screen showing who is alive and who is dead. This is nearly useless, with the only positive of its existence being the fact that a death can be figured out a lot faster, though at the same time it removes the ability to tell where the body was, which is incredibly valuable in figuring out who could have done it.
In fact, the Scientist role is actually bad, because it can be used as a defense for the addition of the second Impostor role, but more on that later. The third role that Crewmates can get is the Engineer role, which allows them to use vents. This is convenient for the Engineer when it comes to moving around, but is inconvenient due to the fact that it makes them a lot more suspicious, due to the fact that they vent, and due to the fact that an Impostor can claim to be an Engineer after being told that they were caught using a vent.
Now, the reason why these three roles are bad - the Impostor role. Whereas the Crewmate roles wind up being nearly useless in almost every game, with minor exceptions, whenever the Impostor role shows up in a game, it is nearly certain to result in a victory for the Impostors. That is so because the special Impostor role is called “the Shapeshifter”, and it allows the Shapeshifter to turn into any one of the other Players.
Being able to do that makes it nearly impossible for the Crew to deal with the Shapeshifter, thus resulting in a complete destruction of the delicate balance that is otherwise in place between the Impostors and the Crewmates.
Now, it is possible for the Shapeshifter to be a good addition to a match of Among Us - as it is possible for the other three bonus roles to be passable - but it requires that the Players who are playing the game take it incredibly seriously and notice almost everything they can, that they communicate via voice chat, or are playing locally on their phones, and are “trying hard”.
In almost every other case, the Shapeshifter role is a bad addition to the match, because, as previously stated - text-based communication is inferior and takes more time.
The issues of Among Us present themselves in the fact that it is a multiplayer only game. It is such, because it could not be anything else, but at the same time the bulk of the matches played are ones that do not feature vocal communication. As a result, this game is dreadfully unpleasant to play without a group of friends with whom one talks. With such a group of friends, it is a nearly perfect social deduction game.
Additionally, there is also a “Hide and Seek” gamemode, though that is not a social deduction game in the slightest. 2/3
Presentation
Among Us is a simple looking game, featuring 2D sprites and a top-down view of a place. Everything is quite quaint, reminiscent of a flash game from the golden age of Flash.
Information is conveyed to the Player very clearly, and there is also a decent set of tutorials for both the normal gamemode and the Hide and Seek one, which provide enough information for the Player to be able to play without much hassle.
In regards to audio, it is quite bare, with there being no music aside from the track that plays in conjunction with the main menu - which track is very decent and quite eerie, though that’s about it. Even so, the lack of music helps with the creation of atmosphere, of tension - there is the clanking of boots against the surfaces the Player Characters walk on, there is the droning of the lights and then there are the screams of the siren whenever something goes awry.
Presentation-wise, I can’t say that anything is too wrong with Among Us. In fact, they do a very good job with what they’ve set out to use. Alas, something is missing - it is too barebones, or perhaps there is too much effort put into devising and presenting the many available microtransactions. As a result, it gets a passing grade, but not more. 2/3
Story
There is no story in Among Us, aside from what is established - that there is some kind of Impostor, who is an alien lifeform, and who wants to kill all Crewmates. There are some bits of environmental story-telling, be it through the snippets beheld during Task performance - the Card Swipe is very neat - or by just walking around Mira HQ or the Skeld.
There is, simultaneously, no story and a very interesting story, because the developers have left in crumbs that are almost nonsense, but not nonsense enough to not be appealing, as a result of which the game not only has a neat premise and some funky thoughts, but it also provides a massive playground for emergent story-telling.
After all, a game of social deduction is a mystery that is waiting to be solved. Even so, there is very little, and I can’t give more than a single point. 1/3
Legendary Point
Does this game get the legendary point, so craved and wanted by all and none at the same time? The impact Among Us has had on popular culture is unmistakable, but the game itself is not anything too spectacular. The interactions and things that it allowed were astounding - such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez playing with Twitch streamers.
Even so, I was not touched by Among Us in any capacity. I liked the main menu’s musical accompaniment, I liked the concept, but the concept itself was not something entirely original, rather an iteration upon a number of other things. So no, Among Us does not get the Legendary Point. 0/1
Conclusion
5/10. Among Us is a simple, yet splendid social deduction game to play with friends, and it can provide for many hours of good fun. However, any other mode of play is strongly advised against, as it simply fails in those regards.
In the bag of mediocrity, though always ready to be procured if my friends desire it. Alas, it might gather quite a bit of dust.