Flying under the radar since 2018, the social-deduction party game "Among Us" has suddenly seen a surge of interest from video game streamers.
In the months after its release, "Among Us" never had more than 50 simultaneous players.
Thanks to a dedicated developer team pushing out updates, the game started to see serious traction recently, and in the past month, its peak concurrent users topped 1.5 million.
That's a pretty amazing feat for a 2-year-old, extremely inexpensive game.
If you've ever played party games such as Werewolf or Mafia (or sometimes called Vampire) with friends, then you have the gist of what "Among Us" is about.
The game features a group of four to 10 players in a space-theme setting.
Each game, one to three players are "Impostors" and the rest are "Crewmates." It's the Impostors' job to stealthily kill Crewmates, and the Crewmates' job to identify and eliminate the Imposters hiding among them. Each game consists of a series of rounds that lasts until one side is victorious.
All players look mostly the same: a crudely drawn, masked, chunky astronaut suit that differs only in color and name from the rest of the crew. It's impossible to identify the Imposters visually.
Crewmates are given a series of maintenance tasks to complete each round, such as restoring lighting systems that have gone offline, refueling engines and repairing electrical systems. The Crewmates win if they complete all their tasks without being killed, or if they identify the Impostors through a series of votes held each round.
The difficulty in identifying the Impostors lies in the fact that completing the required tasks often involves going to various parts of the base or spaceship alone. Each task requires the completion of a short, simple minigame. That minigame, however, covers up most of the screen and is a perfect time for an Impostor to strike. Whenever an Imposter has struck, and a dead body is discovered, a team meeting is held.
The meetings take place either over text only or voice chat only.
Players discuss who the likely culprits are, which other members of the crew were nearby that they can vouch for, and they interrogate one another about their tasks and where they were when the murder took place.
Needless to say, for Imposters, successfully lying to your friends is an important skill.
Players can then vote, and if a majority is reached, the chosen player is ejected from the map and killed, at which point players are notified whether that was actually an Impostor or an innocent Crewmate. The game isn't over for expired crew members, however.
After death, players exist as ghosts, and while they can no longer communicate with the living, they can chat with the other ghosts. Crewmate ghosts can continue to help their teammates by completing tasks and keeping the lights on.
Impostor ghosts can sabotage systems, creating more chances for Crewmates to become isolated and open to attack.
As with the party game "Fall Guys," the rise in popularity of "Among Us" might have something to do with the covid-19 lockdowns that have kept people cooped up at home who still seek connections with other people. The game itself is fairly simple. Most of its appeal comes from interactions with other players, or from watching other people play.
Plus, it'll show you which of your friends are really, really good liars.
"Among Us" is just $5 on PC and free on mobile devices, so if this sort of game is appealing, there's no reason not to grab it. Because of its sudden, immense popularity (and because of the strain on its online servers), a sequel to "Among Us" is in development.
Among Us: Use These Settings For A Perfectly Balanced Game | Community Settings You Should Use
Among Us exploded in popularity over the last few weeks, reaching the much larger audience that this creative multiplayer game deserves — and building a community that demands to know the perfect way to play. In Among Us, you play as a crew on a space vessel doing their daily business and maintenance. Hidden among the space-people are imposters, alien shape-shifters that have only one goal: kill everyone.
If you’ve played Trouble In Terrorist Town, you know the deal here — a detective tries to determine which players are the imposters, the crew tries to stay alive, and the imposters try to kill everyone before they’re caught. There’s a gentle balance between imposters and crew, and with the right settings you can squeeze the maximum amount of fun from the game. The standard settings are good, but they could be even better. That’s where these community-suggested settings come in.
Community Settings | Balanced Settings For Crew & Imposters
These settings are community-inspired efforts to make the most competitive game possible — giving the best balance to the crew and the imposter.
Why are these settings perfect? Let’s break it down.
# Imposters: In Among Us, you want about two imposters for every four players. You want to give the Imposters a chance, so you want a couple of them around — if you have fewer than 6 players, I recommend going down to 1 imposter. Just make sure to avoid playing on the larger maps.
Confirm Ejects: This one is tricky. This setting confirms whether the ejected player is an imposter or not. If you’re looking for more mystery, disable this setting — it gives the imposters a slight edge when disabled.
# Emergency Meetings: Giving each character a single Emergency Meeting means players must use these moments wisely.
Emergency Cooldown: With a limited amount of emergency meetings, it makes sense to allow rapid-fire emergency meetings if there’s a real emergency. If multiple players are calling emergency meetings within 15s, you know something sus is going on.
Discussion Time: Not everyone uses Discord. If you’re using in-game chat, you’ll want to make sure there’s plenty of time for players to say what they need to say. If you’re using voice-chat, feel free to lower this setting.
Voting Time: Again, this is all about communication. Personally, I feel there should be way less time given for voting. Players should have to make a choice fast.
Player Speed: Increase player speed slightly so everyone can move around the map faster. You’ll have less time to react, but you’ll be able to dodge imposter attacks if you’re quick — the imposter settings are important for that.
Crewmate Vision: The crew needs to have much worse vision range than the imposter. That makes exploration a lot more paranoia-inducing! And the crew will have to fully check each room — as intended.
Imposter Vision: Imposters should have x3 (or, at lowest, x2) the vision range. Imposters need more visual information before they make a decision.
Kill Cooldown: Imposters shouldn’t be able to attack rapidly — if they attack and miss, they’ll be punished for it. No rampages allowed here. Making them wait 30s means the Imposters have to act patiently and choose their time to strike, instead of quickly wiping out half the crew.
Kill Distance: Imposters should have to attack at short-range for a kill. Very simple, and the imposters already have plenty of advantages here.
Visual Tasks: Turn off visual tasks so players can’t simply confirm with each other that they’re not an imposter. Turning off visual tasks means nobody can actually see what other players are doing, so there’s more uncertainty.
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