Are you a fan of classic summer camp games like Mafia or Werewolf? Or maybe you’re curious about why there seem to be these cartoonish jellybean astronauts appearing all over your timeline online as of the past month? Well here’s the game (and brief overview) for all your explanatory needs! Welcome to Among Us, the social deduction game that suddenly came into public view a little more than 2 years after it’s initial launch.

Initially released on June 15th 2018 by publisher InnerSloth, Among Us has seen a spike in popularity predominantly during the late summer/early fall of 2020, due in part to its use by popular Twitch streamers and Youtubers. You’d think from the flood of eldritch inspired fanart and dark fan stories that the game itself was dark, but the game itself is delightfully cartoon, with minimal story and premise. This means the majority of the engagement and lore surrounding the game was fan generated, which speaks volumes to its fan base and supporters.

The setting and premise of the game are straightforward, as they are in many social deduction games. You and your astronaut looking crewmates have been infiltrated by an imposter; one (or more) players who have the express goal of sabotaging your mission. As crewmates, you have three main goals: Complete your tasks around the space station, discover and vote out the traitor, and don’t die! The game is split into two main gameplay loops: Run around and do your tasks/sabotage, and emergency meetings. The tasks portion of the game has you running around the map completing various minigames, and checking things off your to-do list. Emergency meetings, however, is where the real social deduction begins.

These meetings, called upon the discovery of a slain crewmate, or initiated with the push of a button at the center of the map, is the main den for accusations and voting. Players have a designated amount of time to accuse or defend themselves, based on what they may suspect or have seen other players do during the Tasks portion of the round, trying to catch Imposters out on lies, or by spotting them near the bodies shortly before they were discovered. Likewise, Imposters may try to throw innocent crewmates under the bus, as a vote is called at the end of every meeting, for a teammate (imposter or otherwise) to be thrown overboard. There’s an in-game chat used for these discussions, or players can choose to use outside programs such as Discord for voice chat, used only during these meetings.

This game is deceptively fun, especially when played with friends, and it will quickly have you pointing accusing fingers at people you thought you knew well. There is a public lobby for single players as well, although that suffers the typical concerns you see in many public lobby based games, with players sometimes prone to breaking rules by telling teammates outright who killed them (which defeats the social deduction aspects), or by leaving lobbies prematurely if they don’t get the role they wanted (many find it more fun to be the imposter, but someone needs to be a crewmate!). It also currently has suffered problems from dropped connections and overloaded servers, due to its sudden increase in popularity, but as time progresses those are expected to improve, given its team and support. 

With a player count estimated in the range of 3.8 million as of late September, it seems that gamers have spoken. Among Us is free to play for mobile users, and has a price point of $5 on Steam, along with cosmetic DLC to customize your jellybean character with pets, hats, and skins to set yourself apart from the sea of primary colored space people. 

For more information about Among Us, you can visit the InnerSloth website here.