In the fall of 2020, months upon months of social distancing and staying home had begun to take its toll on Americans across the country. People who hadn’t seen friends since the beginning of the pandemic had been looking for ways to interact with them again. Enter “Among Us,” a hybrid PC game/mobile application multiplayer social deduction game from 2018. A series of random circumstances led to the game’s rise to prominence, and it’s now being played by both casual and hardcore gamers alike. 

The game features 10 players, or “crewmates,” aboard one out of a handful of space-station-themed maps attempting to accomplish a list of tasks in each match. There are up to three hidden “impostors” whose goal is to blend in and eliminate each crewmate until they outnumber the other players. 

For such a simple model from so long ago (in terms of the game industry), the game holds up surprisingly well. The host of each match is afforded plenty of control over the settings, from the amount and complexity of the tasks assigned to each player, down to the distance from which the impostor is able to kill other players. There are other moments in which the game feels extremely dated, and further limited if you, like me, play the free mobile version (which is compatible for PC players). For instance, after a body of one of the cartoon astronauts is found, a meeting is called in which the players have the opportunity to vote out anyone they think might be the impostor. If you play the game as is, then all you have available to you is a text chat to communicate at that moment. Using a phone’s keyboard makes this more cumbersome. The ideal way to communicate is to open a third-party chat app, such as Discord or Skype and mute yourself until the meetings are called. This is fine and normal routine for PC players, but those playing on mobile need two devices to accomplish this efficiently. A planned sequel was cancelled in favor of refining and updating this title due to its sudden popularity, so there is hope for some quality of life improvements. The game is $4.99 on Steam and free with ads on mobile.