By BRINLEE VUOLA
Staff Writer
Recently throughout August and September, a certain game has been gaining lots of popularity. It’s called “Among Us” and it was originally released in June of 2018. However, during this time of quarantine, lots of people have been discovering it and that has made it gain lots of popularity. It’s a multiplayer game where each person is a character, specifically an astronaut up in a spaceship, and the goal is for everyone to complete their tasks around the ship in order to win. However, there are imposters aboard as well, and their goal is to kill everyone off before the tasks get finished. It’s a big mystery game that people play a lot with their friends, and each role that a person plays is very important to keeping the game fun.
If you have tasks to do, you are known as a crewmate. You run around the ship completing each and every task you’re assigned to while keeping your eye out for anything suspicious. If you come across a body anywhere in the ship, you can report the body and a group discussion will commence. In that discussion, people can vote to get someone off the ship or skip the vote if there isn’t any evidence or suspicions yet. If there’s any case that you see anything suspicious, such as weird behavior from someone or someone hopping into a vent (more on that later), you can run to the cafeteria and press a big red button to call an emergency meeting. You can report your findings there and hopefully, if the rest of the crew believes you, they can vote out the person you saw as suspicious. Be careful with that though; if you’re wrong about your suspicions, that could make you look suspicious and people may think that you just tried to frame someone because you are the imposter, even if that isn’t the case. The number of crewmates greatly outnumbers the amount of imposters, so it’s important for crewmates to stick together in hopes to catch the killer or killers.
If you are not a normal crewmate, then you are the imposter. Imposters do not get tasks to do, but they can pretend they are doing something by standing in front of the required place for a certain task. That way, they don’t just run around and try finding someone to kill, because that would look very suspicious. Imposters are the only people who can hop into vents, secretly moving from one room to another below the surface and without being seen publicly. So if someone sees you vent, they know that you’re an imposter and can get you voted off the ship. Imposter’s can also anonymously sabotage a task or room in one of the following ways: shutting all the doors to trap people in a certain room, firing up the reactor, turning off all the lights, and damaging the oxygen. That strategy leads every person to those rooms to fix the crisis before time runs out, allowing the imposter to kill off someone far behind or kill off someone in a crowd. Killing off someone in a crowd makes it nearly impossible for people to tell who did it. In a full round of 10 people, there are usually 2 or 3 imposters total. But if there’s a small game, there’s usually only 1.
I’ve played “Among Us” several times and it’s honestly one of my favorite games to play now, whether I’m playing with a big group of my friends or all by myself in a server full of strangers. Suspecting certain crewmates, walking around finding bodies, pointing blame at others, eliminating people yourself–just some of the many fun things you can do while playing “Among Us.”