Here are the reasons you need to be playing ‘Among Us’ in quarantine
An online game that works on the premise of social deduction? Part-heaven for a murder-mystery enthusiast, part-hell for the eerie times we’re living in. Among Us is just that. Played with 4-10 players, the game is set in space & basically reuses an age-old premise.
Your spaceship is about to take off, but one of the people in the group is an impostor. This person is a literal backstabber as they’re bent on killing everyone else. The way to victory is by either identifying & voting the impostor off the ship or by completing all the tasks that fall your way.
The game gives the impostor a lot of powers, too. For example, the sabotage trick makes it easier to create chaos, manufacture alibis, and go on a killing spree. While the game was launched way back in 2018, it got infused with new life as people found themselves in social isolation amid the pandemic.
The game Among Us has emerged as one of the biggest PC & mobile games, boasting of a user base of more than 85 million players in the last six months. It’s no coincidence that its wild popularity overlaps with the duration of the lockdown. The success of the game was so unexpected that InnerSloth, the creators are refocusing & pivoting resources from a sequel production to the original version.
Just the distraction you need from 2020
We won’t mince our words. 2020 has been a terrifying, dreadful year. So any distraction seems good, but there’s something about being able to control a situation, albeit in an artificial setting, that gives a modicum of hope to carry on.
In fact, look at the two things you need to do in the game. One, the players are supposed to carry our menial tasks to maintain their systems. If you’re able to d that, victory is yours. It has a distinct resonance for us currently because just getting through the day seems like an achievement enough to celebrate.
Secondly, the game revolves around an impostor who is bent on ruining the whole set-up. This player will do everything they can to sabotage the progress, to kill the honest players, and to make the prospect of victory bleak for the last ones standing. This sounds eerily like an analogy for the coronavirus sabotaging any semblance of certainty & control in our lives.
Remember wink murder? It’s gone digital
As kids, most of us have played this party game where a murderer secretively murders people by winking at them. Unless the murderer’s bluff is called out, they can use their stealth & creativity to burn everyone else to ashes. It’s incumbent on the surviving players to find out who the killer is.
Consider a reproduction of this game in the digital space, and we’ll have a system very similar to Among Us. The premise – that the killer is among us – ties the tricks together. Use your bluffing skills, your fabrication finesse, and blame-shifting prowess correct, and you can emerge victoriously.
Running errands
The quarantine has changed a lot of things for us, one of the most impactful is perhaps the nonchalance of our errands runs. Who doesn’t fondly remember running out for trivial errands? In order to give us a sense of purpose in the interstices of time we have to ourselves, the game gives us tasks such as rebooting the systems, cleaning out air ducts, looking over the corridors, while the killer finds their next victim.
That’s another reason the game feels empowering in a way – you can still check off the smaller tasks on your list to feel like you’ve accomplished something during the day – and if you happen to be an impostor, you get to experience the nonchalance you’ve been missing for so long.
