What Exactly Has Come Among Us?
How the sudden rising of Among Us has brought boredom levels down.
Made by Innersloth, the same people who made the Henry Stickman games, and released on June 15th, 2018, Among Us has positively taken over all kinds of communities by storm. If you also were to look over the shoulder of the average Frederick student these days, you might see a screen like this.
November 13, 2020
Video games have always been that one social category that has lots of different and extreme takes on them as a whole. Some video games can be incredibly violent like GTA or Doom where your objectives are to go through major crime heists or slay demons in the coolest ways possible. There are also more mellow games like Animal Crossing and Minecraft where your objective is to just expand and continue growing your world day by day. However, if you’ve been living under a rock, there’s this game called Among Us that actually isn’t a NEW game as it was released back in 2018, but regardless of release date, the game has spiked heavily in popularity. (especially with students at Frederick High School.) With it’s mechanics of intense mystery and telling lies/truths to your friends, Among Us is the perfect game to play with friends long distance and have endless hours of fun.
To begin for those who don’t know, this game is a party game in which you can have a maximum of ten players with preferably two people playing as imposters. If you get crewmate, your job is to do tasks on the spaceship and figure out who the imposters are and if you get imposter, your job is to try and kill players without getting caught doing so. This game is totally and completely free to play on mobile devices, but if you want to play on PC, you’ll need to buy it for just five dollars on the Steam store. While this game doesn’t have a really good voice channel, all you have to do is go onto Discord and message your friends to hop onto a game with you and just like that, you’re all set for hours of entertainment with almost no money spent at all.
You might be thinking, ‘what about Among Us makes the game so fun to play?’ To which I’d respond with, this game rewards lying and deception while being mainly targeted towards an age demographic of teens and young adults. If you put two and two together, it can be easily seen why this game is so addictive and you also get to learn just how well your friends can lie. But to be more positive, you can also see how good of a detective your friends are and how well they can piece things together.
My own personal first game of Among Us actually was during advisory on October 30th and going into it, I had seen a lot of YouTubers play this game with their friends so I knew some of the strats. The whole reason we were playing this in advisory was to bond a little bit with our class and I have to say that it worked pretty well. It got a lot of quiet people talking, excited, and energetic while having a light hearted and fun mood going on overall.
Don’t just take my word for it, senior Rodrigo Leo who discovered the game in Chinese class last year has all kinds of experience with Among Us. “One month when my friends started hearing about the game, we played it for three weeks back to back on a FaceTime call which was one of the most fun things I’ve done during quarantine.” While Rodrigo says he isn’t addicted to it, he still loves all the new content being added as well as the TikTok trends that come with it.
However, this game hasn’t just asserted itself as a new king of party games, but it’s also been a way to have fun with your friends while staying at home. Rodrigo further commented about Among Us and it’s help in the pandemic by stating, “I do think this game helped people with social distancing and staying at home because it doesn’t require you to [physically] be in the same room as someone. It’s also easily accessible unlike other games where you have to have the same console, this game is downloadable on any smart device.”
What makes Among Us one of the better games of today is that there isn’t anything else like a “battle pass” or special cosmetics that you need to purchase to get the full experience out of the game. But perhaps best of all, the game isn’t clunky, laggy, and tough to play on the free version. Senior Ethan Alstrom went on to endorse Among Us for these kinds of mechanics stating, “if we want to maximize the number of people spending time with their friends online rather than Having them over in person, then games need to be more accessible. This means free, low skill barrier, and available on as many devices as possible.”
Overall, even though Among Us took roughly less than two years to get popular, it’s already asserted itself to be a solid and inviting game. You can even ask Mr. Rein who’s really into video games himself and has also enjoyed his play through of the game by playing it with his advisory students and even playing some rounds as brain breaks. Him, like many other first time players of Among Us, enjoyed his first games and went on to state, “I think (Among Us) is a good team building activity in a way. It is also a good way to take a brain break and have some fun.”
