This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.
Among Us may be a fun game, but the very
premise of it can make sessions tense and unnerving, knowing that you can die when you least suspect it, until there's possibly
no one left.
The Premise
- The game is built on Paranoia Fuel from the crew's perspective. Is that other person in the room just a fellow human who happens to also have a task there, or could they be an impostor waiting to strike? It doesn't help that you can't talk outside of meetings.
- The Impostors themselves are extremely unnerving.
- The game ends if the Impostors alive equal the number of the innocent crew remaining. The crew can't do anything to win/survive anymore, so the gameplay just ends. One must wonder what goes through their heads.
- Watching a player be executed after they are voted out can be a little unnerving. Depending on the map, they are either sent floating off into space without oxygen, sent plummeting to their deaths, thrown into lava, or cast to the seas while being set on fire. Either way, they die horribly.
- The mere fact that the crew members use arguably more brutal methods of execution than the Impostors. Granted, it's possible that they don't have any other options to kill and must use the environment, but still... (Even this isn't true on the Airship, as there's a whole armory stocked with guns, though there is the possibility that those wouldn't work.)
Gameplay
- Getting killed as a crew member is an abrupt process, with the usual ambient sounds of your surroundings getting interrupted by the Scare Chord that plays during your death animation. Often it happens while you're focused on one of your tasks (with the task interface obscuring most of your screen), and sometimes it happens just as you're passing by another player in the hallway.
- You may be working on a task only to see an Impostor suddenly jump out of a vent, poised to kill. You have very little time to react and escape.
- Sometimes a crewmate can spend their entire game with a crewmate. Afterwards, the poor crewmate has their dead body reported. Did the crewmate accompanying them killed them? Or did they just happen to stumble on the crime?
- Imagine you notice the Reactor beginning to melt down. You wait for two people to go do it while you finish tasks, but eventually you notice no one is shutting it down... and you're now too far away to fix it yourself before it melts...
- Even worse, going to the reactor or seismic stabilizer to fix it... and slowly realizing a second person isn't going to come.
- Or you walk up to the reactor or seismic stabilizer...and find the corpse of some poor Crewmate that tried to fix it and paid for it with their life (this one is slightly dampened by the fact that you can report the body and end the emergency without anyone else to help, making it actually a lucky occurrence).
- Similarly, fixing the O2 in Admin, but realizing you're not gonna make it to the O2 room in time.
- Sometimes you'll notice one person monitored as on the reactor, only for the reactor monitor to suddenly cycle back down to 0 players on the reactor.
- Watching the cameras is useful for tracking everyone's movements, but they have limited field of vision, so there's always blind spots where you can miss the action or suspicious activity. This is doubly so for Polus security, where you have to toggle between individual camera views. Did that player just come out of a dead end? Weren't there just two players there? Did that player leave your view because they noticed you were watching? Is that player who's entering your room an Impostor going for the kill? It can almost feel like Five Nights at Freddy's at times. Just remember that everyone are living players, not strings of codes, and this gets even scarier.
- Sometimes you may realize you haven't seen a player in quite a while. Did they die? Are they lying in wait within the vents? Are you just not running into them? Usually you find out which it is the hard way...
- Sometimes you might want to stick together with another player to keep an eye on them, trying to attest to the other's innocence, while hoping they'd do the same for you. But you have to wonder, what if the person you're tailing is the Impostor? After spending that much time together, surely they would have done something by now, right? Or perhaps, is this what they want you to think, so that they can use you as a scapegoat or to get away with more kills?
- Checking the Vitals on Polus shows whether every player in the session is alive, recently killed, or disconnected.note Players who were killed before the most recent meeting are recorded "disconnected" to help distinguish new kills It can be quite a shock opening up the Vitals screen only to find out that someone has died, and you have no idea where, especially given how large the map is.
- If you have the misfortune to be playing with a hacker who has disabled the kill cooldown, it gets even more unsettling as you can watch everyone get picked off one by one in rapid succession; by the time you realize you're next, it's too late.
- What's especially unsettling is when you're with another player, leave them for just a moment to do something else, then check the vitals and see that they're dead. You were just with them, and the brief period you leave is when the impostor saw the chance to strike.
- Sometimes you call a meeting or report a body, only to discover that there are more dead crew than you thought. Now you have to work with a lower numbers advantage and you had no idea where those extra crew were killed...
- High-skilled impostors can even invoke a sense of a Sugar Apocalypse if more than half the crew is killed in one round by the time a meeting is called, making the surviving crewmates even more untrusting of each other from the sheer overload of unsolved murder cases unaccounted for.
- Voting someone off only to be met with a message stating that they were not An Impostor. The real Impostor is still at large, and you just killed an innocent crew member.
- Just picture being on the other side of that. You were wrongly ejected from the group, no one believed you, and you were either flung into space, fell to your doom, or thrown into lava, all while the Impostor is still around, possibly having won the trust of the crew. It'd be equal parts frustrating and horrifying.
- Or even more horrific with good Impostors: you were the victim that started the discussion. You know your killer and not only does nobody suspect them, but the group also proceeds to add another innocent to the ghost crew. If the other ghosts inform you who the second/third impostor is, it is entirely possible that you notice how they smoothly manipulate the Crewmates to murder each other.
- When the lights are sabotaged, your field of view lowers so you can only see players practically touching you. You won't be able to tell if you'll walk right into the kill range of an Impostor, or if you just walked past a body while none the wiser. In the latter case, it's still possible to report a body you can't see if you're close enough for the "Report" button to light up, but you won't know exactly where it is; taking the time to find the body, reporting a body with an uncertain location, or just moving along without reporting the body all can be seen as suspicious behavior.
- Also, even when reporting the body, it might be that the killer is still right in front of you and all you can say is you found a body with no extra knowledge. Or even worse: you see another player that was trying to walk through the dark and end up suspecting an innocent Crewmate while the Impostor has long left the area.
- It doesn't help that, unlike Reactor and Oxygen/Seismic sabotages, lights are not automatically fixed by reporting a body. So after that meeting concludes, you're still fumbling around in the dark.
- Going through the decontamination rooms on Mira HQ and especially on Polus Outpost. If nobody else who you know is a crewmate is coming along with you, then you're all alone in a room and/or hall that takes a while to get through. And if you're killed there, your murderer has the perfect alibi: They were just going to do their tasks, and found you on the way. On the bright side, you can reliably affirm the innocence of the other person if you both come out alive.
- Polus Outpost has both you and the Impostor stuck in the area at least so any other Crewmate in there might point suspicion their way. But Mira HQ? Not only does the locked off area have two vents that can be accessed from everywhere, the decontamination chamber itself also has one. Wait for a lone Crewmate to get into the hallway, vent in, kill, vent out and wait for someone else to stumble upon their body. The decontamination chamber locks the doors long enough for a perfect vent-based Stealth Hi/Bye.
- When a hat-wearing crewmate gets knocked down by an impostor and tries to reach out for their hat? Funny. When that hat is a mini crewmate and the crewmate tries to reach out for who is presumably their child? Not so funny.
- Related, when you die, your ghostly form happens to have a ghost version of your hat. This includes the mini crewmate, meaning the impostor kills not only you, but your child as well.
- It's common for players to have both the mini-crewmate hat and the mini-crewmate pet. Hats become part of your ghostly form, but pets just sit there where you died looking sad. This carries the implication that the Impostor had zero qualms killing one child, but decided to leave the other alive as Cruel Mercy after they just had to watch their parent and sibling get brutally murdered.
- Even though the mini crewmates (and other pets) don't take a ghostly form, they are invisible to living crewmates. This probably implies that the impostor did kill the pet as well.
- When you die, any pet following you just stops. It's usually sad and not scary, but with a mini crewmate? They might be a child watching their parent die right before their eyes. Now they are just sitting there, silent. Perhaps the impostor will pass by, and there is nothing the mini crewmate can do to stop them.
- Being a ghostly crewmate becomes And I Must Scream/Forced to Watch if you think about it too hard. You can fly around and still complete tasks, but you can only talk to your fellow ghosts; you can't call out who killed you from beyond the grave (which makes sense from a gameplay standpoint, but still an unnerving situation to be in). All you can do is watch as the Impostor that killed you gets away with their crime and keeps murdering your fellow Crewmates. And woe betide you if an Impostor sabotages the reactor or something else lethal; ghosts can't fix sabotage, so if Bystander Syndrome kicks in, all you can do is watch as the timer ticks down to everyone's death and your killer's victory.
- Even a dead Impostor can still be dangerous. Although they cannot kill directly, their freedom of time and movement allows them to haunt whoever they like wherever they like, allowing them to focus on things such as closing important doors on Polus or hovering over the button to call a necessary sabotage if a Crewmate is about to initiate a game-winning meeting. While dead Impostors who focus on sabotaging often hurt their own partner(s) more than the other side, the occasional well-timed call can still mean a defeat for the crew, with no way to stop it or see it coming.
- When the Impostors win, their victory fanfare is a Drone of Dread, and it's not the most pleasant to listen to, even if you're playing as one.
- With the Engineer role active, seeing someone exit a vent becomes very nerve wracking, since there’s no way to tell if they’re crewmate or an impostor. On the flip side, Engineers have to worry about venting in front of crewmates who don't know about the role, or in front of an imposter looking for someone to kill, especially with their time limit.
- Similarly, the Shapeshifter role ups the Paranoia Fuel because it becomes 10x easier for an Impostor to frame someone; they just have to shapeshift into that someone and kill in front of a bunch of witnesses.
- Worse still, the shift ability of the Shapeshifter subspecies is so top-notch and attentive that they can can even mimic the pets of the targeted crewmate perfectly, even if the shapeshifter doesn't have one in the match. Literally, there's no way to tell if they're in disguise unless you're lucky enough to catch them shifting back to their real form or managed to find the residue of the shift, but that's only if the visibility of the residue is on.
- Imagine getting framed; you're doing your tasks in peace. Suddenly a body gets reported, and the crewmates said you had killed them. You have no idea what they are talking about (double points if the murder happened in the opposite side of the map), and despite your best efforts, without an alibi from another player, you couldn't convince them that you're not the imposter. What's even worse is, you won't know who framed you, and so do the crewmate "you had killed."
- It's even worse if you become a Guardian Angel. If you got framed, you have no idea who did it, and is left trying to guess who is the Shapeshifter. If you are the one the Shapeshifter killed, you might follow your "killer" and protect anyone who gets nearby, and usually find out the hard way that someone else had is the killer, which means you had wasted your protection. Even going to the ghost chat won't help most of the time. If the Shapeshifter did none of their killings in their true form and even if they did, the dead crewmates would give you conflicting views, or don't know at all. In short, the Shapeshifter mode had made finding the Imposter harder for even the dead Crewmates.
- If you see the Shapeshifted Impostor with the Crewmate they turned into, there's no way to determine who's the fake without someone getting killed; and even then you have no idea who they really are unless you're lucky enough to catch them when it wears off. It's even more nerve-wracking for the crewmate to see themselves, not sure of what they might do.
- In the early days of the Shapeshifter mode, Imposters couldn't shapeshift as each other, meaning that if the Shapeshifted Imposter gets caught with the Crewmate they are disguised as, the Crewmate's innocence is confirmed. But soon that limit got removed; there's no way to tell if the Shapeshifter is trying to frame a Crewmate or trick the Crewmates into thinking their partner is innocent.
- When you're assigned your role, it comes with a sound effect. The role reveal sound for a regular Impostor can be thrilling due to being a Drone of Dread. But the sound effect if you're a Shapeshifter is downright uncomfortable, with the aformentioned drone being accompanied by giggly pitchy sounds that might make your skin crawl.
- The Fungle is a pretty unnerving map when compared to the others. For starters, with the first four maps, at least they take place in a Mira outpost (Mira HQ and Polus) or in a ship that is owned by the Crewmates (The Skeld and Airship). Here, you have to survive a remote island where on top of the Impostors, you now have to worry about the island's native fungus species either blinding you, blocking off key passagways to tasks, or causing everyone to hallucinate and see each other in the wrong colors and clothes.
- Hide and Seek mode (pictured above) is officially a thing and it somehow manages to be more terrifying than the standard game:
- If you're the Seeker, or stick around in the summoning area to watch this happen, you're treated to a lovely shot of your Crewmate doubling over in pain, collapsing on the ground, and writhing for a few seconds... before suddenly standing back up and unleashing a horrifying roar from the mouth that is now on its stomach. And that mouth stays open the whole game.
- When the grace period for the Hiders ends, you hear the earsplitting roar of the seeker throughout the map as they are now able to chase people down. Unless you want someone to launch their headphones across the room, make sure everyone in your group knows of this if anyone is new to the game!
- Unlike the standard game, there isn't a thing you can do against this Impostor except wait out the clock, do tasks to make the clock run by faster, and try to vent away if the Seeker gets too close to you.
- You know how the fan-imposed rules gave Impostors a more limited field of view? Well that's here in the form of a uni-directional flashlight that the Crewmates are also stuck with. It's 100% possible for the Host to give the Crewmates worse vision than the Impostor.
- Unlike the standard game where there's just ambient noises, Hide and Seek mode has background music that starts as a simple bass riff that slowly transitions into pounding heavy metal music the closer the Seeker is to you until it's practically blaring at a thousand decibels, which is also illustrated by a danger meter. To make matters worse, the meter and music just care about the straight distance between you and the Seeker; it doesn't take walls or the fact that you vented into account. If you're hiding in the corner of Medbay on the Skeld while the Seeker is in the corner of Electrical, the meter and music will still go wild. If you take a vent and the route goes past the Seeker the music will still ramp up for one second, which may cause you to think you've emerged right next to them.
- If you've got time during a round, look very closely at the meeting button. It's been shattered to pieces, signifying that working together to eject the Imposter is simply not an option anymore when you're in this game mode. It's every Crewmate for themself.
- If the Host allows them, the Seeker gets a personal map to track Crewmates (or if the Seeker kills half of the players), there are red circles called pings that alert the Seeker to where they are a certain number of seconds each, and the Seeker almost always gets a speed boost once the players are in the Final Hide. With all those combined, you can't stay in one place for too long during the Final Hide unless you have enough vents saved up.
- Every time someone dies, a Scare Chord plays for every other Crewmate and the nameplate of that Crewmate displays with the message "[Player] HAS BEEN KILLED", and above the danger meter one of the Crewmate silhouettes gets crossed off. This is only a mild jumpscare on its own, but it quickly gets terrifying if it happens several times continuously.
