"Every vote matters" is especially true in this game, since any vote can determine the fate of a player. Vote ties can save lives and a single vote can also eject someone. Even "Skip Vote" can save players whereas not voting at all doesn't. Players who rarely vote are often a detriment because they make it harder for their Crewmates to win the game.
Because many people play with friends and quickly learn their tells, the game also ends up being a very good argument against the common "Play with friends or don't play at all!" counter argument to a caustic game community. Some players find playing with strangers much more cerebral as they do not know any individual tells and have to use other methods of deduction.
While there are always exceptions, simply not being an asshole is a viable strategy if you're in a public game. If you do your tasks, are polite to others in the chat, refuse to vote for people without credible evidence, vouch for people who you know (or at least believe) are innocent, and refrain from accusing anyone until you have real cause to be suspicious, you're far less likely to be targeted by the other Crewmembers — and they're far more likely to take your word for it if you accuse somebody. (This, of course, can be used by either Crewmembers or Impostors.) On the flipside, jerkasses tend to earn the ire of Crewmembers and Impostors alike. Lesson: don't piss off the people you work with, especially if your life is in their hands. Second lesson: if you establish yourself as a reasonable, decently friendly person, earning people's trust becomes a lot easier.
The Crewmates themselves (especially in art depictions) are portrayed as clumsy and obnoxious, as well as mean-spirited, giving others cruel ejections. Also, the fact that the Impostors are mostly affable to prevent ejections and even heroic at times doesn't really seem to help this situation.
The impostors win if the oxygen runs out or the reactor explodes. Can they survive these events, or are they willing to die in order to achieve their mission?
Impostors having a kill cooldown at all is sometimes interpreted as the Impostors actually being Crewmates being controlled by some sort of parasite. The cooldown is just how long they can keep control of themselves before the parasite takes over and guides them to their next victim; and it resets with each kill because the Crewmate's feeling of "My God, What Have I Done?" lets them override the parasite for a brief period.
The trailer for the Hide and Seek gamemode shows the Crewmate about to become the Impostor collapse on the ground and writhe around for a few seconds before the Impostor mouth is revealed, as if trying to resist what's happening, adding more fuel to the idea that the Impostors are infected Crewmates.
Angel/Devil Shipping: Crewmate/Impostor pairings are a popular theme in fanfiction.
Awesome Music: Seek, the soundtrack that accompanies you throughout hide and seek mode if you play as the seeker gives you all sort of blood pumping and thrills than it needs to be.
Its western-style remix, Ranch, doesn't slouch either despite coming from "Horse Wrangling" joke mode. If anything, it encourages you to catch those horses.
Better as a Let's Play: It's often more fun to watch a group of your favorite streamers play and argue among themselves than joining public lobbies and having to deal with the unsportsmanlike conduct of the general playerbase. There are also the joys of watching one streamer join public lobbies and witnessing what unfolds.
While different players obviously favor different game settings (map, amount of Impostors, anonymous voting, visual tasks, extra roles, etc), people are particularly likely to go ballistic over whether Confirm Ejects should be turned on. Detractors argue it tends to make games easy for the crew by making serious accusations easily dealt with through the "we eject A, then B if they lied" method (unless there are too few Crewmates left to risk doing so), letting them track how many Impostors are left, and casting immediate suspicion on whoever defended someone in the meeting who turned out to be an Impostor (albeit this isn't fully reliable and can be exploited by the Impostors). Meanwhile, proponents like it for Rule of Drama, as it allows all the tension built up during the meeting to explode when the ejected player's alignment is revealed, and tracking how many Impostors remain allows for more scenarios of the crew knowing that if they don't eject someone in the current meeting, the Impostors will just need one more kill to win, again making for an extra tense deliberation. Luckily, this divide doesn't exist in games with only one Impostor, for the obvious reason that if the ejected player is the Impostor, the game ends immediately anyway.
Whether or not voice chat should be used. Many argue that it makes the game far too easy since it's not hard to deduce who the impostors are based upon information outside the game - and methods to subvert this (i.e. auto-mute until meetings begin, regional chats, Discord bots made to auto-mute "Dead" players) require so much setup that it might just be easier to stick to just text chat. Others argue that it doesn't and is way quicker than just using text chat (which is itself rather slow) since people will speak way faster than they type.
A common defense against the unsporting behaviour of the playerbase is that the game should only be played with friends. Some argue that this is how you "should" play - others argue that it's actually boring since playing with the same crowd means you learn their habits, and can thus deduce a credible suspect off of how your friends behave.*For example, if you know a player who's quite talkative, and suddenly they are quiet? You have reason to suspect them even if they're not doing anything suspicious. Some argue this is part of the game, others find it much more interesting when you're playing with strangers because you don't know if some random person is lying or not and have to actually pay more attention to come up with a credible alibi or prove your own innocence.
Having a game of 2 impostors is highly favored by players. A lone impostor is too difficult for their side, especially for beginners, while a trio of them makes it too difficult for Crewmates. 2 Impostors is considered the most balanced for both sides and gives everyone a good chance of playing as an Impostor themselves without each game being too one-sided.
While all maps maintain a solid player base, The Skeld continues to be the preferred option by a significant margin due to its simple layout, ease of navigation and moderate size.
When special roles were added, you sometimes see that one room where everyone BUT the Impostors are Engineers. For those who want a quick game, an all-engineer crew game saves minutes thanks to everyone venting, especially on Mira HQ thanks to all the vents being connected to one ventilation system.
Similarly to the above, many rooms have at least one or both Impostors as Shapeshifters. This is because the Shapeshifter role allows whoever got it to be far more brazen with their attacks then they would be if they were playing the vanilla version of the Impostor by framing someone else, most often an innocent Crewmate, as the killer.
In Hide and Seek mode, a player can wait out the final stretch to the end of the game by hiding in a vent, where they will be invulnerable for the timer duration, which may reach several seconds. Many people seemed to pick up on this strategy.
An Impostor voting a Crewmate out is a worse way to go than killing in itself.
When someone gets ejected out of the game on Polus Outpost, they get thrown into the lava. A Crewmate burning alive? Pretty horrifying to think about. An Impostor burning alive? They give a thumbsup as they're burning.
"I'm new, how do I use vents like [X]?" used to be an extremely clever way for Impostors to cast suspicion onto someone else (since only Impostors can use vents). It became used and parodied so often that now the only people who try it seriously are incredibly incompetent Impostors that will get themselves voted off because of it. And with the advent of the Engineer role in November 2021, the meme became even more discredited, since Crewmates can also use vents now.
On a similar note, asking "how come me and [X]'s names are in red?" or "how do I use sabotage like [X]?" is an easy way to get voted out, even if just purely out of spite for trying to be clever.
"[ghost], if you were killed by [color], please leave the room" was originally thought of as a very clever method of finding out the Impostor, involving someone telling a ghost to leave the room if a certain color killed them and, if they do so, voting the accused off. However, it quickly fell into disuse and was considered unfair on the Impostor, who may have waited a long time to get the role, due to being completely counterless. If someone tries this strategy now, they'll either get voted off or the ghost will not (or if the person in question isn't the Impostor, will) leave the room out of spite.
Using the name "Me" had gotten popular among players; as Impostors, they can trick Crewmates into asking to be voted out. This also quickly fell into disuse because players now often refer to each other by their suit colors rather than their names and no one would have any reason to unironically ask to be voted out.
The phrase "when the impostor is sus", the edited Jerma picture associated with it, and generally the word "sus" are reaching this status very, very quickly. Doesn't help that Jerma himself has already grown tired of the meme and clearly considers it an Old Shame that he once tried to help make the meme more popular during its heyday.
Using stock phrases like “[X] is sus” and “I saw [X] vent!” in Hide and Seek mode is effectively redundant due to the impostor being known from the get-go. Due to the Emergency Meeting button being broken and the dead bodies not being reportable, players can only chat with each other while dead, where such phrases would be worthless even in a vanilla game.
The Mini Crewmate is the most popular pet in the game. While it's not really explained what they are, the fandom almost universally considers them to be the Crewmates' children. Or Impostors', if you fancy playing as one.
The Rancher, the April Fools counterpart to the Seeker, has a fair share of fans due to their Large Ham traits, their game mode's silly atmosphere and having an awesome and fun theme.
The Impostors' true forms are commonly depicted as being giant tentacled creatures, or as possessing fanged maws in various parts of their bodies.
In fan art that depicts the Crewmates as an alien species, drawing them as furry creatures with a single eye is common. Giving them extra features like horns and wings isn't unheard of, either.
The Mini Crewmates are often interpreted as the Crewmates' (or Impostors', in their given case) children.
There are many fanfics of how the crewmates live their daily lives despite having an Impostor amongst them, whether it be fear or paranoia.
Fans enjoy expanding on the reasons why Impostors kill the crewmates. Common reasons include that the Impostors eat the crew for sustenance, that the Impostors are an experiment by MIRA gone wrong, or that they're on suicide missions to prevent the crew from invading their home planet. It is also popular to depict Impostors as being Tragic Villains who have little choice in killing.
"What if" fanfictions and fanart depicting good, non-violent, or pacifistic Impostors are common.
The idea of a Mini Impostor with a Crewmate parent has some traction in fan art. A common take on this idea is that the parent goes off killing other Crewmates in order to feed their Impostor child with a Nothing Personal attitude towards their victims. It's often guaranteed that this premise will result in even more Black Comedy fuel because of the usual nonchalant depiction of the Crewmate parent and the utter confusion of the actual Impostors upon learning that it was neither of them who was responsible for the killing.
Crewmates adopting the pets (usually a Mini Crewmate because of their common depiction of being their partnered Crewmate's child) of those who have died.
Relating to the first speculated theory of why the impostors are motivated to kill the crewmates, it's not uncommon to see fanon portrayals of Impostors as sapientSuper Persistent Predators who are motivated to eat the crewmates because both races are in a food chain-esque relationship where the Impostors are the Predators and the Crewmates are the Prey (the sapient part comes from the fact that impostors can also chat with the crewmates and are also voiced when it comes to games where players can communicate with each other verbally).
Fountain of Memes: Anything from chat or how people act can be turned into prime comedy material due to the game being self-moderated, leaving plenty of room for jokes and humor from players cracking from pressure. Even after the game itself fell out of the limelight, it was still firmly cemented in pop culture after the meme culture that originated from the game took a life of its own, leading to memes such as "when the impostor is sus!" or the trend of seeing Crewmates in everything.
Due to having similar bean-people character designs and being a chaotic cartoony party game that got popular at the same time, there's a significant overlap between the Among Us and Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout fandoms, with lots of crossover art in communities for both games. The latter game even introduced a Crewmate costume as part of its Season 4 lineup.
Due to shared murder mystery aspects, there's a large overlap with the Danganronpa fanbase, with large amounts of artwork of the crewmates debating in a Danganronpa-style format.
Likewise Push the Button, a similar sci-fi game where players try to find out who's an Impostor.
With Ace Attorney fans due to the similar premise of finding out who's guilty of a crime. This spawned various images and videos showing the Impostors and Crewmates in the courtroom scenes of Ace Attorney, along with that game's effects, memes and character poses, as well as videos of Ace Attorney characters playing Among Us and deliberating in the courtroom during meetings.
Trouble in Terrorist Town also has the premise of a few murderers hiding among a group of innocents, resulting in similar comparisons.
There are numerous crossovers with JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Ranging from a comparison of Kars with the ejected Crewmates and Impostors, several kill-animations re-enacting the deaths of characters and fan-animations recreating the intro sequences or iconic moments from the series.
Fans are also friendly with the Kingdom Hearts fandom, due to the similar premise of the game with the traitor plot of Kingdom Hearts χ. Expect to see a lot of fan edits with the Foretellers and/or the Dandellions as the Crewmates.
Some fans of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) happen to enjoy the game, as it's played with a similar sense of paranoia of who is an impostor and who is normal, much like the film does.
Also has one with that of the manga Talentless Nana, owing to their similar premises, where the show's Villain Protagonist is sent to infiltrate a class of (supernaturally-gifted) students and behave as one of their own, in order to assassinate all of them without drawing suspicion, not unlike the end goal of Impostors in a given game. As the cherry on top, the protagonist of Talentless Nana has a predominantly pink color scheme, thus drawing comparisons with the pink Crewmate (or Impostor, in this case). After the anime adaptation came out, "Among Us: The Anime" and "Pink sus" very quickly became popular memes among that fandom.
Crossovers between this game and Minecraft are very popular, primarily due to creator overlap. There have also been many attempts to recreate Among Us in Minecraft.
Among Us fans get along well with Squid Game fans as well.
Since Impostors can't do tasks, an easy way to tell if someone's a Crewmate is to watch a player perform any task which shows an animation.But…There is an option to disable visual tasks, which removes confirmation. The most blatant of these is the Medbay Scanners. They're long, eye-catching animations that prove that the player is a Crewmate, since the player has to stand still for several seconds before it counts. Even if you turn visual tasks off, the Scanner also accommodates only one player at a time, so you can easily verify if someone's actually using it by attempting to scan yourself (if you can). The Shields and the Garbage Disposal tasks on The Skeld, and the Weapons tasks on both The Skeld and Polus also have animations, but they are much less obvious than the Medbay Scanner.
A very good way to ascertain if an Impostor is faking tasks is to watch if the Task Bar updates before they leave their supposed task. While the Impostor could just wait for the Task Bar to update before moving away, they can be outed if they spend an abnormally long time for a simple task. This tactic does not work if the Task Bar is set to update during Meetings or not update at all.
Players sticking together can be painful to work around for even skilled Impostors, particularly when they finish tasks together. When this happens, Sabotage can be used to split people up, but it's not always reliable enough to net you a kill you won't immediately be killed for; orchestrating a stack kill is feasible but very risky.
It's generally accepted that three impostors in a single round dramatically changes the balance of the game in the impostors' favor. The reason for this is that impostors win when the total number of crewmates equals the total amount of impostors remaining in the game. Thus, all the impostors have to do in order to win is walk up to any crewmate they see and kill them in coordination with the other impostors, in doing so reducing the total crew count from six to three and instantly winning the round. This is a big reason why a later update increased the max lobby size from 10 to 15; but the minimum lobby size for three Impostors wasn't increased alongside it, so while such imbalanced games are still possible, more balanced games can now be played with max Impostors.
In Hide and Seek mode, if you manage to save most of your Vents for when Final Hide kicks in, it becomes much easier to wait out those last 50 seconds by parking yourself on top of a vent and just peacing out when the Impostor inevitably tracks you down. Doubly so in Mira HQ with it's fully interconnected vents; depending on the time set for how long you can be in the vents, you can get pretty far from the Impostor before you have to get out, and be ready to disappear again by the time they catch up to you.
Also in Hide and Seek mode, if you're a Crewmate on the Airship map, you've basically already won; thanks to an oversight, if you repeatedly go up and down a ladder, the Impostor can't kill you.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Before taking off in 2020, it was popular among players in certain countries like Brazil and South Korea.
If a meeting is called at the exact same time someone dies, the corpse will end up in the same room as everyone else, allowing for a hilarious moment where one can report the body that certainly was not killed wherever the meeting is held.
Most Pets freak out as their owner is being killed and are still and despondent after they're dead...except the Charles Copter, who does the opposite; being still during the death animation and freaking out when it's over. The working theory is that the animations were accidentally mixed up, but it's still pretty silly to watch.
If an Impostor procs a Guardian Angel shield, they cannot kill that Crewmate for the rest of the round. Can be this or a Game-Breaking Bug depending on which side you're on; if you're a solo Impostor and proc two shields, that game basically becomes Unintentionally Unwinnable unless you can get one of them voted out.
In this video, showing a day in the life of mini crewmates running a mini airship, the "Naughty Boy" turns off the ship's autopilot, sending it to presumably crash before the other mini crewmates regain control. A couple months later, the Airship Map officially released, and the critical "Fix it or you lose" sabotage is indeed sending it on a crash course.
Trapped is a 2007 British game show that has amusingly been retroactively compared to a live-action Among Us due to the contestants, called "Unfortunates", having one "Saboteur" in their midst meant to make the rest of the team lose, and each round ending in them having a vote-off to see who is the saboteur based on "suspicious behavior", with the one getting the most votes getting "trapped"/eliminated.
This comic predates the Engineer role by over a year.
Similarly, early in the game's life, one rather poor excuse made by Impostor players was that they were "cleaning the vents". Cleaning vents would eventually become a task on the Skeld map.
A common Hacker result was the Kill Cooldown being completely shut down, allowing Hacker Impostors to kill everyone pretty much immediately. Fast forward to Hide and Seek Mode, where Impostors only have a 1 second cooldown, and the only reason this doesn't end the same way is because Crewmates have 10 seconds to scatter before the Impostor can go wild.
Pretend, an Among Us knockoff game set in an office, had tasks involving plunging toilets and lifting weights. The Airship would release later with plunging the bathroom toilets as a task, and The Fungle would have a task involving lifting weights.
It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: After the game's explosion in popularity during mid-late 2020, a lot of people claiming to be former fans who played it in 2018-2019 came out of the woodwork, stating that they liked it before it was cool and how it sucked now that the masses found it, due to public servers now containing baseless accusations, cheating/hacking and general ditziness. The game being played by dozens of major figureheads (up to and including U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) does not help this sentiment.
Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Obnoxious/annoying players will often get themselves ejected in short order, even if they're obviously not an Impostor and thus their removal gives the actual Impostors a lead, simply because people would rather play at a slight disadvantage than put up with such players' antics, even when they aren't actually disrupting the gameplay in itself.
In fanart and memes, Red, Pink, and Purple tend to be the ones ejected first, even if evidence strongly suggests otherwise. In the Latin American fandom, there are tons of memes about ejecting Black just because they are black.
On the Innersloth Discord server prior to the 15-player update, Tan was seen as such because of being the exiled 13th color to make space for numeric consistency. This ended up becoming an Ascended Meme in The Henry Stickmin Collection, as clicking on the Tan Crewmate causes it to get punched away.
Playing with particularly bad Impostors can make games a lot less intimidating, and in some cases, a lot more amusing. Even when playing with good Impostors, sometimes they just have bad timing.
The fact that the crew members are just as fast as the Impostors means that a crew member can easily run away from a pursuer if need be. Less so if they know how to time the menu to close doors while moving.
The designs of the Crewmates themselves, combined with how most players act makes them appear a tad silly.
People invented game modes like Hide and Seek (before the release of the official Hide and Seek gamemode), where players don't mute themselves. Hearing people scream in terror or impostors hum and laugh like a maniac can be terrifying or absolutely hilarious.
When Among Us blew up in the Summer of 2020, some people started comparing it to the mini-game Push the Button from Jackbox Party Pack 6. In that game, a crew on a generational spaceship has to figure out who among them are aliens. Among Us was released more than a year prior to JPP6.
Paranoia Fuel: The game practically runs on this… who can you trust?
Is that player who just came into view and is running behind you just another crewmember going the same way? Or is it an Impostor waiting for the two of you to get isolated enough to finish off? Following on that, is that crewmember standing in front of a task area actually working, or are they waiting for some poor schmuck to come over?
Doing tasks is incredibly stressful, since some of them take quite a bit of time to cycle through, and the screen is so obscured that you can't really pay attention to your surroundings. Few things are more unsettling than completing a task, only to finally notice somebody else in the area that wasn't there earlier, and wondering if they're friend or foe. Or worse, still working on the task only to catch them entering into the area out of the corner of your eye.
Turning off the "Confirm Ejects" option prevents you from knowing whether you just ejected a Crewmate or Impostor until the game ends. Turning off visual tasks disables the animations that would otherwise help you confirm a player's innocence. This amplifies the uncertainty inherent in a session.
Checking the cameras on The Skeld is passable, as you can still somewhat see behind you for any venting Impostors, and there is a camera that's right outside. Checking the cameras on Polus Outpost is less so, as you cannot see behind you at all, and you have to manually switch between cameras Five Nights at Freddy's-style rather than having them all up at once.
Ironically, being the murderer can be more nerve-wracking than being the victim, especially if you're a Bad Liar. Can you make that kill and escape without raising suspicion? Are people going to randomly suspect you anyway because you looked at another guy funny? Is it safe to come out of the vent? Is anyone coming around the corner? All of this and more can get intense at times, but it all pays off in the end if you win. The Guardian Angel can protect a crewmate from one attack, alerting your would-be victim to your identity, and the Impostor cannot tell who got protected until a kill is foiled.
Taken up to eleven with some of the mods — the invisibility mod allows an impostor to cloak at will (albeit they can only remain cloaked for a set amount of time and have a cooldown period to balance things out).
Another overt example is the Shapeshifter role: an Impostor can briefly transform into another player and frame them for their crimes. Unless another player can vouch for you, it's almost a guaranteed ejection. Is the person you saw kill really them, or an Impostor trying to frame them? Is an Impostor posing as you? Could any of the Crewmates right next to you be someone else?
The Engineer mode throws away the mechanism where only the Impostor can use vents to move around out the window, making it much harder to detect Impostors. If you saw someone vent, are they a Impostor, or a Engineer? Are they going to kill you? On the flip side, Engineers can make it even more nerve-wracking for Impostors to vent, because there's no telling if there's an Engineer hiding in the vent to catch you in what appears to be a seemingly-clear area. Not even the Engineers themselves are immune; it's easy for others to forget about the role, so if a Crewmate sees you, they might assume you're the Impostor. Engineers can become a quick target for Impostors too. Is the other player who had vented another Engineer or an Impostor? When is it the right time to vent?
Getting pulled away from your tasks for an Emergency Meeting or reported body is annoying, but understandable. Getting pulled away when you're a ghost and therefore can't exactly call out the Impostor anyway, is less understandable. Doubly so since ghosts always have access to the chat, so it's not like they can't chat with their fellow ghosts outside of meetings. Granted, it does serve as an Anti-Frustration Feature for the Impostors, as the lack of this mechanic would mean it would be easier for Crewmates to purposely kill themselves, and win most of the time through tasks while the rest of the players discuss who is the impostor.
Many consider Card Swipe That One Task, so there was much groaning upon learning that, true to the source material, opening locked doors in the Airship map would require a card swipe.
Quick chat, introduced in the Airship update, is almost universally hated for removing the ability to write freely for players who don't have an account, making friendly, casual conversation downright impossible. Even if seven players aren't saddled with it in a full ten-player lobby, chances are the game will be ruined by the three who are. Plus, it covers up the meeting timer when the chat menu's open.
Self-Fanservice: While the canon characters are Ambiguously Human colourful bean-like creatures, a common portrayal of the crewmates and impostors is as detailed, more realistically-proportioned humans in astronaut suits, usually to heighten the horror elements of the game. As well as comically "thicc" butts.
Self-Imposed Challenge: Given the game's relatively limited ways of playing around with its format, it's becoming increasingly common for famous gamers to make the game more difficult by putting limitations on themselves:
In one session, they exploited the game's lack of Colorblind Mode by everyone setting their monitors to grayscale, changing their names to variants of "IIIIII" (since in the game's font, lowercase Ls and capital Is look exactly the same), and not accessorizing in any way. The only way they could identify each other was by referring to themselves as shades of black and white. One round had a player openly admit to being the impostor at the start of the game—and still winning.
In another video, they played in "Slow Motion", everyone knew who the Impostors were, and there was no reporting.
In one format, referred to as "Caveman Mode", the players all de-accessorize their characters and change their names to pronouns and similar (depending on the session), leading to names like He, Me, Them, Who, and Someone. Discussions inevitably degenerate into insane levels of Who's on First? confusion and Hulk Speak being liberally thrown around. Examples include Chilled Chaos and ZeRoyalViking of The Derp Crew, Cartoonz, and Bryce McQuaid.
Becoming increasingly popular with various YouTubers is Proximity Among Us, which does allow voice chatting during the rounds as opposed to just in meetings, but uses a special voice chat program that works in tandem with the game to allow players to only hear the voices of other players who are physically nearby on the map, adding some realism to the game. Ghosts can still hear nearby players who are still alive and can talk to other nearby ghosts as well (meaning that, if an Impostor is successfully ejected, they'll have to face their victims as ghosts), but living players cannot hear dead players. This allows Crewmates to more easily coordinate traveling in groups, clear each other to other players they might see, and possibly even implicate their killers as they die if they're lucky enough to have another Crewmate nearby to hear them, but also gives Impostors the chance to better plan their kills and sabotages in tandem with each other, and, if done well, even falsely throw suspicion on an innocent Crewmate during the round. Valkyrae and her friends have used this mode with hilarious results.
One session with Mr. Fruit had a Hide and Seek set of rules. Everyone's movement speed is set to fast, and there's only one Impostor, who must announce themselves at the start of the game. The killer's vision is set to the lowest setting while the Crewmates have max vision. Comms are sabotaged at the start of the match, and no one is allowed to fix them. The Impostor also has a short cooldown on their kill timer. If you see a body, you're not allowed to report it. The crew can only win by completing their tasks, and they must do so before the killer kills enough people. Other variants leave comms on, but lights are sabotaged, or tasks are completely disregarded and the winner is the last Crewmate standing. The original ruleset became so widespread that the June 2021 Roadmap announced plans to make it an official game mode, which became reality in December 2022. The advent of the Shapeshifter role saw the advent of a variant called Shift and Seek, where "Seekers" shift into who they want to kill, and can only kill that person.
Gabby16bit, an Italian Youtuber, had a special challenge. While there are two Impostors, the trick is that the first Impostor will reveal themself, do all the killing, and be safe from being voted out. However, they will also give important clues on who the second Impostor is, who the Crewmates have to identify before they get killed.
Signature Scene: The Skeld's ejection cutscene is by far the most iconic and recognizable cutscene/animation in the entire game. It helps that The Skeld is also the game's most iconic map. The texts revealing that the player was/wasn't an Impostor are also more iconic than the text simply saying they were ejected (which happens when Confirm Ejects is turned off).
Spiritual Adaptation: The game more or less follows the same premise as The Thing (1982): one of the members of the crew is an alien impersonating them and is out to kill everyone, instilling fear and distrust among everybody. The menu music even has the same iconic "double pulse" from The Thing's soundtrack.
Randomized Naming. Along with The Airship update, Innersloth also made it such that only people with an account could choose their own name, and everyone else was assigned a random name that changed every game. While it helped cut down on inappropriate naming (such as sex chats and hate speech), it also took away the players' ability to create otherwise harmless names of their choice.
The new "Shhhh" screen at the start of the game has not been well-received, to say the least. Fortunately, the Devs acknowledged that something went wrong with the proportions and plan to fix it.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Decontamination task in the Airship could have been the perfect replacement for the Medbay Scan on every other map — long, eye-catching animation, something you could have to lock into position for, and something you could have to wait in line to do. Unfortunately, not only is this not the case, Visual Tasks don't exist on the Airship at all—so some other candidates for Visuals, such as putting weapons away or turning on the fans, also don't work as such.
Underused Game Mechanic: A 2021 update saw Scientists added to the Crewmate roster. They can view the current status of everyone else at any time. But most players don't bother using it. Calling an emergency meeting just to say you noticed someone die on your screen, but with no knowledge of where their body is, or who else was nearby, only earns you the suspicion of your fellow Crewmates.
Viewer Name Confusion: Polus's critical sabotage, Reset Seismic Stabilizers, is often mistakenly called "reactor" by players, due to being practically the same in terms of gameplay as the Reactor Meltdown sabotage from The Skeld and Mira HQ,note You can also sabotage the reactor in the Fungle, but it's fixed differently from its counterparts in the other maps with the only difference being that the scanners used to fix it are far apart instead of next to each other.
