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"Join your crewmates in a multiplayer game of teamwork and betrayal!"
Google Play store description

Among Us is a multiplayer game published by InnerSloth with production assistance by PuffballsUnited, creator of the Henry Stickmin Series. It is, in essence, The Thing and the social deduction games Mafia and Werewolf (1997) translated into a video game. Up to fifteen players have the role of the crew of a spaceship or facility, and must finish tasks for maintenance. However, up to three of them are Impostors, shape-shifting creatures whose objective is to kill enough Crewmates for victory.

The game has five Three-Quarters View maps: The Skeld (a spaceship flying through space), MIRA HQ (the top floor of a high-rise building), Polus (a research facility on a cold planet), The Airship (a recreation of the Toppat Airship from the Henry Stickmin games), and The Fungle (a deserted island dominated by the titular fungi jungle).

In each map, the Crewmates are each given a set of tasks to perform across the map; they do not know who their allies are. Dead Crewmates become ghosts, and can still contribute to their victory condition by finishing all their tasks. Impostors know who the other Impostors are and can sabotage vital systems to draw the Crewmates away from their tasks, temporarily lock doors to restrict movement, and use vents to slink about quickly. They also become ghosts if they're voted off, and can still cause sabotages. Each player can start a meeting to discuss the Impostor's identity by reporting any dead bodies they find, or by initiating an emergency meeting, although the latter only has a limited number of tries per player depending on the rules.

The game ends in victory for Crewmates if all tasks are completed or all Impostors are voted off, while Impostors win if surviving Crewmates no longer outnumber surviving Impostorsnote  or vital systems fail through their sabotage.

To facilitate the game's atmosphere, players are expected to not communicate except during a meeting. Dead players are also not permitted to speak at all until the game ends, though they share a text chat visible only to other dead players.

The game was first released on June 15, 2018, and it slowly but steadily nurtured a small, dedicated fanbase. It exploded in popularity on Twitch and other streaming platforms in mid-2020, fueled by the worldwide desire for socialization during the COVID-19 Pandemic, basically becoming the next Fortnite (before that game had a major resurgence in late 2023). In August 2020, it was announced that a sequel, Among Us 2, was in development and planned for release in 2021, before being dropped in favor of maintaining the massive fanbase the current game had and releasing the content planned for the sequel onto the current game in September 2020, promising features like better servers, player profiles, Colorblind Mode, and a Henry Stickmin Series themed location, later revealed to be the Toppat Airship on November 18th. A Nintendo Switch port of the game was announced on December 15, 2020, and released later that same day. It also made its way to the current Xbox and PlayStation consoles almost exactly a year later on December 14, 2021.

A major update was released on November 9, 2021, adding four new roles (Engineer, Guardian Angel, Scientist, and Shapeshifter), the ability to gain experience points, and tons of cosmetic options for the game and characters. Another update in December 2022 added a "Hide and Seek" game mode, where one player becomes an Impostor at the start of the game and has a limited time to kill all the other players.

In 2023, an animated series adaptation was announced to be in the works at CBS Studios with Owen Dennis (Infinity Train) developing and executive producing.

Compare with Werewolf (1997) and its variations, as well as Trouble in Terrorist Town and Town of Salem, all having a similar premise of identifying and executing undercover killers, and Project Winter, an online multiplayer with Survivors trying to escape a snowy wilderness and Traitors that try to impede their progress.


EMERGENCY MEETING, TROPE!:

    open/close all folders 

    A-C 
  • Accuse the Witness: Sometimes Impostors caught killing someone by one witness will throw the accusation back at the witness. If no one else has any facts about the situation, other Crewmates know that one of them is lying and usually end up ejecting both.
  • Achievement Mockery: One hidden achievement called "Watch Me Scan". It requires you to get killed in the middle of doing the Medbay Scan task.
  • Action Figure Speech: When a body is reported or a meeting is called, it will play an animation of the green and orange Crewmates shaking, with the caption "Discuss."
  • Admiring the Abomination: Can commonly happen for players killed by a very good Impostor; it's easy to admire a player who is able to talk their way out of anything, casually use the deaths that they cause to their advantage, and manipulate the Crewmates, all for the sake of taking them all out.
  • Advanced Tech 2000: The Submit Scan task uses the "SCAN-MO-TRON-2000" device in the Medbay.
  • Air-Vent Passageway:
    • Impostors can use vents to quickly and stealthily move across the map, but their kill cooldown is frozen until they leave the vents. This can work against them if a Crewmate sees them get in or out of a vent, because only the Impostors can use vents; get caught going into one, and it's a dead giveaway of your identity.
    • One of the core strategies in The Skeld is to wait in the Medbay doors. Since there is only one passageway for Crewmates to enter Medbay, it's a dead giveaway that someone vented if you can see anyone inside the room while waiting in the door. Medbay is also near the cafeteria so you can easily call an emergency.
    • The November 2021 update added the Engineer role, which allows this Crewmate to use the vents like an Impostor, although there's a time limit for how long they can be in the vents.
    • Hide and Seek mode flips the script; the Seeker is too large to fit inside the vents, which the Crewmates exploit by escaping through them. Though like the Engineers, Crewmates can only stay in a vent for so long.
  • Alarm SOS: Exploited. Hitting the Emergency button summons all the players to the room it's located in for a meeting. If a Crewmate sees an Impostor come out of a vent and/or kill, and can beat them to the button, calling the meeting will save them from being killed (at least until possibly the next round) and can potentially lead to the Impostor being gotten rid of.
  • Aliens Among Us: The main theme of the game: there are 1-3 Impostors among the Crew members, and one of the ways for the crew to win is to figure out who the Impostors are and eject them.
  • All There in the Manual: The description on the official website claims the Impostors are parasitic, shapeshifting aliens.
  • Almost Out of Oxygen: One of the sabotage options is to disable the oxygen, requiring Crewmates to go fix it before it runs out completely. Interestingly, this implies that Impostors either don't need oxygen or are perfectly fine with dying themselves in order to slaughter the Crew.
  • Alone with the Psycho: A well-timed door closure will allow the Impostor to trap one person, kill them, and vent away before they can be caught.
  • Ambidextrous Sprite: A character facing left is just a flip of the sprite for the character facing right. This usually isn't noticeable, but some of the accessories make it more visible, such as the forehead sticky note (the writing appears reversed when the sprite is flipped). The first exception is the Right Hand Man Reborn skin. The cybernetic parts always cover the left side of the character wearing them no matter which direction they're facing.
  • Ambiguous Gender: We never get what the player characters' genders are. The Impostors being more inhuman than the Crewmates takes this up a notch.
  • Ambiguously Human: The Crewmates are typically assumed by players to be humans in space suits, but the Medbay results show them to be very short, very heavy, and imply that the spacesuits may be their actual skin. They also only have one bone in their body — a single bone sticking out of their midsection.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • Unlike Mafia and Werewolf, dead players can still participate to a limited degree to ensure they don't feel like their time was wasted from being killed early. Dead Crew can complete tasks while dead Impostors are able to sabotage.
    • For Crewmates: Reporting a body while a sabotage crisis is active (such as oxygen tanks shutting down or a reactor threatening to explode) will end the sabotage. This is because everyone is teleported to the emergency button for the meeting; if the crisis was allowed to continue with only a few seconds left on the clock, it would be an unwinnable situation for the crew. Also fits under Acceptable Breaks from Reality, because it's not realistic for a crisis to just stop, but it keeps the game fun. Additionally, even if downloading data can be interrupted by a meeting or being killed, other, longer tasks can be partially completed, interrupted, then the remainder completed later. Electricity sabotages, however, will remain in play after meetings end because they aren't as directly disastrous as other sabotages.
    • For Impostors: Living players can't talk to each other except during meetings, as it would be way too easy to signal someone chasing just before a kill.note  Also, dead Crewmates are kept to their own ghostly chat that can't be viewed by survivors. Furthermore, sabotages can be carried out in any room regardless of current position (no matter how little sense that makes), since having to physically be somewhere would make it far easier to determine who did it. Finally, the Crewmates can't use the emergency button to call a meeting during a sabotage crisis, since it would be way too easy to end a sabotage that way.
    • If Crewmates leave the game early without completing all their tasks (alive or dead), the task completion meter will adjust accordingly so the new goal reflects the number of remaining players. This prevents a game from being Unwinnable by the Crew if someone ditches the game, but if a Crewmate remains in the game and refuses to do their tasks, then, well, the Crew is out of luck. Fortunately, players can be kicked during meetings to force the task meter to adjust.
    • You have to actually hold the "Pet" button for a few seconds before you actually start petting your pet. So if you accidentally click it mid-game, you're not stuck in place for long enough for the Impostor to get you.
  • Anti-Rage Quitting:
    • Quitting mid-game too frequently will penalize you with a time-out before you can join another lobby. This was done in response to issues with people immediately leaving games if they weren't an Impostor (and to a lesser extent, people who quit as soon as they were killed or Impostors that left as soon as they were caught). In any case, it's a way to ensure that people play games to completion.
    • The Cosmicubes update gave more tangible incentives to not leave mid-game, since you only get your rewards (Exp, Beans, and Pods) if you see the round through to the end.
  • Anti-Trolling Features:
    • Players can only communicate with each other after a body has been discovered, or an Emergency Meeting is called. Even then, anyone who is trolling for whatever reason can just be kicked out of the game without ejecting them if they cause too much trouble for everyone involved.
    • Some players only want to play as an Impostor, and will Rage Quit the game as soon as it starts if they're a Crewmate. It was eventually patched in where leaving early too many times could prevent someone from joining another lobby for at least five minutes, with increasingly longer wait times the more often that the offending player keeps quitting.
  • April Fools' Day:
    • Every April 1st before 2022, the layout of the Skeld becomes mirrored. Its name is also mirrored in the menu. The in-game map remains the same though, and your movements on it are mirrored relative to the movements on the actual Skeld.
    • April 1st from 2022 onward has the crewmates become horse-like creatures.
    • The 2023 version has the "Hide N Seek" mode name temporary changed to "Horse Wrangling", where instead of an Imposter finding crewmates to kill in the dark, a Cowboy tries to wrangle the Horse crewmates with a unique "corpse" sprite of a horse having all four legs tied, where the intro animation for the Imposter being changed from a Crewmate kneeling down before transforming to have a mouth with sharp teeth and a long tongue to the horse Crewmate swaying side by side before standing upright and revealing a zipper and removing the horse costume to reveal a normal crewmate wearing cowboy attire, and the music altered to a more western-style for the Imposter/Cowboy.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The host can set the maximum number of players who can join their lobby, with the smallest room size being 4 members, and the biggest accommodating 15. Additionally, the maximum amount of Impostors allowed in any given game is dependent on the size of the lobby.note 
  • Art Evolution: Early artwork of the Crew depicts them with flat rectangular visors. Their in-game sprites established a rounder dome shape, and updates to the game and store pages have redrawn certain assets to reflect this.
  • Ascended Meme:
    • A common joke if you got caught venting was to claim you were cleaning the vents. Early July 2021 saw an actual vent cleaning task added to the task list. Unfortunately, Impostors still can't use it as an alibi due to how simple the task is; you're still standing outside of the vent. However, November 2021 introduced the Engineer role, who can use vents like an Impostor, giving Impostors a genuine excuse after all.
    • Another common joke is about how Card Swipe is impossible. One achievement, named IMPOSSIBLE TASK, is unlocked by finishing Card Swipe on the first try. It's also lampooned in this bit of merch; a sliding pin that lets you slide the card across it, but the display just says "LOL NOPE".
  • Asshole Victim: If you go out of your way to insult players, either you'll get voted out of spite, or the Impostor may be so disgusted at your behavior that they'll gut you on sight, which may result in the most spiteful Crewmates ignoring your body as they walk by or celebrating your death upon being reported.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: A double kill, aka both Impostors killing at the same time in the same place, feels very satisfying and can decimate a lobby quickly. The problem, though, is that by the very nature of this it can easily clear people for the entire game if one person was with another, or at least pair them together so that if one is guilty, then both are guilty. It is also difficult to pull off in the first place due to being unable to communicate with your partner to either get in the same place or to match the timing, let alone the issue of getting two and only two Crew in the same place at the same time.
  • Awesomeness by Analysis: Some Crewmates can deduce the identity of the Impostors simply by tracking all the other players' movements around the map using the security cameras or computer. In a game with a lot of players, this can require keeping nine to fourteen different people's movements straight mentally while also analyzing whether said movements are possible without venting — and avoiding looking suspicious while carrying out the detective work.
  • Bad Liar: One sure tell for an incompetent Impostor is not being able to lie convincingly, which can be a pain for their teammates.
  • Balance Buff: In earlier builds, Impostors couldn't fix their own sabotages, which made it rather easy to spot them if they were not rushing off to fix it. This was since changed to give them better alibis. A later patch also added in the ability to have anonymous voting so that Impostors could (almost) always vote their own interests safely as well as the ability to turn off automatic task updates, which were a good way to catch Impostors (Kara, a regular from CaptainSparklez' games, was especially good at catching it). Since Impostors are at a statistical disadvantage, they tend to need more help than Crew. Further updates added the option for the task bar to fill up after emergency meetings or to never fill up at all in the entire match.
  • Bedsheet Ghost: Ghosts are semi-transparent versions of their living selves, with their legless bottom halves billowing like sheets.
  • Being Evil Sucks: Some players would rather play as Crewmates than Impostors. While it may be cathartic to play as a horror movie monster preying on unsuspecting victims, there is also the added anxiety of making sure you and your targets are isolated and coming up with believable alibis when the bodies are discovered. Playing as a Crewmate may be scary, but playing as an Impostor is more stressful.
  • Big Bad: If there is only one Impostor, then they must work alone to achieve their goals of sabotaging and killing off the Crewmates.
  • Big Bad Duumvirate: In games with more than one Impostor, there is a rare chance that the Impostors could work together to kill the Crewmates. They may be able to pull off things like double kills or vouch for each other during discussions.
  • Big Bad Ensemble: In games with more than one Impostor, there is a more likely chance that the Impostors will act separately and may even accuse each other to avoid suspicion. All that matters for the Impostor team to win is that enough of the Crew members die.
  • Big Red Button: The Emergency Meeting button is a large red circular button with black and white stripes around it. Each player only has a limited number of times they can call a meeting using the button, and if the lights, communications, reactors, oxygen, or seismic stabilizers are sabotaged, then they cannot press the button until they are fixed.
  • Bilingual Bonus: The name of the ship, "The Skeld", originates from an Old Norse word for "Shield" or "Shelter".
  • Bizarre Alien Biology: Impostors have a mouth where their belly should be, full of sharp teeth, and a tongue sharp enough to impale people. If an impostor sabotages oxygen and no one fixes it, then the impostors win, which implies that they don't need oxygen to survive, though it could also mean they're willing to sacrifice themselves for victory.
  • Blackout Basement:
    • Set the players' vision to less than 1.0× and their field of vision will be restricted by a radius around them — players and bodies will not display outside that radius.
    • If the electricity gets sabotaged, the Crewmates' field of vision rapidly drops until they can barely see in front of them, which gives the Impostors a greater ability to kill undetected. During this time, the Emergency Button is disabled, but Crewmates can still report dead bodies.
  • Bland-Name Product: The Vitals machine on Polus Outpost has a Simsong brand. Crewmates can also buy "Don Dew" or "NRG" from vending machines for tasks, which are references to Fleeing the Complex and Escaping the Prison, respectively.
  • Blatant Lies: When caught venting or killing with no way of tricking the other person, the best course of action is often to just make something up entirely, such as that you saw the other person kill or running from the body, and hoping you have more credibility. However, lying too often will decrease said credibility, so it's generally better to tell the truth as much as possible and simply omit certain details or just inserting one small lie into any story you construct.
  • Bolivian Army Ending: An Impostor victory (assuming it's not from timing out a sabotage) is essentially this. The crew can no longer outvote the Impostors to eject them, but you don't actually see the remaining Crewmates getting killed.
  • Boom, Headshot!: One of the kill animations shows the Impostor punching the victim to the ground and then taking out a pistol and blowing their brains out while they're down. It's hard to tell, but there doesn't seem to be much of the victim's head left afterwards.
  • Bullying a Dragon: Talking trash about the Impostor, sometimes unknowingly, is a good way to get yourself bumped up to the top of their hit-list. On the flip side, killing off someone who talked trash about you is a good way to get yourself bumped up everyone else's suspect list.
  • Bystander Syndrome: This can severely screw the Crew over during oxygen or reactor sabotage. Sometimes, Crewmates will ignore the crisis and continue with their tasks as they hope someone else will go and fix it — and when everyone takes that mindset, they may only realize that nobody's fixing the problem when there isn't enough time left. Actual wins/losses via sabotage are pretty rare, but it does let the killer get away with a lot when only one or two people trickle in to fix the problem.
  • The Can Kicked Him:
    • On the map Polus, one of the potential locations for the Fix Wires common task is located in a non-functioning toilet stall near Medbay. There's also a vent located directly under the task panel, allowing Impostors to conveniently murder any hapless Crewmate who's unfortunate enough to have to fix the wiring in the toilets and, in many cases, get away with it.
    • One of the possible tasks on the Airship map requires a Crewmate to unclog a toilet. Taking advantage of both this and the fact that the toilets are a relatively secluded part of the map, a viable strategy for the Impostor is to hide in a toilet stall and kill any Crewmates that pass by. The seclusion of the toilets on the map are also a double-edged sword in this case — while Crewmates can hide there without getting caught for the entire round, Genre Savvy Impostors can also keep the dead bodies of the Crewmates they killed there without them being found.
  • Can't Kill You, Still Need You: A good Impostor will never target a suspicious Crewmate if they can help it, nor do they want them voted out early. So they'll often choose to first accuse that person but then suggest not actually voting on it. If the person is actually thrown out early in the game, it looks bad for them for pushing the vote and removes another person to deflect blame onto.
  • Cassandra Truth: As with most deception-based games, it's not unusual for the group to gang up on an innocent Crewmate despite their protesting, only to realize they've voted off one of their own.
  • Caught on Tape: The Skeld, Polus, and the Airship include security cameras that Crewmates can use to try and spot the Impostor, who can also disable them by sabotaging communication systems.
  • Central Theme: When there is an unknown threat, how far are you willing to go to protect yourself? And how can you justify it to yourself and your peers?
  • Character Customization: Along with changing your character's color, you can also give them various cosmetics such as hats, clothes, and even a pet companion to follow you around. These do have some impact on gameplay, as companions may make you more identifiable. On the other hand, if everyone wears the same outfit, it will become harder to identify anybody at the edge of your vision, as individual character colors will be significantly less visible.
  • Chewbacca Defense: A successful defense against accusation doesn't actually need to make any sense at all if you sound sincere enough. Many very good players construct ridiculous lies that frequently go unchallenged simply because of how convincing they sound.
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Some Impostors will vote to kick out other Impostors to save their own skin — a viable strategy if not doing so will put suspicion on the remaining Impostor(s).
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Tasks in the task list are one of three colors: white tasks haven't been started yet, yellow tasks are multi-part tasks that are partially done, and green tasks are done.
  • Color-Coded Multiplayer: Every playable character is clad in the same space suit, but in different colors. During gameplay, while players can name themselves whatever they like, people usually just refer to other players by their color.
  • The Colored Cross: The game developers changed the crosses on the MedBays to blue after the Red Cross took notice.
  • Common Nonsense Jury: A crew made up of thoughtless, disorganized or simply incompetent players can easily wind up ejecting people for no reason, letting off an Impostor who had effectively been proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, or just straight up failing repeatedly to agree on anything in the first place.
  • Company Cross References: There are several references to the Henry Stickmin Series, another game by InnerSloth and PuffballsUnited.
    • Two pets are miniature versions of Henry Stickmin and Ellie Rose.
    • Some of the hats include:
      • The Center for Chaos Containment cap.
      • The Police hat.
      • The Wall Ushanka and Cap.
      • The Toppat Leader's top hat, with a version worn by Reginald Copperbottom, and another worn by Henry himself when he becomes the leader.
      • A pointing miniature Henry.
      • The characters' eyebrows.
      • Charles' headphones.
    • Special mentions to the Police body cosmetic and The Wall body cosmetic, while not worn by characters in the games for obvious reasons.
    • One particularly elaborate costume is based on the Right Hand Man when he becomes a cyborg.
    • Some of the trash in one of the tasks can include the Tunisian Diamond and the teleporter.
    • The vending machine can have the Don Dew and NrG drinks.
    • A framed photo of Henry can be found in the Polus Outpost map, right outside the meeting room.
    • A poster for the Henry Stickmin Collection can be found in the MIRA HQ map, beside a computer monitor in an office.
    • The abbreviations for all the endings of Fleeing the Complex are used for the names of the weather nodes in Polus Outpost. Even the odd one out — Node_MLG — is also a reference to one specific fail from that game.
    • The fourth map is the Toppat Airship from Infiltrating the Airship, and contains a ton of references to that game. Too many to count.
    • Here's a video by 2 Left Thumbs for more examples.
  • Confronting Your Imposter: The Shapeshifter is capable of turning into any player still remaining. Naturally, things can get very awkward if a Shapeshifter encounters the person they're currently disguised as, often giving away the presence of a Shapeshifter among the Impostors. It's also often a dead giveaway that the Crewmate is safe, especially when Impostors have the ability to shapeshift into their partners (but rarely if ever do so, and have no reason to outside of trying to fool the crew into thinking an imposter is a crewmate).
  • Context-Sensitive Button: Crewmates have a Use button, and Impostors have a Sabotage button on the bottom right of the screen. It changes to Security, Admin, Doorlog, or Vitals when near those terminals. For Impostors, the Sabotage button also turns to Vents when close enough to a vent and Use when next to a sabotaged system.
  • Convection, Schmonvection: The main structures of outpost Polus are situated immediately around an open lava pit, with the main Admin room's doors opening directly in the pit's direction. Somehow, this doesn't negatively affect anyone until they're dropped into itnote .
  • Conviction by Contradiction: Not at all uncommon, and often weaponized by Impostors to get otherwise innocent Crewmates ejected by pressing them on their alibis and jumping on anything that doesn't immediately pass muster in their attempts to explain themselves as proof that they must be the murderer.
  • Cooldown:
    • Impostors have a cooldown between kills, which can be set between 10-60 seconds, though it won't go down while within vents and checking on security cameras. This is to ensure that an Impostor can't just go on a rapid murder spree (although at the lowest possible cooldowns, it is possible to chase down that poor Crewmate running for the Emergency Button if you're standing between them and the body and are in a remote-enough part of the map). The cooldown is also reset to the maximum cooldown if a dead body is reported or an emergency meeting is called.
    • Impostors also have a cooldown on their sabotages, where all the non-door sabotages share the same cooldown, and doesn't start the cooldown until the sabotage is fixed. On the Skeld map, if a major sabotage (not including the lights or communications) happens, the doors also cannot be sabotaged as well, and vice versa, to prevent Impostors from delaying Crewmates for long enough for the countdown to finish and win the game.
    • All players, including Impostors, share a cooldown on the Emergency Button, and although the countdown cannot be interrupted, it can be disabled by Impostors by sabotaging a function, such as Oxygen, Reactors, and even Lights and Communications until it is fixed. There is an option to set this cooldown to either be shorter, longer, or even the same as the Impostors' kill cooldown, but how long is up to the lobby's host.
  • Cool Spaceship: The Skeld is a spaceship that resembles a turtle.
  • The Corpse Stops Here: Justified since Crewmates are expected to report corpses on sight; not doing so is typically grounds for an Impostor accusation. Of course, this trope applies just as often to the body reporter, as they're obviously someone who was in range of the crime scene.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: Crewmates who are exceptional detectives capable of figuring out even a crafty Impostor can often make subpar Impostors themselves, because they might find it harder to make up lies to support their story compared to working with the facts. Furthermore, the fact they suddenly aren't cracking the case this round might raise a lot of suspicion. This isn't always the case, though; on the flipside, some of these players have an easier time adapting their detective skills to Impostor play by learning to spin the facts in their favor.
  • Crossover: The game's included or been featured in so many crossovers, it has it's own page.

    D-G 
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
    • For Impostors, the Sabotage, Use, and Vent icons are all a single Context-Sensitive Button. As a result, they can end up venting when trying to kill the lights, or calling a meeting when they wanted to get the reactor.
    • The map of the Skeld is mirrored on April Fools' Day, which seems harmless until you have to race to fix the reactor and realize only too late you're not supposed to go left.
    • If you're used to wearing a certain color, but get auto-assigned a different one because your usual color was already claimed, try to remember this fact; responding to discussions about your usual color like you're still that color tend to not win you credibility points.
  • Death as Game Mechanic: Dying lets the player keep playing as a transparent ghost who can interact with the ship, but not the players. So they can complete tasks or sabotage the ship, but they can't speak during meetings or kill innocents.
  • Death or Glory Attack: There are ways for an Impostor to get multiple kills on the Crewmates. However, if botched, they can lead to very undesirable results for the Impostor:
    • Double kills, as mentioned in Awesome, but Impractical. They require a lot of trust in the other Impostor(s) and just the right amount of circumstances to pull off successfully, but quickly and effectively cut through the Impostors' kill requirement, or outright secure a victory, against two Crewmates who would have thought themselves safe. If one of those factors is out of place, like the second Impostor being too slow or on kill cooldown, the initiating Impostor just killed a Crewmate in front of a witness who can immediately report the dead body, which can quickly become two witnesses if the other Impostor doesn't want to risk blowing their cover.
    • Stack Kills. Impostors can get away with one kill with potential suspects for everyone. But it can easily out-rule everyone who wasn't in the room (especially if there's only one Imposter), and everyone in the room is a suspect, including the Imposter. Imposters also have to sabotage or look for a common task at least three people are doing together and aren't spaced out. Plus, there's the risk of Crewmates pretending to do something, spotting the movements, or finishing the task just before the Imposter kills someone.
    • Shapeshifting as a Shapeshifter and killing in front of other Crewmates to frame the Crewmate you took the form of. Pulled off well, it can allow the Impostors to kill a Crewmate, and frame another into getting voted off. However, if the Shapeshifter is witnessed by the real Crewmate they're disguised as, this is likely a big giveaway of the Crewmate's innocence and alerts the Crewmates to a Shapeshifter's presence, as Shapeshifters are capable of turning into other imposters, but rarely do so and have no reason to unless they are trying to make the crewmates believe their teammate is a crewmate.
  • Decided by One Vote: For any player to be ejected at a meeting, they need to have received a simple plurality of votes. (This also includes any votes to skip.) A tie in votes means nobody gets ejected. It's possible for someone to be ejected because the one person who voted for them was also the only person to vote before time ran out.
  • Denser and Wackier: The game becomes this during April Fools. The player characters turn into horses, make neighing sounds and have silly animations for everything from moving around to Impostors killing Crewmates. But the biggest example is Hide and Seek mode, where the Seeker is replaced by a rancher who screams "Yeehaw!" instead of roaring and proceeds to round up the other players while the usual Hide and Seek theme is replaced by a rodeo version.
  • Desperation Attack: Playing an Accuse the Witness ploy usually falls into this as the Impostor, since normally getting discovered near a body would lead to a very quick death. If the Crewmate is alone when the Impostor is discovered and hasn't been declared safe, the Impostor playing things out right during the resulting discussion can result in one more Crewmate kill under their belt. As outlined under Accuse the Witness, however, most sensible Crews will opt to vote both of them out, which means that it also falls under Taking You with Me unless the play occurs on the cusp of the Impostor's victory.
  • Destination Defenestration: The player being voted out is subject to this. On the Skeld, the voted player is Thrown Out the Airlock. In MIRA HQ, they are sent plummeting to their doom, on Polus Outpost, they are dropped into a pit of lava, and on the Airship, they are tossed overboard.note 
  • Developer's Foresight: If you get yourself voted off as the Impostor in Freeplay mode, you get a special message saying that the Crew would have won because the Impostor is dead.
  • Difficult, but Awesome:
    • Two or more Impostors performing a simultaneous kill can rapidly thin out the Crewmates' numbers, but it generally needs all Impostors, each with a Crewmate victim, in the same room, and for the kills to be made within a split second of each other. React too slowly, and one of the potential victims can report the kill and start casting suspicion. Even if the multi-kill was executed flawlessly, making a clean getaway is not as easy. This is why a multi-kill is often used to quickly secure victory… and not often used in other circumstances.
    • The Admin Table on all four maps seems to have limited use to newer players (it shows how many people are in each room at the moment, but not who), and in fact helps out new Impostors much more than Crew. It also seems less immediately useful than Cameras, Door Logs, or Vitals, which with less experience can identify Impostors. But the Admin Table is one of the most powerful information tools available to Crewmates to trace everyone's movements, detect (probable) venting, and bust open fake alibis… provided you know what to look for and what you're doing.
    • Pulling a Stealth Hi/Bye in a room with multiple, vision-obscuring tasks (Electrical on the Skeld is a primary example) is a risky but potentially rewarding gambit. Basically, it hinges on venting into the room while multiple people are distracted with tasks, quickly killing someone, then venting out before someone notices.note  If not immediately caught and ejected, this will almost certainly get someone innocent blamed when the body is noticed and reported, and likely cast suspicion on everyone else that was present when the scapegoat turns out to not be an Impostornote , all while "clearing" the actual Impostor of suspicion.
  • Disney Villain Death:
    • On the MIRA HQ map, ejected players are dropped out of the building.
    • On the Airship, players are flung out in a reference to "The Betrayed" ending of Complex.
  • Disposing of a Body: Meetings will clear all dead bodies from the map. Impostors can call a meeting to erase evidence the Crewmates can use to suss them out, though it can backfire, since other players might suspect them of clearing out bodies on purpose.
  • Divided We Fall: It's in the Impostors' best interest to invoke this among the Crew, as it's much easier to cause the group to vote out an innocent player if they mistrust each other.
  • Do Not Go Gentle: Some caught Impostors will still insist on throwing around blame, making excuses, and generally doing anything they can to avoid being voted out, even in the face of damning evidence (multiple witnesses to a kill/vent, lack of credible alibi, security/admin evidence…). This makes a degree of sense game theory-wise, since even a miniscule possibility of talking one's way out of the situation is better than giving up entirely and having zero chance.
  • Double Unlock: Cosmicubes. You have to first purchase the Cubes with Beans or Stars, then unlock the contents with Pods.
  • Drone of Dread: When the game is won by the Impostor(s), a low, ominous hum plays over the Victory/Defeat screen.
  • Duty That Transcends Death:
    • A Crewmate that is murdered or voted off can still complete their tasks, and can actually do so quicker since they can move through walls and aren't affected by the lights going out. However, only living Crewmates can fix sabotages.
    • As long as one Impostor is still alive, the voted-off Impostor(s) can still perform sabotages and lock doors. However, dead Impostors cannot kill Crew members.
  • Dwindling Party: The Crew will be slowly picked off unless/until they can eliminate the Impostors.
  • Easily Forgiven: Enforced for both sides.
    • If a Crewmate is voted off by weak evidence, they are still expected to finish the rest of their tasks to help their side win.
    • If an Impostor betrays a teammate to avoid suspicion, it's still in the favor of the betrayed to not sell out their teammate in retaliation, as it will mean a quick loss for their side (or, in 3-Impostor games, the Impostor team "merely" being heavily crippled and on the verge of defeat). It's also still in their favor to close doors and start sabotages at the appropriate times to support their living allies (albeit this takes knowledge and timing to do, and doing it wrong could instead make things worse).
  • Easter Egg: The QR code on the Crewmate's boarding passes scans to "Yo holmes, smell you later".
  • Edible Theme Naming: There's a top hat made out of cheese, with a bite taken out of the rim.
  • "Everybody Dies" Ending: One of the Game Over scenarios has the Impostors either destroy the map with a Critical Sabotage or starve everyone of oxygen, killing all of the players.
  • Everybody Lives: You can get rid of the Impostor(s) without any Crewmate deaths. Doing this by random chance generally involves very incompetent Impostors or very competent Crewmates — usually both.
  • Et Tu, Brute?: It's possible for an Impostor to accuse and vote out their fellow Impostors to sway suspicion off themselves, or for an Impostor to rat out their teammate(s) with their dying breath. The former may be forgivable depending on circumstance; the latter is often frowned upon as unsportsmanlike conduct (since it all but guarantees a Crewmate victory).
  • Evil Counterpart: Inverted with Engineers, who are Crewmates with a vent button.
  • Exact Time to Failure: When the oxygen or reactor is sabotaged, a countdown shows how much time the Crew has to fix things before they all die. During this time, the Emergency Button is disabled.
  • Excuse Plot: Everything about doing tasks and fixing sabotages is only there to provide a regular and predictable pattern of behavior that Crewmates follow and Impostors must occasionally violate. As such, some players don't really bother and simply play detective by running around investigating or sitting on top of resources like the cameras or vitals/admin/logs, which show who is alive or dead, roughly where people are, and exactly where people have gone respectively.
  • Expressive Accessory: Some hats will "die" along with their wearer when the Crewmate is killed. For example, the flamingo hat which gains X-ed out eyes, or the heart which breaks.
  • The Faceless: Nobody knows what the Crewmates or Impostors look like underneath their suits. Every single one of them seemingly wears their uniforms at all times of day, even in family photos.
  • Face Death with Dignity: Both Crew members and Impostors seem to take their horrible dooms very calmly. The mere fact that they don't struggle, even if it's entirely within an Impostor's abilities to defeat their captors, when being Thrown Out the Airlock, sent plummeting to their death from a near-orbital platform, or tossed down to molten lava, suggests that they just shrug and resign themselves to their fate after the majority vote was reached.
  • Failed a Spot Check: Can be invoked on Crewmates if you're an Impostor. Some Crewmates simply fail a spot check because they're so focused on their tasks that they fail to notice the body on the ground or the conspicuous "Report Body" button light up. This works especially well if the dead Crewmate wore a dark-colored suit or is obscured by surrounding objects. This goes double if the lights have been sabotaged.
  • Fair-Play Villain: Enforced by the game. By all means, the Impostors should be more than capable of subduing every Crewmate around them if they so desire. However, kills are restricted to single victims at any given time and have a mandatory cooldown period between each kill, and the Impostors themselves don't even resist when voted out to their horrible deaths.
  • Faking the Dead: In games where there are two Impostors, if the Crewmates vote someone suspicious but innocent out early, one Impostor can take the opportunity to not do any killing and instead focus on gaining the Crewmates' trust, providing vouches for their partner, and representing a hidden voting bloc. Then, when things get down to five or six and the Crew isn't on guard, they can suddenly show their true colors for a game-winning kill.
  • Fatal Family Photo: In the "Swipe Card" task, the wallet you take the card from includes a family photo. Only Crewmates have the wallet and photo (since Impostors don't have tasks) and they can be killed while doing their task, invoking the trope.
  • Flash Step: If Kill Distance is set to Medium or Long, an Impostor can seem to instantly teleport a few feet toward their victim when they kill them. Averted if the setting is Short.
  • Floating Limbs: The characters' arms are normally not shown, but certain animations give them floating hands.
  • Flock of Wolves: Sometimes, when two players are together in a room, a third that passes by will opt to stick around for the sole purpose of ensuring neither kills the other, only to die themselves when it turns out both of the initial players were Impostors.
  • A Fool for a Client: An accused player will often have to take the initiative in defending themselves. How well this works out depends on the player's persuasion skills, ability to make solid arguments, the strength of the evidence against them and whether the crew is willing to hear them out in the first place. The main exception to the trope is when a fellow player can vouch for the accused, such as if they were together the entire round.
  • Foregone Victory: If the number of Impostors is equal to the number of Crewmates, the Impostors instantly win. This is because Crewmates can only eject Impostors by vote, and Impostors can obviously stalemate any vote by their equal numbers (and are also able to kill Crewmates whenever), so it's inevitable that they would win anyway. It's a viable late-game strategy to just rush the Crewmates when everyone is congregated after a round of voting to try and force this equal ratio.
  • Forgiveness Requires Death: Frequently, anyone making a bold accusation will permit the rest of the team to vote them off if their accusation is proven false.
  • Frame-Up: The Shapeshifter role can frame an innocent Crewmate by first shapeshifting into a Crewmate, then killing another Crewmate in front of witnesses. However, this can backfire if you're seen alongside the Crewmate you're shapeshifted into, as it confirms they're innocent as Shapeshifters can't shapeshift into other Impostors.
  • Framing the Guilty Party: It's an entirely valid strategy to just lie about somebody being an Impostor if you suspect that they actually are one, by claiming that you either saw them venting, or finding a dead body around where they used to loiter. However, this can be a risky play if any of the other Crewmates catch onto the lie before ejecting the Impostor, as in most cases, it's much safer to remove a known liar than to vote out an unverifiable threat.
  • Futile Hand Reach:
    • One of the four available kill animations has the Crew member trying to crawl away from their assailant and making this gesture before being shot in the head. If they had a hat on or a pet, it will look like as if they're reaching out to them before dying.
    • Crewmates voted out on Polus Outpost will reach out as they sink into the lava pit if ejections are set to be confirmed.
  • Gambit Pileup: This can happen quite easily, especially in games with a large amount of players. While trying to manipulate the crew, the Impostors (unless there is only one) could either be plotting together or running separate schemes; smarter Crewmates might be running joint or separate investigations as well; Impostors may start sabotages to force the crew to or away from given locations, and individual Crewmates might realize this and move away from the sabotage site; Impostors might try to frame someone, but a sharp Crewmate might call their tricks; different Crewmates might have different prime suspects and get in each other's way; some players try to earn each other's trust while others try to avoid trusting anyone too much, etc.
  • Game-Breaking Bug:
    • After the Airship officially released, many players found themselves stuck after a meeting, unable to move. Downplayed in that there's a simple work around (go in and out of the settings menu) as well as a way to avoid it (don't have the options menu open when the meeting concludes), but it's one you'll likely have to be told by someone who stumbled upon it.
    • For Impostors, there's a bug where attacking a Crewmate and proccing their Guardian Angel shield will leave that Impostor unable to kill that Crewmate for the rest of the round. In games where one Impostor remains, triggering shields on two different Crewmates could leave the game Unintentionally Unwinnable; unless you manage to pull off a critical sabotage, or con one into voting out the other.
  • Game Lobby: Lobbies appear as a Drop Ship where up to 15 players enter (appearing from the seats). Players can customize their appearance using the laptop and chat between rounds, while the host can also change game settings. On Polus, the ship is shown at the top of the map and the players disembark from it at the start of the game.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation:
    • The Crew can win by completing all objectives, despite the fact that there are still Impostors around among them (this is to ensure that imposters have a reason to kill instead of never killing to avoid ejection). What happens to either party afterwards is never acknowledged.
    • Reporting a body will automatically fix a time limit sabotage such as oxygen or reactor, which makes no sense, but prevents unwinnable situations if time ran low before the meeting and makes for less awkward gameplay because players don't have to go back to worrying about the sabotage once the meeting is over (as well as avoiding the questions that would be raised by a crew deliberating at the table while the oxygen is running out).
    • The ways Impostors can murder Crewmates depicted in cutscenes are stabbing in the back, sucker punching and a headshot, a Neck Snap, and stabbing with a long, spear-like tongue coming out of a toothy maw. No matter which is shown, it leaves behind the lower half of their body with a protruding bone, despite the fact that none of the four kill animations did that.
      • The animation for a kill with the Right Hand Man Reborn skin involves the Impostor using laser vision to burn the Crewmate to a crisp, but the body will still show up as unburnt with the bone intact.
    • The "sucker punch and headshot" kill animation is as undetectable (outside of visual range) as the other methods, even though a gunshot would instantly let anyone in earshot know at least the general location where a kill had happened.
  • Gaslighting: One defense when caught red-handed but without the witness having enough time to confirm the information is to quietly deny everything, suggest they saw slightly wrong, and then, crucially, not accusing them back. If you can confuse the other person by saying you were just near a vent or happened to find the body at the same time they did, then their credibility goes down and you're much more likely to survive at least one round.
  • Going Critical: The Impostor can sabotage the Reactor, which will kill everyone if it isn't repaired.
  • Good Colours, Evil Colours: The Vent ability is red for Impostors and light blue for Engineers.
  • Gray Is Useless: Players have buttons on the bottom right of their screen to perform necessary functions. If they are not allowed to use said functions (i.e. an Impostor's "Kill" function is on cooldown), the buttons will be grayed out. This is averted with monitoring abilities, which use grey and green.
  • Guardian Angel: Invoked with the Guardian Angel role for Crewmates that was released with the November 2021 update. The first Crewmate to die becomes the Guardian Angel; their ghost gains wings that flap as they move, and they can put a shield on a Crewmate that will protect them from being killed by the Impostor.
  • Guilty Until Someone Else Is Guilty: If there's no hard evidence to prove someone's a Crewmate, no one will believe anyone isn't an Impostor until the game ends, which always reveals who the Crewmates and Impostors are.

    H-L 
  • Hailfire Peaks: The planet Polus is known for its hot core and its cold temperatures. On the map, it's cold enough to snow, while there's a lava pit on the right side.
  • Half the Man He Used to Be: Regardless of the kill animation, victims are always reduced to their lower half with a bone sticking out.
  • Hand Cannon: One of the kill animations shows the Impostor punching the victim to the ground and taking out a comically large pistol (that's about as long as the user is wide) to finish the job.
  • Harder Than Hard:
    • Playing with three Impostors was basically a death wish for Crewmates; however, a 15-player update made it much easier to win against them.
    • Games are made very difficult for Crewmates when players quit as soon as they find out they're not Impostors, many times leaving the remaining Crewmates only a double kill, or even just one kill away from losing the game. This motivated the developers to implement Anti-Rage Quitting features.
  • He Knows Too Much: If you're playing Impostor and someone is placing suspicion on you, it's usually better to try and convince the rest of the group to vote them out. If their body is discovered, especially soon afterwards, it's often a dead giveaway because of this trope.
  • Herd-Hitting Attack: Despite Impostor kills being single-target, the ensuing blame and suspicion are herd-hitting. One of the most confusing things an Impostor can do is a "stack kill": killing someone when three or four people are all standing in exactly the same place, meaning the subsequent conversation can lead to anyone getting mistrusted or voted out.note 
  • Heroic Sacrifice:
    • Can be invoked by Crewmates in the "50/50 strategy" if someone is sure that they found an Impostor but the rest of the crew is unconvinced — volunteering "If not [X], then vote me out next" has gotten many an Impostor ejected.
    • Confirmed Crewmates stacking behind each other (such that their sprites overlap) is a way to catch a lone Impostor off-guard. If the Impostor doesn't realize there's a stack and kills a sacrificial Crewmate only to reveal another one behind them, the other Crewmate(s) can quickly report the body and catch the Impostor red-handed. If there were two or more Crewmates hiding behind the "sacrifice", this will have two witnesses with evidence against the Impostor. Of course, Impostors can also play along with this and blend in with the "stack", then strike at the right moment, or initiate a "stack kill" if there are enough Crew members piled on top of each other.
    • Inverted when pulled by the Impostors; one gambit is for one Impostor to start going on an unsubtle murder spree midway through the game, knowing full well that they will be caught, so that the remaining Impostor(s) are in a numerically favorable position to win. The remaining Impostor(s) can even denounce their co-conspirator to seal the deal.
  • Hide-and-Seek Horror: In Hide and Seek Mode, the Crewmates have to hide from the Impostor, who is trying to find and kill them.
  • The Hilarity of Hats: A wide variety of silly hats are available in customization, including a pair of horns, a fez, a few Animal Eared Headbands, a roll of toilet paper, and a sunny-side-up egg. One death animation has the victim reaching for their hat as their final act.
  • His Name Is...: It takes such frame-perfect timing that you'd be hard-pressed to do it intentionally, but it's possible to kill someone in the same frame that they report a body or press the Emergency Meeting button (usually after, say, witnessing an Impostor killing or venting on the cameras). They'll show up as dead during the pre-meeting body count, but alive during the actual meeting. Either way, you've cost the Crewmates a witness and possible intel.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: Goes both ways.
    • For the Crew, being overly careful can quickly lead to players being paranoid and mistrustful of others, resulting in doom via Divided We Fall, thus playing directly into the hands of the Impostors by voting each other out, giving them a victory by numbers.
    • For Impostors, miscalculated sabotages can sometimes allow the Crew to pinpoint exactly who did the deed, even more so if they're overly defensive and thorough about their supposed alibi. A thorough liar can easily out themselves if they mention something vital that nobody brought up and they shouldn't have been able to know unless they were the Impostor that did it.note  Impostors that forget that their own field of vision is wider than Crewmates' (which is default and almost never changed) and still active even when lights are sabotaged can give themselves away by revealing what they see that a Crewmate couldn't.
  • Holiday Mode:
    • In October, maps feature bowls of candy, bats, green and purple goo, and other Halloween decorations.
    • Players who attempt to play on the Skeld on April 1st in any mode will discover that the map is mirrored left-to-right (and the title screen will even note "April Fools! Try out ehT dlekS!"). Like other Holiday Modes, the mirrored version of the Skeld can be played anytime by the host setting their system clock to a date and time that correspond to April 1st on GMT.
  • Humanoid Abomination: While the characters are Ambiguously Human to start with, the Impostors really skirt this line for several reasons.
    • One of the kill animations involves the Impostor impaling their target with a spear-like tongue coming out of a toothy maw. That toothy maw opens by having their top half, faceshield and all, flip up.
    • The Impostors can win via shutting off the oxygen of the ship, implying that they don't need it in the first place.note 
    • When a Crewmate is killed on Polus Outpost, the Impostor's pulse on Vital Signs Machine (Simsong) doesn't increase at all from stress or guilt.
    • By default, the Impostors have better vision than Crewmates. This can be changed, however. Impostors can also see in the dark during the lights sabotage.
  • If I Wanted You Dead...: If a Crewmate or Impostor spends too much time alone with another Crewmate, they can argue that they aren't the Impostor, because if they were, they would have killed their partner when they were alone. Clever Impostors usually try to employ this tactic to whittle down the party size and build trust with their would-be victims, before springing the bamboozle when there's only a handful of people left and it's already too late to realize their duplicity.note 
  • I Know You Know I Know: Players have to behave like Crew to stay Beneath Suspicion, while remaining wary of other players, so games often involve players trying to predict each other's actions and act accordingly. There's a lot of "I knew you knew I was clear, and that's why I'm following you", "Is [color] just trolling or really an Impostor, or are they trying to bait Impostors into voting them?", "You know that If I Wanted You Dead..., I'd kill you, so I'm innocent", and so on.
  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: One kill animation shows the Impostor opening its mouth at their midriff and impaling the target with their tongue like a lance.
  • Implausible Deniability: Whenever an Impostor is caught red-handed using a vent or killing someone, especially by more than one witness. It takes audacity, quick wits, and no shortage of luck to talk one's way out of that situation, but it is possible (usually by convincing everyone that the witness is the one who's lying).
  • Impossible Task: Spoofed with an achievement by the same name. The requirement? Do the Card Swipe task on the first try.
  • Imposter Forgot One Detail: A common occurrence for Impostors who do not have much experience with the map they're playing on, as they may either mention tasks and locations which don't exist on that map, or provide the wrong locations for the tasks they were supposedly doing. This is the main reason that Impostors are given a list of fake tasks at the start of the game — they don't have to stick to that list when developing their alibis, but doing so helps prevent obvious slip-ups.
  • Impostor-Exposing Test: Inverted if task animations are turned on. This gives certain tasks a visual effect that guarantees to onlookers that the player doing such a task is a Crewmate, as Impostors cannot do Tasks. Their visibility varies, but the most obvious is the Medbay Scan.
  • I Never Said It Was Poison:
    • Impostors can accidentally out themselves if they provide information that only an Impostor would know — for instance, the location of the body if the reporter hasn't mentioned it, or the positions of Crewmates that they shouldn't have been able to see during a lights sabotage.
    • Crewmates can attempt to invoke this by reporting a dead body but refusing to disclose where until everyone gives an alibi of what they were doing. The hope is that someone is caught by an alibi that contradicts a trusted Crewmate's, or slipping up and saying why they couldn't have been in the room when which room wasn't disclosed.note  This can be a double-edged sword, however, as players tend to look poorly on reports or meetings where the initiating party doesn't say anything, which at best leads to a skip and at worst getting ejected for wasting time.
  • Instant Cooldown: The reactor and O2 sabotages are fixed instantly when two players resolve their issues. They are also instantly fixed if a player finds a dead body.
  • Instant-Win Condition: Crewmates win automatically if every single one of them completes all of their tasks, even though the Impostor(s) would still be at large.
  • Instructional Film: The trailer for Polus Outpost is a parody of these.
  • Intangibility: Ghosts of both Crewmates and Impostors can float through walls. They also move faster than living players. However, dead players can't be seen by living players, their chat messages only go through to other dead players, and they can't vote or fix sabotages.
  • Interface Screw:
    • The task minigame graphics are deliberately made extremely huge to obstruct as much of your peripheral vision as possible, so that players performing tasks cannot clearly see if any potential Impostors are approaching them or track their fellow Crewmates to confirm alibis.
    • For more specific examples that allow the Impostors to directly screw with the Crew's interfaces, sabotaging the lights invokes Blackout Basement on the Crew, while sabotaging the communications will disable the security cameras and obscure the task checklist and task progress bar.
  • Invisible Wall: Ghosts can move through walls, but they'll hit invisible walls around the normally inaccessible edges of the map.
  • Jacob Marley Apparel: The ghosts of dead players still wear the hats they had when they were alive.
  • Jump Scare: All the cut-ins share the same starting animation of the red flash and lighting, and interrupt whatever task you were on. Kill animations are accompanied by the Scare Chord as you watch your death; Emergency Meetings announce themselves with a loud blaring tone.
  • Kill and Replace: Implied to be the case. Evident by their name and place among the Crew, it's suggested that Impostors have murdered the real Crewmates that they're posing as to take their place and blend in with the team. Also possible with the Shapeshifter role, though it's more like "Replace and Kill" since you can only turn into Crewmates that were alive from the start of the round.
  • Language Barrier: Before the option for Filipino (aka Tagalog; and Polish in the same patch) language settings, Filipinos were so common to see in English lobbies that it became somewhat of a meme within the community.
  • Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid: When a character is voted out in the Polus map, they're dropped into the nearby pool of magma, whereupon they will make a "Sploosh!" sound as they land.
  • Leeroy Jenkins: An inexperienced or overconfident Impostor might kill at the first apparent opportunity without thinking about how to get away cleanly and put together an alibi, and will often foil a fellow Impostor's attempt to coordinate with them by going on the offensive prematurely, screwing their team over.
  • Lights Off, Somebody Dies: If the Impostor sabotages the lights, due to the reduced field of view of the Crew, they have essentially free reign to kill anyone they feel like until someone fixes them.note  It's also not unusual for an Impostor to wait at Electrical to ambush whoever is coming to fix the lights.
  • The Load:
    • Crewmates who refuse to complete their tasks (out of paranoia or just plain obstinacy) can prevent the Crew from winning by tasks. More generally, Crewmates who fail to stay aware of their surroundings or come up with believable alibis during questioning only help the Impostor by being easy to frame. Lastly, Crewmates who throw baseless accusations left and right can hinder proper deliberation, lead to completely avoidable false convictions and will often end up making themselves annoying at best and suspicious at worst and getting themselves ejected, exacerbating the crew's losses.
    • Impostors who start sabotages at inconvenient times for their fellow Impostors will often make things a lot harder for their own side and potentially even get themselves or their allies ejected. Even worse, because they can still sabotage while dead, even if they die early they might continue to hinder their living allies throughout the rest of the game.
  • Loophole Abuse:
    • Poor Communication Kills is the theme of the game, and it's enforced by restricting communication only to live players and only during meetings. But nothing's stopping people from simply using an external application such as Discord or Teamspeak to discuss at a meeting. While it can be done and a lot of players do make use of these apps, the general consensus is that everyone playing must be involved in voice chat if it's used and must adhere to the game's normal communication restrictions; colluding in secret or talking during prohibited times is unsportsmanlike and earns the ire of the playgroup if discovered.
    • Even with visual tasks disabled, it's still possible to use Medbay Scan to confirm someone's innocence; only one player can scan at a time, forcing the rest to wait in line. If someone is at the scanner and you're forced to queue when trying to use it, it means they're scanning for real.

    M-R 
  • Made of Bologna: Crewmates who are unfortunate enough to get killed by the Impostor suffer this, getting their heads torn off but leaving a cartoon bone poking out of the lower stump.
  • Magical Security Cam: Security cameras somehow provide a top-down view of the area, even having themselves in the footage.
  • The Many Deaths of You: Crewmates can meet their demise in a lot of ways: via a Neck Snap, multiple Back Stabs with a knife, being speared through the face by an Impostor's tongue, and being socked in the face and having their brains blown out while they are down. Additionally, both Impostors and Crewmates can also perish by being Thrown Out The Air Lock, subjected to a Disney Villain Death, dumped into molten lava, or subjected to a premature Viking Funeral.
  • Maniac Tongue: The Impostor sports one during the Hide 'n' Seek mode.
  • Maze Game:
    • The first portion of the node tasks on Polus are in the form of a small maze, where you have to make a path from top left to bottom right of the board without hitting a dead end.
    • The Airship has Reset Breakers, which forces you to go through Electrical to find the switches in order.
  • Meaningful Name: The ship the Crewmates are on, The Skeld, means "Shield" or "Shelter".
  • The Millstone: Goes for both sides.
    • A bad-playing Crewmate is annoying at best and an obstacle at worst. Crewmates have to finish tasks to win without voting Impostors off, and newer Crewmates may not know how to do tasks, thus removing the time limit that the Impostors would normally have. The Crewmates can still win by voting the Impostors off, although they're prone to voting off the liability first before working out the Impostor with a smaller numbers advantage (and voting off the liability doesn't actually fix the issue, since that player still has to finish their tasks before the Crewmates can win).
    • A bad-playing Impostor arguably hurts their side much more than a bad-playing Crewmate does theirs, as the Impostors are always outnumbered and the death of one (especially in the early game) will put much more pressure on the remaining one(s) to pick up the slack and increase the risk of exposing themselves. Dead Impostors can still sabotage and arguably have more freedom to sabotage doors, which can help their living teammate(s) when used wisely and hurt them even further when used carelessly.
  • Mini-Me: There's a hat in the game that is essentially a mini-Crewmate. The mini-Crewmate "hat" is also the same color as the player that is wearing it.
  • Miscarriage of Justice: It's a frequent outcome for someone to be voted off only to turn out to not be the Impostor. While this can be the result of a Frame-Up by the real culprit, just as often it is caused by unfortunate timing or simply a flat-out incompetent crew.
  • The Mole: Up to three Impostors in a game have to blend in with the Crew members and pretend to complete tasks while their goal is to kill the Crew. They can fix their own sabotages to gain trust.
  • A Molten Date with Death: On the Polus map, players ejected by vote are dropped into the lava pit.
  • Multipurpose Tongue: One of the kill animations for the Impostors is stabbing a victim with their tongue.
  • Must Have Caffeine: One possible explanation for a task on Mira HQ that requires getting a drink from a vending machine, given that two of the possible ones are Bland-Name Product versions of caffeinated soft drinks and a third is an energy drink.
  • Mythology Gag: The Airship, being a set-piece from the Henry Stickmin Series, features plenty of references to the series.
    • In the aptly named "Gap Room", a large pencil is in the corner on the right side. One of Henry's methods of crossing said gap from the right was that same pencil, a magic pencil to be specific.
    • When someone is voted out, they get ejected in the same manner as Henry Stickmin in The Betrayed ending of Fleeing the Complex, complete with dramatic music.
    • Instead of the normal buzzer, calling a meeting or reporting a body uses the same jingle heard in one route in Mission.
  • Neck Snap: One of the possible kill animations, where the Impostor sprouts Floating Limbs and pulls this on their victim.
  • Nerf:
    • In earlier versions of the game, Impostors could kill without any cooldown, and dead Crewmates could also fix sabotages. Those have since been removed.
    • For almost every map, lights were the go-to sabotage, with others mostly only being called in order to force Crewmates in some direction. On the Airship, there are three places to fix them, meaning someone will almost always be near one of them and they could be fixed at any moment, making them a great deal riskier. The strategy of calling a sabotage on six is also weaker thanks to both multiple spawns and the general setup of emergency locations: Crash Course is right below the meeting room and lights has three locations. Comms is the same as always, but is typically the least popular sabotage. Thus, after a reactor sabotage, it's easy to just run up the ladder while Impostors can't easily work together to camp lights.
    • On Airship, Vitals is incredibly far away from the button, making it nearly useless as a tool to know when to call the button before a loss. It's also in one of the most neglected corners of the map, making it much harder to use as a tool to know the timing of deaths. The only other map with Vitals, Polus, has it in a central location in the room next to the button, making it a valid strategy to just sit there watching it to see when people die. On Polus, it's also right next to Admin, making it easy to find where dead bodies are likely to be, but on Airship, the Admin table is in the opposite corner of the map.
    • One highly effective early strategy was to simply watch the task bar when someone was doing a task to see if the completion rate went up. If they moved off and it didn't, they faked a task. There were ways to trick people taking advantage of this strategy, but they were pretty luck dependent and required the Impostor to stay too long or too short on various tasks, which looks bad in itself. Eventually, a function was added to block being able to see the task bar change because it was just that gamebreaking.
  • Never Recycle Your Schemes: It's generally a bad idea as Impostor to keep using the same tactics over and over when playing in the same group (doubly so if you actually know people in the group), since eventually someone will catch on. If you're particularly unfortunate, a clever Impostor can even frame you this way (e.g. "Nobody else closes doors this much", etc.).
  • Never Split the Party: This is a valid survival strategy for the Crew. An entire group travelling in a ball around the map provides safety and supervision while specific members can work on their tasks. Being constantly eyeballed means Impostors will not be able to strike without sabotaging the lights. Plus, it's a much more assuring way to sus out an Impostor, as they cannot advance the task meter regardless of what they do. That said, Impostors can counter this strategy using carefully timed sabotages. Even a pair of Crewmates doing this narrows the field considerably, so long as there's only one Impostor roaming around. If a body is found and the pair were together the entire time, they eliminate each other as suspects.
  • Nobody Poops: There are no toilets of any kind on the Skeld and MIRA HQ, thus playing this trope straight on those particular maps. An actual bathroom was finally added with the release of Polus, albeit unusable, and the developers even lampshaded this via one of the listed features in the patch notes ("A bathroom! (Out of order)"). The Airship's bathroom features a task where you have to use a plunger to unclog a toilet in one of the stalls, complete with squishy sound effects and a flush when the task completes.
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
    • There are many cases of Crewmates going out of their way to ensure the safety of a fellow player only to get killed for their trouble, usually by the very player they were protecting. A particularly cruel scenario is when a Crewmate tries to keep an eye on two other players to ensure neither kills the other, only for both to turn out to be Impostors, kill the Crewmate who tried to protect them from each other and scram before anyone else finds the body.
    • It is common for a player heading out to fix a sabotage to get ambushed by an Impostor either right before getting there or right after successfully fixing it, which is one of the reasons Crewmates are often reluctant to be the first to go deal with a sabotage. This can be defied by going to the site of the sabotage in groups, but it's harder to pull off during a lights sabotage due to the reduced visibility making it harder to stick together and to tell who committed a murder that would otherwise have been in plain sight.
  • Noob Bridge: Polus Outpost has a task for a drill that is only accessible from the south… but has a fence as its west border that does not obstruct vision. First-time players (or even players who only play on Polus infrequently) will often attempt to approach the drill from the west before realizing that there's an obstruction there.
  • No OSHA Compliance: The small metal bridge around the edge of the lava pit in Outpost Polus has absolutely no safety railings whatsoever. Somewhat justified by the fact that it also doubles as the Crew's elimination method.
  • No Plot? No Problem!: The game itself provides no explanation on why your characters are all together on the different maps, nor who or what the Impostors want and why they want to kill everyone. In the former case, it is (somewhat) explained through blog posts and trailers, and in the latter case, this works to their benefit.
  • No-Sell: Security cameras are completely unaffected by a lights sabotage, remaining able to see everything clearly. Instead, to disable the cameras, an Impostor has to sabotage comms.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: The game is devoid of music beyond a few atmospheric noises; you're only accompanied by the surrounding ambience or the sounds of your activities. This helps maintain the tense atmosphere. In addition, witnessing kill animations from outside the perspective of the victim has the Impostor move seemingly too fast for the human eye. One moment, they're standing there with someone; the next, they're standing over a freshly-dismembered corpse. And once the game starts, players aren't even allowed to communicate with the text chat unless in the event of an Emergency Meeting or after a dead body is reported.
  • Not Me This Time: In games with more than one Impostor, it's not uncommon for one Impostor to be ejected for a murder that was actually committed by another Impostor. This trope applies even more strongly if the ejected one had been responsible for most or all of the previous murders, only to get convicted of the one murder they weren't actually responsible for.
  • Not Too Dead to Save the Day: Crewmates can become Guardian Angels upon death, who can make the Impostor's job much harder by shielding living Crewmates from kills.
  • Obfuscating Stupidity: Trying to be the Only Sane Man or The Leader will raise a lot of suspicion and/or put a target on your back, so it's best to act clueless and dumb to not flare anyone. Be too stupid in a competent group of Crewmates, however, and everyone will start looking at you weird.
  • Obvious Rule Patch: In very early versions of the game, Impostors couldn't fix sabotages, which made it very easy to either catch them when it was very obvious that they were faking it, or at least cast suspicion on them for not going over to fix them in the first place. This was quickly dealt with by making it possible for Impostors to fix their own sabotages if they have to.
  • One-Hit Kill: In terms of game rounds, this can happen in games with exactly four or six Crewmates and two or three Impostors. At the very beginning of the game, if the Impostors can somehow coordinate to each kill a different Crewmate at about the same time, they will immediately win due to the tie rule, before any meetings can be called and regardless of what anyone else witnessed.
  • Our Ghosts Are Different: Ghost players are able to go through walls, move faster than living players, are unaffected by lights sabotage, and can see what's going on in the entire map, while even the best vision for living players cannot see through walls. Crewmate ghosts apparently can interact with the world since they still can complete tasks, and Impostor ghosts can still sabotage systems.
  • Out-Gambitted: One reason an Impostor might start a sabotage is to draw the crew away from a body. But sometimes, a sharper player figures this might be the case (or a lazy player can't be arsed to go fix the sabotage) and walks away from the sabotage site, thus finding and reporting the body, which foils the Impostor's plan. This is a risky thing to do, however, both because you're trusting your fellow Crewmates to deal with the sabotage while you investigate and because you are going off alone, with no potential witnesses should you get picked off.
  • Peaceful in Death: The chats between dead players tend to be a lot more civil than the chats between living players; the latter are under the pressure of catching the Impostor (or not being caught), but you can't really help that any when you're dead; so at worst the former just clowns on a dead Impostor or gripes about being Surrounded by Idiots when their killer isn't caught.
  • Percussive Maintenance: For the "fix shower" task in the Airship, the player hits the shower head with a hammer to make it line up properly.
  • The Perils of Being the Best: In playgroups with known differences in skill level, experienced or persuasive players tend to become early targets because of this trope. Sometimes a skilled Impostor can be outed because the remaining suspects are too inexperienced to play at their efficiency; though such an Impostor can use this to their advantage by pretending to be less skilled (i.e. avoiding using sabotages) to get suspicion off them. This is even more glaring with the advent of a level system, which seems to serve no purpose other than giving a rough idea how much experience playing the game a player has; meaning even playing in a random public lobby with people who have no idea who you are can still paint a target on your back if your level is sufficently high.
  • Pet the Dog: The Impostor will not kill their victim's pet (if they have one following them). They will even let the pet stay on the meeting room afterwards… albeit still scared (like the dog) or depressed (the mini alien).
  • Player Elimination: Being inspired by Werewolf (1997), the game lets the Impostors kill players, and allows players to vote on who to kill in an attempt to get rid of the Impostor(s). However, it's a downplayed version, as dead players return as Ghosts and still have a chance to affect the game.
  • Player Nudge:
    • The game expects you to stay silent until discussion time. In case you missed the memo, it reminds you with a Crewmate hushing you with a "Shhhhh!" before your role is revealed.
    • The "Test Samples" task in the Skeld and Polus will give you a message once you activate it that hints that you're allowed to leave while it works in the background. These can range from subtle ("Go get a coffee.") to blatant ("Go do something else.").
  • Poltergeist: A deceased Impostor functions much this way, closing doors, shutting down electricity, and assaulting the communication lines from the afterlife.
  • Poor Communication Kills:
    • Enforced by game rules. You're only allowed to communicate during meetings, so it's harder to coordinate with the crew or prove your innocence and it's easier for you to get eliminated. The trope gets exaggerated if a Language Barrier is involved, especially in public games.
    • In games with proximity chat enabled, however, where players can talk openly and freely in the game but can only hear anyone near them, you're free to discuss and coordinate however you wish. Crewmates can announce where they're going and team up, but it also means Impostors can now hear if their next victims are nearby. Impostors have to try harder to blend in and have to be even more careful not to give themselves away, but they can also potentially coordinate with their Impostor partner.
  • Radio Voice: The pilot chatter on comms, which can only be heard during a sabotage, has a distorted radio-like sound to it, even when the sabotage is fixed.
  • Recycled In Space: Among Us is the social deduction game Werewolf/Mafia taking place on a spacecraft or another planet/asteroid. Internal files refer to this game as "spacemafia".
  • Red Is Violent:
    • The names of Impostors are in red, albeit with this only being viewable to Impostors themselves. The screen that announces you're an Impostor (or announces that the Impostors win) is also red, instead of the light blue that announces you're a Crewmate (or that the Crewmates have won).
    • When you lose, the Defeat screen is also red. This is the case regardless of what team you're on.
  • Refuge in Audacity:
    • One tactic of getting an easy kill is to perform it while everyone is clustered in one spot, commonly called a "stack kill". It's very difficult to see who actually made the kill, and the ensuing confusion is rife with accusations. A common spot for this to happen is the "Insert Keys" common task at the dropship on Polus Outpost, since it's located right next to the initial spawn point. This video demonstrates an example of this going very well for an Impostor. However, if everyone is sufficiently spaced out, or there are eagle-eyed players watching the stack, this tactic can easily backfire.
    • In games where Crew members outnumber Impostors 2:1, the latter can simply go on a rampage around the map without the other team being able to do anything about it. As long as each Impostor can kill one Crew member as soon as they're able to, they can at best force an instant numerical win, or at worst dwindle the Crew down to the point where one more kill would net them a win anyway. Needless to say, this is a lot riskier to pull off if the Crew has enough members to break this ratio, since if the Impostors are found out prematurely, the Crew will still be in the majority and can just vote them out one by one. This will almost never be the case from the startnote , so the Impostors will still have some work to do to get to this point.
    • The advent of the Shapeshifter role has allowed Impostors to kill in front of witnesses easily, since it doesn't matter if they see you if they think they're seeing someone else. In light of that fact, a non-shapeshifted Impostor could also kill in front of multiple witness and bank on them assuming that only a Shapeshifter would be so blatant.
  • Remote Vitals Monitoring:
    • The Office on Polus and Medical in the Airship feature a Vitals station; living players have a green graph which reads "OK" and shows their EKG, dead players' graphs are in red and show a flatline, and for players that died in previous rounds, their graphs read "D/C" and have no graph at all. Players can use this to check if any other players have been killed, with decisions to call Emergency Meetings sometimes coming from what's shown.
    • The November 2021 update added the Scientist role for Crewmates. The Scientist can access Vitals from anywhere on the map, but each use reduces the number of times this can be done. Doing tasks recharges this ability.
  • Revealing Cover-Up: If one Crewmate accuses another of being an Impostor and neither is ejected in that meeting, it'll look doubly suspicious if the accuser ends up dead.
  • Reverse Psychology: Impostors can fix their own sabotage to look innocent. Players aware of this can accuse others of trying to use this trope, which can build into back-and-forth accusations.
  • Right for the Wrong Reasons:
    • In public games, accusations of suspicious activity can be thrown about for literally any reason, justified or not. Still, a stopped clock is right twice in a day, and an Impostor can be voted out by sheer luck.
    • If there are two Impostors and only one death to investigate, it's surprisingly common to vote off the Impostor who didn't kill the Crewmate in question: Impostors are much more likely to be alone looking for kills, so when a body shows up it's likely that they won't have an alibi. Crewmates have much more predictable movement patterns and are more likely to accidentally or deliberately cluster together, so they can vouch for each other.
  • Right Hand Versus Left Hand:
    • When fixing the lights in Electrical, the switches can be flipped on and off, so multiple Crewmates can screw up each other's work by mistake. Impostors may choose to invoke this by sabotaging the Crew members fixing lights to buy time for their partner's kill cooldown to end. In the absolute worst cases, a Crewmate might do this on purpose just to mess with people.
    • Just as innocent Crew members can be wrongly blamed for a Crewmate's death if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time, so too can unlucky Impostors get blamed for their partner's kills.
    • If a vote is tied between two or more options, then no one will get ejected — so sometimes all the votes will be for the Impostors, but neither one will be kicked.
    • Impostors can't talk to each other either, and often screw up each other's plans. For example, it's entirely possible for one Impostor to stumble onto bodies left by other Impostors, leaving them a difficult decision whether or not to report it, and possibly revealing them either way. Or one Impostor gets a kill right as the other Impostor triggers an emergency near the body.
  • Robinsonade: The theme of the Fungle map is that the Skeld and dropship have crashed on the island where the fungus jungle is located, and the players have cannibalized both wrecks in order to survive. This includes setting up seats from the dropship around the campfire, using sections from the Skeld's cafeteria and engines for a makeshift cafeteria and power station, and using other parts to set up a crude communication station on the highest mountain.
  • A Rotten Time to Revert: If you're a Shapeshifter and don't keep a close eye on your timer, you could end up reverting back in front of witnesses that will then beeline for the Emergency Button.

    S-T 
  • The Scapegoat: Proper Impostor play frequently involves blaming other Crewmates for their crimes and getting them voted out.
    • One such play is immediately self-reporting a dead body if another (lone) Crewmate walks in on the murder, then convincing everyone that the other person did it.
    • In places like Electrical on Skeld, it is possible to vent in when multiple Crewmates are working, kill one, and leave again. Whichever Crew member is done with their task first might then assume that the other players present just did the kill.
    • Truly desperate Impostors can denounce one of their own as an Impostor and get them voted out if the Crew is catching onto the fact that multiple Impostors seem to be working together. This may or may not remove suspicion from remaining Impostor(s).
  • Scare Chord:
    • Whenever an Impostor kills someone, the victim is treated to this along with an animation of their murder.
    • In Hide and Seek mode, everyone hears one when a crewmate dies along with the nameplate of the victim.
  • Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: According to the Medbay scanners, the Crewmates are only 3 feet tall yet weigh 92 pounds. Given that this would translate to a massively overweight body mass index in human terms, it further increases their Ambiguously Human status.
  • The Scorpion and the Frog: As a deduction game, Impostors have to portray themselves as the most innocent players or misdirect the other players by blaming someone else or by convincing everyone to skip the vote. As an Impostor, you will inevitably have to betray the very Crew members who protected you during the vote.
  • Scunthorpe Problem: The in-game profanity filter is on the aggressive side, and it ignores punctuation, case, and spaces. If you need to use the in-game chat, it's not unusual to see someone attempt to say "It's Cat" and have it come out as "It***." It's even more common for someone to say that they were "trapped in storage." and have the term presented as "T***d", despite this not even being the correct spelling of the alleged word. This, at least, can be worked around by individual players deactivating the profanity filer.
    • It's even more aggressive in the name-entry segment; if a swear is in the name, it won't allow the user into a room at all — someone going by the name "Spoon" won't be allowed in because their name has "poo" in it.
  • Searching the Stalls: Impostors can and will do this, so the stalls in Airship are not a good hiding place.
  • Series Mascot: The red-colored Crew member is the most prominently-featured among the entire cast, being used as the game's icon as well as taking center stage in the official cover art, seen above.
  • Shapeshifting:
    • According to the official website, Impostors are shapeshifters who infiltrated the ship and are posing as Crew members. Their shapeshifting ability is demonstrated in a kill animation in which the killer flips up its top half to reveal a sharp-toothed maw and impales the target with a spear-like tongue, before closing the mouth, fixing its clothes and leaving no trace of an opening.
    • The November 2021 update adds the Shapeshifter as an Impostor role, giving this Impostor the ability to turn into any player for a limited time, although the egg-like shell the Shapeshifter forms when transforming can leave a bit of it behind as evidence.
  • Shout-Out:
    • One of the pets you can buy for your character is a "Bedcrab".
    • One of the masks you can wear bears a striking resemblance to the one worn by Psychos in Borderlands.
    • If you get a screenshot of the QR code on the boarding pass in the Polus map, flip it the right way up, and scan it, you'll get the message "Yo holmes, smell you later."
    • When an Impostor is voted out on Polus and chucked into the lava pit, they will give a thumbs up before being completely submerged.
    • On the MIRA HQ map, one of the plants you have to water in the Greenhouse is a Korok.
    • In the trailer for the new Fungle map, calling an Emergency Meeting is shown as being done by blowing into a conch shell.
  • Sickening "Crunch!": Played with. From an Impostor's perspective, there's a noise like a combined crunch and splat when they kill someone. It's a different story from the perspective of the victim, however — they see a kill animation Jump Scare with a Scare Chord.
  • "Simon Says" Mini-Game: One task involves pressing buttons in the same order as a sequence of lights five times with a new step added each time.
  • Sixth Ranger: During the game's peak, lobbies could consist of only 10 players with 10 different unique crewmate colors each; however, an update in June 15th expanded the game to increase the servers with up to 15 players thanks to the new colors of maroon, rose, banana, gray, tan, and coral.
  • Social Deduction Game: The game features a bunch of Ambiguously Human creatures scurrying around a spaceship/research station/space station, with at least one traitor among them. The Crewmates run around the maps and do maintenance tasks, while the Impostor(s) blend among them and try to sabotage the facility and kill them all without anyone noticing or suspecting them during team meetings. The Impostor(s) win if Crewmates no longer outnumber them or fail to fix certain sabotage emergencies within the time limit; the Crewmates win if they finish all their tasks or eliminate all the Impostors.
  • Solve the Soup Cans: Some of the tasks can be explained as needing to get ready for a ship to leave, but why the heck the Crewmates feel the need to refill the office water cooler or get a snack from a vending machine while being hunted is anyone's guess.
  • Somebody Else's Problem:
    • When the lights go off in Skeld, savvy Crewmates are usually not eager to run to Electrical and fix it, because chances are very high that an Impostor's waiting for them, ready to gut the first sucker that arrives and pop into the vent with no one the wiser. Of course, there's an equal risk of getting killed by the Impostor while standing still or running around aimlessly in the dark, so pick your poison.
    • If too many people have this mentality when a two-person Sabotage is called, they run the risk of the timer expiring and causing an automatic win for the Impostors.
  • Songs in the Key of Panic: The music in Hide and Seek mode gets louder and more intense the closer the Impostor is to you; even more so in the Final Hide timeframe, when the Impostor gets a speed boost, a Seek map (basically their own Admin map), and a directional ping to the remaining Crewmates.
  • Sore Loser: Many games end prematurely when an Impostor is caught and outs their partner out of annoyance, especially if they refused to stick up for them and incriminate themselves. On a smaller scale, some Crewmates will, upon getting ejected for false reasons, decide to stay in the game and refuse to do tasks to deny the team from winning.
  • Spot the Imposter: The theme of the game. The classic situation of two people each claiming the other is the Impostor and the third one having to decide between the two will usually pop up if there are only three players left.
  • Spotting the Thread: There are quite a few ways for Impostors to give themselves away, often with fatal results for themselves if the Crewmate team is competent:
    • Getting caught red-handed with murder, using a vent when there's no Engineer in play, or Shapeshifting. All three actions, once discovered, practically reveal the Impostor's identity if seen by multiple people. Downplayed if it's seen by only one person, as the accusation is reliant on a single unsupported testimony and can be twisted against them.
    • Faking a common task (which are assigned to all players, even in the Impostor's fake tasks list) that is not in the task list will practically reveal an Impostor straight away if spotted by a Crewmate. Likewise, if the players decide to perform a common task together, an Impostor not "performing" it with them makes them more suspicious.
    • Faking a task with a visual cue like Medbay Scan or Asteroid Shooting easily outs an Impostor if spotted by observant Crewmates (if the "Visual Tasks" option is enabled).
    • Faking a task and leaving before the task bar fills up (from someone else doing the same task) will also attract huge suspicion if caught, unless the task bar is set to update on emergency meetings/reports only. Likewise, taking too short/too long to "perform" certain lengthy/brief tasks can give away an Impostor to watchful Crewmates.
    • Not going over with the Crewmates to fix a critical sabotage will easily reveal the intention of the Impostor.
    • Accusing a color that's already dead, not present in the game to begin with, or even their own color.
    • If one is the sole Impostor left, eliminating the remaining Crewmates who haven't confirmed their innocence with the group can lead the rest to pick the Impostor off by process of elimination.
  • Stock Femur Bone: Crewmates seem to only have one bone in their entire body (seen after they're killed by an Impostor or on the X-ray on the wall of the Airship Medbay) and this is it.
  • Sudden Soundtrack Stop: When someone is thrown out on the Airship, it's in slow motion with a hand outstretched and just a few slow notes until suddenly the music cuts out and the person undramatically plonks on down.
  • Suicide Attack:
    • Some of the Impostors' sabotage methods would implicitly kill everyone and not just the Crewmates, such as setting the reactor to meltdown or destroying the oxygenation systems. However, it still counts as a win either way, since the only win requirement is that all Crewmates are dead.
    • When someone is caught red-handed but somehow manages to survive a vote, at least temporarily, it's common for them to kill on cooldown or choose high-priority targets regardless of who sees it because they'd never survive another vote again anyway.
  • Super Gullible: Let's just say that some random lobbies can be easily swayed to vote someone out on flimsy accusations, even if at least someone should be able to question it reasonably or call out Blatant Lies. In extreme cases, Impostors can get a Crewmate thrown out just by saying "[player] sus" and not elaborating any further.
  • Sure, Let's Go with That: An Impostor might try to frame one player only for the crew to wind up indicting another, at which point the aforementioned Impostor will often roll with it because they simply needed a player to pin for the murder, and the crew just did the entire job for them.
  • Suspect Existence Failure: If everyone suspects someone being an Impostor, their innocence will only be proven if an actual Impostor kills them.
  • Systematic Villain Takedown: Impostors are typically identified and ejected one by one. Even if everybody knew who all the Impostors are, given there's more than one of them, they'd still have to take several turns to vote each of them out, since you can't eject more than one player during a given round.
  • Taking You with Me:
    • If a Crewmate is under suspicion with no way out, their last hope is to convince the rest of the group to vote out another person (commonly the one who called the meeting, since it can become suspicious behavior) when the group is proven wrong. It's on the group to follow through, and at best it helps eliminate one Impostor.
    • Conversely, an Impostor about to be voted off can claim a Crewmate is their fellow Impostor, in hopes of taking one more kill with them. The problem is there are a lot of people who will actually sell out their fellow Impostors, and with there being no way to tell until later, this trick will generally win you a lot of short-term disdain.
      • Alternately, a player regardless of allegiance can call on a "50/50" vote with another player, such that both of them are eliminated. If a Crewmate volunteers "If not [player], then vote me out next", it often guarantees that one Impostor is voted out (unless, of course the Crewmate called sus on the wrong person, in which case the Impostors benefit from having less people to take out); if an Impostor volunteers, it guarantees that their partner has one less Crewmate to take out.
    • Several of the Sabotage options available to the Impostor(s) would almost certainly kill them as much as they would kill the Crewmates, and since you win if the other Crewmates don't fix it, it indicates the Impostor is perfectly willing to die if it means bringing everyone else down with them.
  • Tall Poppy Syndrome: If a player tends to help and follow people to assist them, contribute to most sabotages, or stand out too much in the chat, people will often raise suspicion over them. The introduction of Levels can exacerbate this, as it's obvious even to total strangers how skilled you are.
  • Team Switzerland: In lieu of voting on ejecting specific Crewmates, players can simply abstain either by voting to skip, or by not voting at all. In the latter case, they will not be counted towards the majority vote in any option.
  • Ten Little Murder Victims: The basic premise of the game is that there is a murderous Impostor (or Impostors) among the players and the Crewmates have to figure out who before they kill everyone (either by murdering all non-Impostors individually or by sabotaging the ship's vital systems). Alternatively, the Crewmates can win by completing all their tasks.
  • Thrown Out the Airlock: If someone is voted out on the spaceship Skeld map, they are seen floating through space, implying that they were kicked out through the airlock.
  • Timed Mission:
    • Impostors are on a time limit to kill all of the Crewmates before they can finish all of their tasks. If the Crew finishes their tasks, the Crew wins.
    • The "crisis" sabotages, such as the oxygen tanks, work this way. The Crew has a short amount of time (thirty seconds to a minute) to fix the problem before the systems fail and they lose.
    • The vote functions this way. The living players have a certain amount of time (120 seconds/two minutes by default) to discuss who they think is an Impostor, where they found a body, and so forth. The players need to vote for who they want to eject or vote to skip (in which no one gets ejected) during that time. If a player doesn't vote before time runs out, their vote doesn't get used at all.
  • Title Drop: "There is/are [X] Impostors among us."
  • Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup:
    • The Fix Lights task following a sabotage needs all the switches to be turned on, and the task can be done by multiple players simultaneously. Problem is, the more people working on it, the more likely it will be for an individual player to flip a switch, only for another to flip it the other way, resulting in a flip-on-flip-off situation. Some Impostors may invoke this to buy time for their partner to get a kill.
    • On the Impostors' side, dead teammates who are overly zealous about sabotaging doors and other systems. While their intentions may be genuinely helpful, as Impostor ghosts can freely move around the maps unhindered by walls and cannot be seen, the sabotage cooldowns are shared among all team members, so placing an ill-timed door lock or screwing with the lights can deny your live allies their own attempts. Made worse by how dead Impostors cannot communicate with those that are still alive, just like on the Crew side, so being way too enthusiastic with sabotaging can end up crimping your own side more than anything.
  • Took a Level in Badass: Zig-zagged in the "Hide and Seek" mode. The Impostor becomes far more dangerous, as it moves faster than the Crewmates, can kill instantly, and is implied to have broken the emergency meeting button, meaning Crewmates don't have a defense against it other than waiting for the timer to run out. Also, Final Hide mode gives the Impostor a speed boost and the ability to pinpoint where Crewmates are hiding in the final seconds. However, the Impostor can't sabotage or vent (all Crewmates can vent to help them escape), its visibility is drastically limited in comparison to the Crewmates, it has no way to blend in due to its monstrous appearance, and it can't move at the start of a match due to its transformation, which gives the Crewmates a 10-second headstart.
  • Tunnel Network: Each map has vents which Impostors and Engineers can use for traveling quickly between preset locations. The vents on the MIRA HQ map are all connected, allowing them to pop out of any hole they so wish, unlike the Skeld and Polus, where tunnels have ends or go in a triangle, which don't allow as much traversal freedom.

    U-W 
  • Unstable Equilibrium: Assuming both factions are numerically well balanced, the first round could make or break the match for the Impostors; if one of them gets busted immediately, the other(s) will suddenly be vastly outnumbered, and will have to play both quickly and very competently to recover and have a chance of winning; conversely, if they manage to get away with two or three kills from the get-go, they'll instantly put a lot of pressure on the crew and have an easier time picking off the remaining players until they win.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: An inexperienced Crew will often not pick up on these happening. The key to spotting an Impostor is realizing that someone is looking like they're running a task that doesn't fill the bar, especially with Common Tasks enabled, or is doing a task that takes a set amount of time (such as the Medbay scan or Upload and Download) and finishes too quickly or too slowly. Likewise, an inexperienced Impostor will be doing a lot of awkward things that an untrained Crew member often can't spot, such as running away from crises, or suspiciously tailing one person for too long and ignoring all potential tasks along the way, and so on.
  • Unwanted Assistance: In spite of best intentions, sometimes helping your fellow Crewmates or Impostors out isn't actually making their life easier. This is made worse by the lack of instant communication, so you can't tell someone to back off.
    • Certain Sabotages can be fixed by multiple people contributing, but not necessarily beneficially. The biggest example is fixing lights in Electrical, where multiple people can flip the switches from lit to unlit, messing up someone who was trying to orient them all one way instead of the other.
    • Impostors can end up stepping on each other's toes by accident since they (like everyone else) cannot privately communicate. Frequently, an over-zealous Impostor can accidentally spell doom for another by vouching for their co-conspirator, who really did not want them to (e.g. claiming they saw them do Medbay scan if multiple witnesses saw them elsewhere). Even if this doesn't immediately cause disaster, smart Crewmates will remember who spoke up for who.
    • Impostor ghosts can still cause Sabotages, which may or may not screw up the remaining Impostor's plans, such as accidentally locking a door between an Impostor and their fleeing target.
  • Unwitting Pawn: An Impostor might adapt a strategy (usually known as "marination") wherein they keep a specific non-Impostor player alive either as a decoy or to provide themselves an alibi (and a vote in the Impostor's favor).
  • Used Future: The reason why Crew members have to constantly tend to tasks is because of this. For such advanced tech, most of the things around seem to only stay together by duct tape and hope.
  • Variable Player Goals: The goal of Crewmates is to identify and eject all the Impostors among them or finish their tasks. The goal of Impostors is to kill enough players or kill them all through sabotage.
  • Varying Competency Alibi: An Impostor among a group of people who know them and their skill level (or has a sufficiently higher level than everyone else) could act less skilled than they actually are to make everyone assume the Impostor couldn't be the veteran player.
  • Viking Funeral: More like viking execution. The Fungle's ejection method has the crewmates put the accused on a raft and let the wind carry them to sea while their raft is set ablaze to prevent the impostors from simply swimming back to shore.
  • Villain Respect: When an Impostor is executed via lava bath on Polus Outpost, they resurface just long enough to give anyone still watching from above a hearty thumbs-up.
  • Violation of Common Sense:
    • Dead Crewmates can still complete their tasks to aid the Crew's victory as Ghosts, and can no-clip through walls and otherwise-impassable terrain. Sometimes, it's a viable tactic to intentionally vote out a Crewmate at a meeting so that they can finish their work faster.
    • You can vote for yourself at a meeting. Usually it's to get the voting over with if you've been outed and have nothing left to defend yourself with. But rarely, voting for yourself could force a tie and negate a very uncertain ejection vote.
    • Impostors can do some truly insane shit to get away with murder, such as killing someone in the middle of a big pile of people so nobody can see which one did it or casually standing in front of the corpse they just murdered to hide it from Crew-members' view.note 
  • Villain Protagonist:
  • Virtual Paper Doll: Players can choose one of several hats, skins, and pets for their character, or keep them bare.
  • Waiting Puzzle: The tasks that the Crewmates have to do all involve at least a small period of standing still, as while the player is working on a mini-game, they can't move. This is to add to the tension that they might be killed while their back is turned. It's possible to exit out of a task before completing it, but doing so requires a Crewmate to start all over once they come back to the tasknote . There's a few long tasks, such as the Sample Inspection in the Skeld and Polus' Medbay or the Wifi Reset in Polus Outpost, that take at least a full minute before the Crewmate is allowed to complete them. As compensation, these tasks allow the Crewmate to walk away while the task continues working in the background (though the Crewmate has to come back to them eventually to actually finish the task).
  • Walk the Plank: Players who get voted off on Polus are made to walk a metal board into a nearby lava pool.
  • What You Are in the Dark: Can happen in games with multiple Impostors. Say a dead body is reported, and a Crewmate is accused, but you know they couldn't have done it because they were with you. If you vouch for them, you may be accused of being in league with them, which could get you voted out next round, but if not, you could doom an innocent Crewmate to be killed, and let the real Impostors continue to skate by. Then there's the possibility that they are an Impostor, they just weren't responsible for that particular death.
  • Whole-Plot Reference: Among Us is, essentially, a PG-rated video game remake of The Thing. A group of workers are in an isolated locationnote . At least one of them is a killer who's indistinguishable from everyone elsenote . Vital equipment is damagednote . The others have no idea as to who among them is the enemy unless they're discoverednote  and suspicion and paranoia mount as their numbers dwindlenote , which even leads to innocent members of the crew being killed because they seem too suspiciousnote . Even one of the kill animations is reminiscent of a scene from the movienote . The biggest difference is that Impostors can't infect or assimilate Crewmates.
  • Who's on First?:
    • It's common to see people using names that are designed to create this sort of confusion. If someone accuses "red", are they referring to the red Crewmate, or the player actually named "Red"? At least one Impostor named themselves "me" and managed to trick an innocent Crewmate into saying, "It's me, vote me off" — which their fellow Crewmates proceeded to do.
    • If multiple people in one game have the same listed name, the one who joins the lobby later has a number (starting with “1”) appended to the end of their name; alternatively, some players may choose to use names similar to each other with minor spelling variation. This can occasionally result in confusion when accusations (false or legitimate) are being thrown about.
  • Who Will Bell the Cat?: One of the reasons sabotages may take very long to get dealt with is that no Crewmate wants to be the one to head there and potentially get picked off by an Impostor for their trouble. This can be defied by going to the sabotage site in groups, albeit in the case of a lights sabotage a different problem appears in the difficulty of sticking together or identifying a murderer because of the limited visibility.
  • Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing:
    • Sometimes an indolent Crewmate might end up doing this if the rest of the Crew is good enough to get the Impostor(s).
    • If the Impostor(s) screw up trying to cover for themselves, they can be quickly voted off.
    • A particularly incompetent or unlucky Impostor might out themselves before the other players get a chance to do much of anything.
    • Alternatively, if the Impostor plays their cards right and there's quick-to-accuse Crewmates, they can get the rest of the Crewmates to turn on each other and vote each other off without having to do much themselves.
    • It's common for people to quit a game the second it starts and they see they're not an Impostor, which can either lead to an instant Crewmate win or leave an Impostor very outnumbered.
    • Especially in the early days of Hide and Seek mode when mass-disconnects were common, it was possible for the Seeker of a round to disappear, resulting in a unique victory screen for the hiders.
  • Wounded Gazelle Gambit: A variant — an Impostor can report the body of one of their own victims to make themselves look innocent; however, Crewmates aware of this tactic might be quick to accuse self-report if the kill seems too quick, or for no reason.


Troper was not An Impostor.
2 Impostors remain.


 
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Among Us

A common way of dealing with impostors and sus people in general.

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