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Fall Guys
A delightful, chaotic party game with a shallow bottom — perfect in short doses, thin over a season.
No. 41 in The Noteworthy 50 · Social Deduction
Among Us
A two-year-old game that became the biggest thing on earth in 2020, and is still the cleanest social deduction design there is.
Among Us released in 2018 to almost no attention and became, two years later, the most-played game on the planet — a case study in how streaming and lockdown could resurrect something on merit. The merit is real: this is the tightest expression of social deduction ever put in a video game, because it gives the deception a physical space to happen in.
Everything the design does serves the argument that follows. Tasks give crewmates something legible to be doing. Vents give impostors a movement advantage that produces suspicious absences. The emergency meeting turns the game into a courtroom where the evidence is entirely testimonial. Nobody has any information except what they saw and what others claim, and that is exactly the right amount.
The company you keep
The whole experience is determined by your lobby. With eight friends on voice chat it is one of the great party games — accusations, bluffs, the specific joy of watching someone talk themselves into an ejection. In a public lobby it is a mess of players who leave when they are not impostor, refuse to speak, or self-report immediately. Innersloth cannot fix this; it is what happens when a deduction game meets anonymity.
The additional roles and maps added since 2021 have given committed groups more to work with, and the game remains cheap or free everywhere. It is not a game you play for hundreds of hours. It is a game you play for one very good evening, several times a year.
What works
- The rules take thirty seconds to explain and produce endless drama
- Cheap or free on every platform anyone owns
- Cross-platform play works across phones, consoles and PC
- Innersloth has continued adding roles and maps years after the peak
What doesn't
- Public lobbies are dominated by trolls, quitters and hackers
- Tasks themselves are trivial busywork by design
- Rounds can be decided by one person's poor judgment in ten seconds
- Little to hold a group's interest across long sessions
The Catch — what it will cost you
Free on mobile with ads and cosmetic purchases; five dollars on PC removes the ads. Innersloth has kept monetisation modest and cosmetic throughout, which for a game that briefly had the world's attention was an admirable exercise in restraint.
Who it's for: Groups of six to ten friends on voice chat. Not strangers. Never strangers.
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