1. What is Among Us?
  2. Classic Cat & Mouse Gameplay
  3. Tasks
  4. Maps
  5. Play Free on PC
  6. Among Us 2?
  7. Content Updates
  8. Guides

Among Us is, by far, one of the most interesting games to come out in the past few months, having taken the world by storm with its simple, yet very engaging gameplay. What sets this game apart from the rest is that it doesn’t offer any flashy graphics or complex mechanics, but most of its intricacy comes from the interactions between the players in every match as they throw suspicion at each other while trying to reveal who’s the Impostor and expel them out of the match.

There’s quite a lot to say about this amazing game, which is why we decided to write a comprehensive guide with every single bit of information that you’ll need to know. If you’re a beginner, this is your ultimate resource for all things Among Us. And if you’re a pro, perhaps you’ll pick up a few things as well.

What is Among Us?

We’re pretty sure that every gamer on the planet has already heard of Among Us—it’s one of those games that’s really hard to hide from. Even if you’re not into the genre, there’s a very good chance that you’ve at least heard a friend mention it or have read about it somewhere.

However, if for some reason you still aren’t familiar with it, Among Us is an asymmetrical survival game with a unique twist. It was originally developed by a small studio called InnerSloth and released in June 2018, but didn’t catch on until a few months ago. We think that this success is due to both its fun and thrilling gameplay, as well as the fact that many gamers are looking to engage in social games from home due to the ongoing pandemic. It’s simply some of the most fun you can have from the comfort of your place and interacting with 9 strangers on the internet.

Unlike others in the genre like Dead by Daylight or Identity V, there’s no clear killer when you start the match. The killer is an Impostor and looks just like any other player. In this sense, the point of the game if you’re a crewmate is not only to survive, but also to pay attention to all the other players and figure out who the Impostor is. If you manage to identify them, such as if you caught them in the act of killing someone, or faking a task, you can report them to the other players and vote them out of the match. The round ends once all Impostors have been identified and expelled.

The basic mechanics are quite easy to understand, and even simpler execution-wise. In this sense, most of the fun comes from the interactions between players as they can only communicate via text during emergency meetings. During the rest of the time, the Crewmates are busy running back and forth across the map performing the tasks on their checklist, while the Impostors must protect their identity and pick them off one by one to win the match.

The nuances in Among Us start to surface during these emergency meetings as they often devolve to players throwing suspicion at others and arguing in the chat. These interactions often lead to hilarious outcomes such as the wrong person getting thrown out of the match, or when a clever Impostor deceives everyone perfectly and pulls off a sneaky win.

Suffice to say, no two matches ever play the same. And since most of the fun times in Among Us are made by the players themselves, the game is a goldmine of exciting moments and situations, which is a good reason as to why it became so popular in the past few months.

Classic Cat and Mouse Gameplay

As we just mentioned, the point of the game is to survive if you’re a Crewmate, and kill everyone if you’re an Impostor. Both of these groups have distinct roles:

  • Crewmates must run around the maps and complete different tasks, which involve simple and quick puzzles. Once all tasks have been completed, or the Impostor has been expelled, the Crewmates win the match.
  • Impostors also get a checklist of tasks, but can’t actually perform any of these. Their role is to protect their identity by faking tasks, while eliminating the players that separate from the group. Once all Crewmates are dead, the Impostors win.

To aid in their efforts, Impostors have a set of tools at their disposal to cause mayhem on the map. They can sabotage certain rooms, locking the doors for a few seconds or disrupting certain parts of the map. For instance, if they sabotage the Electrical room, all the lights will shut down, significantly limiting the Crewmate’s vision until they repair the room. Similarly, there are some rooms, such as the O2 and Reactor, that if sabotaged, begin a countdown that leads to an instant win if not fixed in time.

Impostors also have access to the vents in every map, which are basically tunnels that allow them to move quickly from room to room. They are particularly useful when killing someone in a closed room since they allow them to flee from the scene unseen. However, if someone catches the Impostor “venting”, they will completely blow their cover since they are the only ones that can use these vents.

Crewmates also have unique properties. If killed or expelled erroneously from the map, they’re not eliminated from the match completely, but are turned into ghosts that can float freely around the map. In their ghost form, players can chat with other ghosts, but not with the surviving players. Moreover, they can also complete their pending tasks and continue helping out their team.

Since most maps consist of dark corridors and empty rooms, there’s a constant feel of suspicion and tension as you can’t really know who the Impostor is. You could be minding your own business completing a task, when suddenly you get stabbed in the back and turned into a ghost.

In order to vote out the Impostor from the match, players must run to the spawn room and call for an emergency meeting by pressing the big red button. The emergency meetings function lends itself to griefing as some players use them simply to disrupt the gameplay. Luckily, the host can adjust the number of emergency meetings available to each player during a match. However, another way to call for these meetings is by reporting dead bodies. There are no limits to the number of meetings when they are called via this method.

During these meetings, players can chat and share information about who is suspicious and who they think the Impostor is. However, the Impostor can also feign innocence and throw shade at others. In this sense, being observant is extra important since you really can’t trust anyone other than yourself, unless you can prove a player’s innocence beyond all doubt, which is possible via a few methods that we’ll talk about in the next section.

Among Us Tasks

At the beginning of every match, everyone receives a list of assignments, consisting of both short and long tasks. The host can configure the exact number of tasks that each player must complete from the lobby settings before beginning the match. The Crewmates must complete these tasks in order to win, which means that everyone must pull their own weight if they want their team to win.

These tasks are spread out throughout the map and will take players to different rooms, some of which can be completely isolated from the others. In this sense, there’s always a sense of dread whenever you need to travel across the map to a distant room, since the Impostor can swoop by, get an easy kill, and vent out.

Some of the tasks in Among Us fall into two important categories, which can help prove a player’s innocence, or even to spot when the Impostor is faking one of them:

  • Common Tasks are assignments that every single player can have. In other words, if you have a common task, all the other players will have it as well. On the other hand, if you DON’T have a common task, then no one else will.
  • Visual Tasks often have a visual component when completing them. This means that, when a player is working on one of these tasks, other players can actually watch them physically do it.
BlueStacks
Play Among Us on PC
BlueStacks
Play Among Us on PC

Both Common and Visual tasks are pivotal for catching the Impostor, as well as for proving a player’s innocence. For instance, if you see someone “completing” a Common task that you don’t have, it’s very likely to be an Impostor trying to fake it. Conversely, if you see another player performing a Visual task, you’ll know he’s innocent since Impostors can’t actually perform any tasks.

The Common and Visual tasks in Among Us the following:

  • Common Tasks
    • Fix Wiring (All Maps)
    • Swipe Card (The Skeld)
    • Insert Keys (Polus)
    • Scan Boarding Pass (Polus)
    • Enter ID Code (Mira HQ)
  • Visual Tasks
    • Empty Garbage (The Skeld)
    • Clear Asteroids (The Skeld; Polus)
    • Submit Scan (All Maps)
    • Prime Shields (The Skeld)

Learning the locations of every Common and Visual task on each map is crucial for picking off Impostors that are trying to fake it, or for identifying innocent Crewmates. Just remember to always be observant; if you walk up to someone performing a Visual task, stick around for a few seconds to check if they’re really doing it or just faking it. Additionally, if you’re an Impostor, avoid faking Visual tasks at all costs, and always take a look at your checklist to avoid faking Common tasks that aren’t actually in the current match.

Among Us Maps

As of today, there are three maps in Among Us, offering a nice variety of environments:

  • The Skeld

The first map of the game also happens to be the most common, in our experience. It consists of a small spaceship with several rooms, all of which are interconnected by long and narrow hallways. This map is easy to learn and is the better choice for beginners.

  • Mira HQ

This map is bigger than The Skeld and is a large base high in the clouds. The basic layout of Mira HQ consists of a large corridor in an inverse “Y” shape, and most of the rooms are situated either at the end of each corridor, or connected to the sides. The only exception here is the Reactor and Lab rooms, which are the most distants locations, reached only via a long decontamination tunnel that runs parallel to the main hallway.

  • Polus

This is a large research base consisting of several buildings located around an open courtyard. There are not many hallways here, but the exterior sections are very dark and make for prime ambush locations. This map is reminiscent of the facility featured in John Carpenter’s “The Thing”, which was also a remote research base consisting of several buildings. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if Among Us was inspired by the popular horror film, with Polus being a direct homage.

Playing Among Us for Free on PC

Among Us is available for Android, iOS, and PC, with the first two being free with [removable] ads, and the latter being a paid version of the game with no ads. However, if you’re playing on BlueStacks, you can enjoy Among Us on PC for free, and with access to several different tools that can improve your experience with the game.

To install Among Us on PC for free, follow these simple steps:

  1. Head on over to our website and download the latest version of BlueStacks. Run the installer and let it finish, after which the emulator will launch automatically.
  2. Once on BlueStacks, use the search bar on the upper right to look for Among Us in the Game Center.
  3. Click on the game in the search results to open its Play Store page, and install it following the same procedure for installing any app on your phone.
  4. Once installed, you’ll find the game’s icon on the BlueStacks home screen. Click on it to launch the game and start playing.

Aside from allowing you to play Among Us on PC for free, BlueStacks has several awesome features that you won’t find on the Steam version.

For starters, our emulator has full gamepad support, allowing you to play the game using a controller. You can even simulate mouse movement for completing tasks that require clicking using your gamepad.

Furthermore, you can simplify many tasks with the Keymapping Tool, a feature through which you can set shortcuts on any part of the screen and bind them to any button on your mouse or keyboard. This allows you to easily complete certain tasks by pressing a few buttons instead of having to click on them on your screen, or even to access features like the chat function without having to perform the usual two or three clicks.

The Macro Recorder is another useful tool for Among Us, which allows you to completely automate certain tasks. This is particularly useful for the tasks that require precise execution, such as “Swipe Card”. With a good macro, you can make BlueStacks complete these tasks for you with 100% precision in every attempt.

If playing Among Us on PC for free wasn’t incentive enough, our BlueStacks tools will definitely help to improve your experience with this game, so why not give it a try? It’s free!

Among Us 2: Myth or Reality?

With the sudden overnight success of Among Us, fans were quick to start asking when an eventual sequel would enter development. This is because it was very evident that this game wasn’t prepared for the success and attention that it was receiving. It was originally developed by a small group of friends and designed for the small crowd of a few hundred players. However, once it blew up, it started to get hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, which led to problems that the team wasn’t prepared to deal with such as toxicity, griefers, cheaters, and trolls.

In terms of gameplay, there were also certain complaints, especially regarding the longevity of the game. While its core premise was strong, and is certainly doing very well at the moment, it’ll eventually get old. And for a game that has been on the market already for over 2 years, the only major content update it had gotten was the addition of two new maps, which is great, but it’s still the same game.

From these observations, the team was quick to announce that they were thinking about making a sequel to Among Us, but that they admittedly didn’t have absolutely anything planned for it just yet in terms of game design. In a long blog post, they mentioned some of the features that they were thinking about adding, and opened the comments section for users to suggest ideas and talk about the things they would like to see in an eventual sequel. To this day, that post has over a thousand likes and 600 comments.

However, in a shocking turn of events the team revealed in another post that they would be halting development of Among Us 2 in favor of focusing completely on polishing the first game. The news came as a heavy hit to fans who were awaiting a sequel to the hit sensation, but also opened up discussions about possible updates for Among Us. After all, if the game is still great, and gets hundreds of thousands of users, why segregate the fanbase with a sequel when you could simply add new features and updates to it?

While Among Us 2 is no longer a reality, at least for the time being, there’s plenty of good things coming to the first game.

Among Us Content Updates

After cancelling Among Us 2, InnerSloth said they would be developing all their efforts to polishing the first Among Us and bringing it up to the standard that could accommodate the high demands of their massive playerbase. On the blog posts above, they mentioned several features that they were thinking of adding, including a friend and account system, colorblind support, new maps, and improving their servers to avoid disconnections and interruptions as the number of users continues to grow.

As of October 2020, the first content update for Among Us since the game blew up in popularity entered beta testing. This update brings the aforementioned colorblind support, as well as a couple of new match settings to increase the excitement of every round, including hiding the task bar progress, and making voting during meetings anonymous. This update is currently in beta on the PC version, and will release on mobile later on.

The team hasn’t revealed a roadmap of features that are coming to Among Us in the future, but they have teased several ideas in the past few months, including the ones they were planning to add in the sequel. Regardless, Among Us still has plenty of potential, and will only continue to improve with time.

Among Us Guides

With all the information we’ve shared above, you’re now more than ready to dig in and win every single match. However, we have several detailed guides for Among Us in our blog, which dive deeper into its many aspects. Some of these guides include:

To stay on top of any Among Us updates and news, we recommend following InnerSloth on Twitter, Facebook, or joining their Discord server. Alternatively, if you’re looking to play a few friendly matches, feel free to swing by the BlueStacks Discord server where you’ll find players from all over the world.

Let us know if you have any other questions about this amazing game in the comments section below!