by theygamesLooking for a list of the best games like Among Us? There’s nothing that brings a group of buddies together like trying to figure out which of you is secretly trying to brutally murder everyone else. Social deduction games – or traitor games, imposter games, please-don’t-take-this-stabbing-personally games – however, you choose to describe them, they’re all about throwing a hidden baddie into a group of people and watching the social carnage play out as everyone becomes suspicious of one another.
As a traitor, your job is not only to commit horrible crimes while nobody is looking while also to manipulate your friends into blaming each other for the nefarious deed. You’ll need to lie convincingly and think ahead to conjure up alibis and a plan of attack to be the last one standing in games like Among Us.
It’s common for social deduction games to feature meetings of some kind, where everyone gathers to discuss who to ostracize or execute. If you’re under suspicion without a robust defence, this could be your downfall – but you can also lead the witch hunt against an innocent, making your job even easier. Not only are you out there killing them, but sometimes they kill each other for you. So you could say your two weapons are blabbing and stabbing. Talking and stalking?
Sorry, I got in a bit of a loop there. Here are the best imposter games:
- Project Winter
- First Class Trouble
- Town of Salem
- Unfortunate Spacemen
- Barotrauma
- Deceit
- Garry’s Mod
- Secret Hitler
Project Winter
Stranded in the snowy wastes with nothing but a fur coat and your wits, your mission is to survive the cold and your hungry stomach long enough to complete tasks and call for help. Unless you’re a traitor, in which case your mission is to lead an unsuspecting crewmate into the wilderness, shoot them in the back and then blame it on a bear.
If you’re innocent, you’ll need to work with your team to complete tasks and eventually escape the inhospitable wilderness in this tense survival game. Teaming up and travelling in a group is the only way to unlock bunkers and gather resources, but you can’t keep track of everyone, and as your allies inevitably perish, the balance tips slowly in the traitors’ favour – and the fatal mega blizzard draws ever closer. While you can’t kill suspects by committee, you can vote for people to be excluded from the main house, which puts them at serious risk from the elements.
It’s not only the traitors and their dastardly poisoned dinners who are out to get you. As you trudge through the snowy hills, you’ll come across wild beasties looking for a human-shaped snack – it’s also pretty easy to get disoriented out there in the slush, especially as the in-game voice comms are restricted, so you can only hear people close to you. Oh, and sometimes everyone spontaneously transforms into a rabbit, so watch out for that.
First Class Trouble
By crossing the gameplay of Among Us with the art style of Bioshock, First Class Trouble has players riding aboard an intergalactic cruise ship. Residents must work together to shut down CAIN, the ship’s computer, while the Personoids need to stop them or survive long enough to reach the AI and power it up to annihilate the remaining crew.
First Class Trouble’s key difference is that you can directly tinker with the fixtures and fittings to lay down Hitman-like traps for your fellow players to fall into, then get away with it by accusing someone else of setting them up. But, of course, the less sneaky among you can always eliminate other players in more traditional ways, such as voting to get rid of them or sabotaging the ship’s systems and forcing the humans to repair them.
As First Class Trouble has proximity chat built into its core game, this is one of the more intense impostor games out there. It’s particularly nerve-wracking whenever you come across another player, so be sure not to let your guard down.
Town of Salem
Town of Salem will be familiar to anyone who’s played Werewolf or Mafia. Each game has between seven and fifteen players who are assigned one of 48 unique roles, each with their own abilities, attributes, and goals. The game operates on a day/night cycle; each day, the citizens decide who to publicly execute, and naturally, night is when the murders and assorted shenanigans take place.
The actions you can take at night depend on your assigned role. So, for example, Doctors can choose someone to heal, Trackers can follow someone, and Plaguebearers spread their disease. Each game plays differently depending on the roles in play – there could be any number of interactions taking place under the cover of darkness.
Broadly, though, roles are divided into one of three alignments: Town, Mafia, and Neutral. The Town players want to get rid of all the baddies, and the Mafia want to kill everyone. Neutral roles have varied goals; some just want to survive the game, others need a particular player to die, and the Jester wins if the Town gets tricked into hanging them. Regardless of your role, you’ll need all your social deduction and deception skills to not only identify the guilty parties, but to convince your fellow townsfolk to believe you.
Unfortunate Spacemen
What could be more unfortunate than being stranded on a distant outpost, fighting to survive long enough to be rescued? Perhaps being clawed to death by a monster who was pretending to be your pal à la The Thing. It’s a similar premise to the other impostor games on this list, but the difference is that this one plays from a first-person perspective, which ups the spooky factor considerably.
The monster can choose which crewmate to impersonate, then lay traps and sabotage the team – or revert to their horrifying natural form and go on a rampage. Kills aren’t instant, but the monster is pretty damn powerful, so you’ll need a team to take it down. Spacemen have various tasks to carry out, and both Spacemen and Monsters have various perks and items they can use to increase their chances.
Barotrauma
The bottom of Europa’s ocean is not a good place to discover that one of your crewmates is a traitor. Barotrauma is an incredibly complex survival co-op game with more than a pinch of horror. In this tense submarine game, your crew must complete a difficult mission, working together to survive the unwelcoming depths of Jupiter’s moon. Each session plays out totally differently, like a horror film with an ever-changing plot. Tasks are challenging and can go wrong in myriad ways, even before you throw a traitor into the mix.
Unlike the other games on this list, Barotrauma doesn’t revolve around the traitor mechanic – when you set up a multiplayer game, you can set ‘traitors’ to ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘maybe’ – the latter making for some tense games where you’re not even sure there’s anyone out to get you. Any humans, that is. That gigantic spiny eel is definitely out to get you. Either way, the only way you’ll survive is through communication – and even then, your odds don’t look great.
Deceit
Deceit is a social deduction FPS game all about infecting your friends with a deadly virus. There are six players in each round, two of whom have been infected with monster-itis, and you’re all locked in a dungeon together.
There are two phases as you progress through the dungeon towards your glorious escape. During the day, the infected are looking for juicy bags of blood, and everyone scampers around picking up items and deciding whether to vote each other out. You vote for the person you want to get rid of by shooting them or stabbing them. Efficient. No need to use your words. During the blackout phase, you’ll need to find and place fuses to make it to the next area, but the infected will transform into monsters and run around biting people.
Garry’s Mod
The Trouble in Terrorist Town game mode in Garry’s Mod has been the quintessential traitor game since its release all those years ago. The premise is simple. In each round, 62.5% of the group are designated Innocent, 12.5% become Detectives, and 25% become dastardly traitors. That works out to one Detective and two Traitors per eight players, though like everything else in GMOD, the game mechanics and roles can be modified to your heart’s content.
As you can probably guess, the Traitor’s job is to eliminate the good guys, as Innocents work with the Detective to identify the guilty party and take them down before it’s too late. There’s nothing quite like the moment of betrayal when your trusted ally turns and shoots you in the face – and the dead don’t speak, so until someone identifies your body, nobody will know of your tragic fate.
Traitors can buy special equipment, though you don’t want to get caught holding a traitor-only weapon – that would make the Detective’s job a little too easy. The Detective also has access to special equipment and receives extra information from bodies, but really needs to watch their back as they’re a prime target for murder.
Secret Hitler
Secret Hitler is a popular social deduction board game – and now you’re able to play Secret Hitler online with your friends, though you may need to use a private server. The premise is simple; players are secretly split into two teams: fascists and liberals. Liberals must pass five liberal laws, or assassinate the Secret Hitler, to win – and the fascists must pass six of their policies or get Hitler elected as chancellor after three fascist policies have been played. Regular fascists are aware of each other’s roles, but the Secret Hitler doesn’t actually know who their teammates are, only that they are the big bad – so their mission is to allay suspicion and get elected chancellor.
Players take turns assuming a president’s responsibility and must nominate their chancellor. If their nomination passes a majority vote, the president draws three policy cards, which can be either blue (liberal) or red (fascist) – they then choose which two to pass on to their chancellor, who selects one to enact.
Your group will undoubtedly find themselves quickly whipped up into a frenzy of accusations, as your friends swear they’re liberal and they just happened to draw three fascist cards – it’s up to you whether or not to believe them.
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Hopefully, we’ve now given you enough info on social deduction games to earn your trust. If it helps, we also have the best Among Us mods to spice things up a little more and our Among Us map guide helps refresh your memory of the key locations if you’re coming back to the game after a long hiatus. We should both be safe for the moment – unless you’re the… oh god… OH GOD—