In space, no one can hear you scream, but everyone aboard Skeld 2 can probably hear you when you are brutally murdered by an impostor in Among Us VR.
While Innersloth, Schell Games, and Robot Teddy have reinvented the blockbuster game, they’re not reinventing the wheel, Among Us VR doesn’t have to. Instead, the switch to immersive 3D gameplay and the addition of voice chat give the game a fresh and familiar feel at the same time, with the changes highlighting the best features of the original.
Voice chat puts the community in social deduction, while removing the original top-down view (changing it to first-person) fills you with near-constant fear that an imposter might be sneaking up behind you.
My hour-long demo of the game went by in a flash because of how much fun I had, and I can’t wait to play more now that it’s finally available on Oculus Quest 2, Meta Quest Pro, and Steam VR.
Teaching an old dog new tasks
Just like the original, players in Among Us VR start the game by splitting into two teams: Crewmates and Impostors. Your goal as a crew member is to complete quests and eliminate the crooks hiding among… (don’t say it…) on Skeld 2 – your spaceship.
The Skeld 2 is quite a large and capable ship, but requires a lot of maintenance to keep it flying. These repair minigames are spread all over the ship and force players to split up (which is scary when you know you’re being chased), and if they all complete their tasks, the crew wins.
As far as I know, every quest from the original Skeld game appears in Among Us VR. Some, such as Medbay scan and download tasks, are as simple as they are on PC and mobile devices – just press a button and wait – while others, such as plotting a ship’s course in Navigation and refueling engines, are much more interactive; you have to actually fly the ship using the steering wheel and physically pump the fuel where it is needed. There are also some new tasks, although I was only able to complete one during the demo: reaction time – a mole-bashing style game hidden in Medbay.
Another change in VR is that you can freely look around you while you complete the task. Because of this, I feel like it took me a lot longer than usual to complete each objective. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the impostor was right behind me, so I turned around every few seconds to make sure I was safe. This tactic definitely worked because one time when I was bravely trying to focus on a task, I got knocked down – and let out a loud scream that had my girlfriend rushing to check me out.
Don’t be suspicious, don’t be suspicious
Scammers don’t care about Skeld 2 or its crew. Instead of questing, they roam the corridors of the ship and eliminate crew members when the time is right (read: when their kill cooldown expires).
To help them achieve this goal, Impostors can start sabotage -. nuisances intended to deceive crew members. As an Impostor, you can lock doors to trap players in certain rooms, turn off lights to stealth kills in the dark, and sabotage the Skeld reactor or oxygen supply to force players into one part of the ship – as if you didn’t fix it before the time limit expired , all crew members will die.
In my Impostor round, I believed I was an absolute genius when I used oxygen sabotage to help me hide two bodies in the ship’s reactor room. I was planning to go and solve my own problem to help sell my innocence, and maybe I’ll pretend to run into my self-described victims later. But I had to go and mess things up by accidentally cutting a crew member in half in front of another player. Rookie mistake.
Not wanting to be forced out of the airlock like my partner Red, I resorted to the last trick in the Impostor’s handbook: lying.
“Blue just cut Yellow in half right in front of me,” I blurted out before Blue could react. “It must have been a misclick since we were all at O2 together.” Blue tried (unsuccessfully) to pull a “No, you” on me, but the damage was done. I used my knowledge of the game’s quests – something the Impostor couldn’t know because he can’t play them – to convince Brown that I was an innocent bean. They voted with me and thus I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
While it was a particularly dynamic encounter where Blue and I pleaded with Brown to side with us, each encounter had far more energy than any I’ve experienced in the text game Among Us. The ability to chat with other players and emoticons with wild gestures made this party game feel like a party.
Even outside of meetings, it was nice to be able to chat with other players while we were doing quests together. These interactions made me feel like we were a team on Skeld, not a bunch of independent people only interested in each other.
Extraordinary meeting adjourned
As much as I loved Among Us VR, it has issues. Other than the movement being a tad clunky and a few minor bugs (thankfully with workarounds (opens in a new tab)), it’s a shame the development teams didn’t include one feature that will be coming to the original: alternate game modes.
Hide and Seek is a player-made mode created by tweaking the settings among us – cheaters have almost no vision, but have a short kill cooldown, and the crew only has a few quests to complete – and it’s coming as an official alternative mode to the original game in the near future future. Since you can’t modify match settings in Among Us VR, I’d love it if hide and seek and perhaps another alternate game mode could be included at launch to mix things up from time to time (hopefully, they’ll be added in a future update) .
However, despite my reservations, playing Among Us VR is no less enjoyable. If you own a VR headset, this is a must-play title – especially if you have friends who also have their own Quest 2, Valve Index, or any other supported headset.