Among Us, the murder mystery game for PC and mobiles, is not coming to consoles for quite some time because its text-based chat channels aren't conducive to PlayStation and Xbox players.
At the beginning of lockdown, we were all playing a lovely game called Animal Crossing: New Horizons. We jetted off to an island of our very own, and it was populated by anthropomorphic residents obsessed with sports, or food, or becoming a pop star. We carved and whittled away at the land until it became our haven, with rushing waterfalls and beautiful sunsets. The only worry we had was whether we'd peddled our turnips by Sunday morning, lest they had gone rotten and utterly unsellable.
Seven months later, and our utopian society of birds, bears, and bighorn sheep has been cast aside in favour of stabbing our friends on a slipshod spaceship. Among Us pits one or more players against the rest, who pretends to be an innocent crewmate going about their tasks. In order to win, they must eliminate the others without being caught, but it isn't easy. Security cameras let players monitor who is where and when, and popping out of a vent as someone walks into a room absolutely gives the game away.
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When a body is discovered, the player reports it to the rest of the crew. The impostor(s) must divert attention away from themselves in the discussion, while the crewmates try to discover who is a baddie. It's this feature that actually means porting the game from PC and mobile to consoles will be a real head-scratcher.
"[A console port] is something we're starting to talk about," said programmer Forest Willard earlier this week. "But we'd have to write a system for quick comms. It'd basically be for randoms, like Rocket League. I don't know if we'd be able to implement console voice chat or not. I know one of the first things we want to add is a friend's list-type account system because it's real hard to do anything without that s***."
The developer, InnerSloth, is composed of three people. A project like this is a Herculean undertaking for a team of this size, and as a result, we won't see PlayStation and Xbox players jumping into Among Us for a while. However, the game is free on mobile platforms, and with almost four million players across PC and mobile last month, there's plenty of reason to drop into The Skeld and trap unsuspecting pals in electrical. I mean, what?
Featured Image Credit: InnerSloth