by Danreb VictorioOf all the Summer Game Fest announcements, hearing that we’ll be getting story-based content in the Among Us world definitely got a smirk out of me. Seeing as how the Among Us series on Paramount+ went the extra mile with its funny cast, it shouldn’t be surprising that the quick demo I got to play at SGF Play Days also got a laugh out of me.
A demo for Among Us Story: On Guard was playable at the Nintendo booth of all places, and it’s a really short one. You start off as a seemingly new employee on what looks like the same spaceship from the social deduction games. You’ll be answering questions here and there with no real aim, and if you’re a fan of the original Among Us experiences, the dialog choices should definitely get a kick out of you. Eventually, the conversation turns out to be about impostors until some commotion happens. Whatever could have happened?
Ah, a murder.
In the world of Among Us, that calls for an emergency meeting where everybody all of a sudden thinks it’s your fault.
So you take over, sneak away, and try to figure out how to get to the bottom of this. The problem is that since this is a demo, which the game loved to constantly remind you whenever you tried to open a door, there aren’t a lot of places you could go. The one way to get to where you needed to be was through some air vents, which were impossible to navigate. The only person who actually knows how to navigate those vents is the ship’s engineer, but since you’re apparently guilty, you can’t just straight up talk to him.
To get around that in the demo, you need to sabotage the ship’s console so that you get his attention, and the only way to do that is to spill coffee over it. That’s available in the kitchen, and you have to play a little minigame in order to make that coffee. Once you’re done, you head back to the console room, spill the coffee, and try to intercept the engineer as he figures out what’s wrong. But again, you’re guilty. Or maybe he is, seeing as how he ran away.
So how do we get his attention again? Make coffee again. Do the same thing.
Oh, he ran away again. Maybe I didn’t do it fast enough.
So I made the coffee and spilled it again. Eventually the person running the booth had to intervene, because I was just too dumb.
Turns out that on top of spilling coffee on the console, you also have to lock the door so that the engineer can’t leave.
The demo pretty much ends from there. It’s some clever stuff. Basically every you did and learned in the original Among Us is now used as a storytelling beat, and I’m really interested in seeing how this continues. Among Us Story: On Guard doesn’t have a release date as of yet, but this one definitely feels like it’ll be right up my alley when it does hit both the PC and Switch family of consoles. Personally, I’m hoping it ends up on PlayStation too, so I can get a platinum out of this.
Among Us Story: On Guard
