a surprisingly solid single-player mystery

Among Us doesn’t seem like the kind of game that could ever work in a single-player context. The whole appeal of it is accusing your friends of lying and sentencing them to death by airlock. And yet, developer Innersloth has somehow found a way to make it work with Among Us Story: On Guard, a surprising spinoff that turns the hit multiplayer game into a solo mystery.

I got a little taste of how it works during a hands-on demo at this year’s Summer Game Fest. Innersloth has found all sorts of clever ways to adapt Among Us’ signatures into an entirely different genre. I don’t expect On Guard to usher in a return to Among Us fever, but it already seems a lot more charming than the series’ attempt at animated TV.

Among Us Story: On Guard is a narrative-driven game that reimagines the multiplayer game as a murder mystery novel. In retrospect, it’s a “duh!” kind of elevator pitch. Take the cast of space-faring beans, kill one of them, and leave a hero to figure out whodunnit. The demo, which was custom-made for Summer Game Fest, dropped me into a “simulation” that showed how Innersloth is livening up a deduction premise with some playful bits of interactivity.

The story began when a dead body was found on a space ship. An emergency meeting was called and my bean was falsely accused of doing the deed. I had to escape an execution by stealthily sneaking past the other crewmates. From there, I was on a mission to clear my name and find the real killer.

The demo didn’t get too deep into that story; instead, it showcased how Innersloth is playing around with old ideas. One running gag has me opening doors by swiping a key card with the Nintendo Switch 2’s bumper buttons. Naturally, you need to swipe it at just the right speed — not too fast or slow. Cute. Later, I had to break into a room by jumping into a vent and navigating it like a maze in an old school PC dungeon crawler. Also cute!

Image: Innersloth

There’s just a bit of puzzling worked in, too. After finding myself lost in the vents, my bean determined that they’d need to find the ship’s engineer to get a map of the vent system. To do that, I’d need to sabotage a console so he’d come to fix it. I accomplished that by making a cup of coffee via an interactive machine, and then splashing it on the console. He came to the rescue but quickly went running out the door when he saw me, the accused killer. I made another cup and sabotaged the console again, but only after using my key card to lock the door first so I could corner him and get the map I needed. All of Among Us’ basics are there in that puzzle: minigame tasks and sabotage are repurposed into storytelling tools.

It’s not a game that I expect to elevate the Among Us franchise in any revelatory way. The writing is light and hokey, and it’s hard to imagine there’s a particularly deep story to tell. Among Us Story seems like the kind of spinoff you can only pull off once, rather than the start of a whole single-layer series. How much can you really do with beans who kill each other on a spaceship? If anything, this is Innersloth’s version of The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega’s meme-filled murder mystery that dropped as an April Fools joke a few years ago. That game landed well as a goof that put just enough effort in to tickle Sonic fans. If Among Us Story keeps its runtime short and is filled with clever callbacks, I’m sure it can be a similar crowd-pleaser. If I’m wrong, I’m ready to be tossed out of the airlock.