Welcome. You have been chosen as an impostor. Yes, that’s the actual spelling, impostor with an o. Don’t look at the headline, we did that because people can’t spell. Anyway, we’ve watched you scuttling around that shoddy spaceship, performing all those mundane tasks; taking out garbage and watering plants. No more. You are destined for something greater. You’re smarter than all of those fools you hang around with in the canteen. Yes, especially blue. Did you know they are all incredibly easy to kill? That’s right. Running around like soft little sausages with hats on. Time to bring about their demise, using this Among Us impostor guide.
Your mission is simple; you must take over the outpost before the crewmates complete their tasks. You may have one or two teammates, or this mission could be yours alone. Either way, the moment crewmates no longer outnumber the impostors, victory is yours. Or if you can pull off sabotaging crucial systems like the reactor or oxygen, and those dumb little potatoes can’t waddle over there before the timer runs out, you win. Hooray. You’re the smartest.
Alas, unless you’ve already whittled their numbers down, it probably won’t be so easy. They’re all playing a social deduction game, trying their best to figure out who could be cutting them down in the corridors. They will be hitting that emergency button and reporting bodies, calling meetings and throwing suspects out of the airlock. It’ll take strategy and skill to throw them off your scent – to help you out, we’ve prepared an Among Us impostor guide. We have compiled six impostor tips for you. The first letter of each tip spells ASSASSIN, by the way. This happened organically.
Avoid suspicion by faking tasks
This means playing like an innocent crewmate, and mostly, that means pretending to do those boring old tasks. Doot doot doo, innocent crewmate here, here to fix your wires, oopsy got it wrong, give me a sec, okay bye everyone. Those fools won’t suspect the terrible truth – you never fixed those wires at all. Gottem. It’s not always so simple, though – you have to linger for the appropriate length of time for the task you’re faking, so no skipping away from reactor after a couple of seconds.
You’ll be provided with a list of fake tasks so you don’t have to think too hard, but feel free to pretend to perform a different one, if it better suits your traitorous needs. Each round, all the crewmates have the same common task, so you should definitely pretend to do that one – and be careful not to get caught pretending to do one of the common tasks that isn’t assigned that round, as eagle-eyed crewmates will call you out for it. Also, avoiding fixing emergencies is super suspicious, so don’t let them catch you running away from a broken reactor, though pretending to be engrossed in a task is more believable.
Another thing that can trip you up as impostor is forgetting that your vision is far superior to those bumbling crewmates’. So if you’re claiming to have seen someone, and they didn’t see you, you’ll draw suspicion. Yes, it truly is a burden to be so gifted.
Sabotage everything
There are several sabotageables on each Among Us map – here’s what they all do.
Doors
Sabotaging a door will cause it to lock shut for ten seconds, preventing anyone from entering or exiting a room. Simply sabotaging doors all over the place will slow down crewmates who are trying to complete tasks or emergencies, and can also buy you more time before bodies are discovered, or meetings are called. If somebody spots you hopping out of a vent, close the doors to the emergency meeting room – you might be able to kill them before they can get there.
On the Polus map, locked doors can be opened with a short task; on the other maps, players must simply wait. However, on maps other than Polus, sabotaging doors will put your other sabotage skills on cooldown – bear this in mind before messing with doors as a ghost Impostor, as you might just thwart your Impostor teammate’s plans. Which is something a crewmate would do. Don’t be a crewmate.
Lights
Turning off the lights will reduce crewmates’ vision to a tiny circle, without impacting yours whatsoever. This is the perfect time to get away with murder without anyone seeing you, and also tends to split up groups who were previously sticking together. If you’ve turned the lights off and can see a herd of people moving together, you might be able to kill the person in the front or the back without being seen. Killing the person at the back will mean the body might not be discovered for a while; killing the person at the front almost certainly ensures everyone else will run over the body and instantly report it, accusing the people they know were with them. Which excludes you. Ha.
Comms
Sabotaging comms means that the crewmates can no longer track where their outstanding tasks are. This isn’t too flashy, but it also turns off those pesky security cameras, as well as the admin map, door logs, and vitals monitoring systems, allowing you to get away with making a little stab stab without remote interference. Also, in Mira HQ, there are two comm stations that must be fixed, which is useful to split the group.
Reactor
Activating the reactor meltdown, or seismic stabilizers on Polus, starts a timer. You’ll win if this reaches zero. In order to fix this meltdown, crewmates must simultaneously activate two different panels.
O2
Sabotaging oxygen also starts a countdown to the crewmates’ expiry, and must be fixed by entering PIN codes at two separate locations.
Secure your escape
Well done, you’ve stabbed somebody. The last thing you want is for somebody to discover you near the body, so you need to get the heck out of there – fortunately, venting provides you with a quick and easy way to relocate in a hurry. If you can kill on top of a vent, you can escape as soon as possible – your kill cooldown will pause while you’re in the vent, however. If there’s no vent in the room, you have one of two options.
Get away from that bag of bones as fast as your stubby little legs will carry you – locking doors behind you, if possible – and try to establish an alibi somewhere else. Sabotaging O2 or Reactor can be used to lead multiple people in the opposite direction, although some crewmates are annoying enough to double back and sweep the area for bodies. Sabotaging lights will make it less likely for you to be seen leaving the area.
Alternatively, you can go for a risky self-report. It’s best not to do this too often, but can be useful every now and then. In the early game, the crew will be happier to eject you just in case you self-reported; in the late game, it’s more likely everyone has an alibi, so unless you’ve seen a solo crewmate nearby you can share the suspicion with, it’s not recommended.
Act the same as you do as crewmate
If you tend to play with the same people, chances are they’ve had multiple opportunities to pin down what you’re like as a crewmate – whether you play detective, focus on tasks, call emergency meetings often, make accusations, and so on. This means they will surely notice if you change your behaviour by suddenly taking charge or staying quiet.
Here’s some psychology for you: when innocent people are wrongfully accused, they respond immediately, often angrily. So if you’re directly accused, you’ll need to perfect your incredulous response. However, you’re also supposed to be working with the crewmates to figure out who the impostors are, so try angrily spewing a torrent of irrelevant information.
Strategically kill
Pay attention to the remaining ratio of impostors to crewmates, and the time since the last meeting took place. For example, if there are six people left and two impostors, all you need to do is double kill to win the game. If there are three of you left, and they’re about to press the emergency button, it’s time to sabotage the reactor or O2 to make sure you can get the kill off.
You should also pay attention to who is vouching for who, who is under suspicion, and who is presumed innocent – for example, someone who got a confirmed impostor ejected. Generally, other people being suspect is useful to you, so you want to keep those people around. Also, calling a meeting removes bodies, which can be useful if you want to hide evidence – you can claim you called the meeting to report suspicious behaviour or vouch for someone.
If the crewmates are about to finish tasks, bear in mind that reporting a body or calling for a meeting also disrupts all tasks in progress. This means it’s worth killing in front of someone to stop the last tasks from being completed. Wait to see if they report it – and then pin the blame on them. All else being even, the 50/50 should go your way as you can accuse them of obstructing victory. If they don’t report, though, you’ll need to do it yourself to stop them winning on tasks.
Seek an alibi
At some point, you may need someone to vouch for you. If you have an impostor teammate, they could cover you in certain situations, but you’ll want to convince the crewmates you don’t kill to trust you. Let’s say you’re alone in a room with an innocent little dumpling of a crewmate, and your kill cooldown is up. Looks like dinner time, right? Wrong! Unless you’re close to winning on kills, it might be useful to stick with them to provide you with an alibi. If a body is found, immediately vouching for your crewmate buddy will often earn you a vouch in return, as well as making that person trust you more.
Implicate others
You’ve just made a lovely juicy kill, and as you’re admiring the way the body flops to the floor, somebody walks in. Oh no. It doesn’t really matter too much who presses the report button – it’s time to lie your pants off. You must immediately accuse them of being the killer, with immense passion and fury. If you don’t respond with a counter-accusation or an excuse, you’re as good as dead. In dire situations, where the intruder has somehow been confirmed innocent and didn’t catch you making the kill, you could say you saw another player venting, but this is incredibly risky.
Most of the time, you’ll be entering into a 1v1 accusation slinging contest. What happens next depends on the conditions at that moment in that particular game. If there are enough players left, they can afford to get rid of you both; but towards the late game, they might hold off and try to win on tasks. If they do this, do not kill the person who accused you, as this effectively exonerates them.
Nominate wisely
In meetings, if suspicion falls on a crewmate, don’t be too quick to vote for them. A crewmate would take time to hear both sides of the story – instead, you can subtly add to the suspicion around them. Similarly, if your impostor teammate is under extreme suspicion, don’t be too late to vote for them, as that also looks suspicious.
As you know, you can either vote for someone to be ejected, or vote to skip. However, you can also abstain from voting at all – and crucially, this is not the same as voting to skip. If the meeting has been overrun by blathering, and nobody has voted for anything, you can snipe someone by voting for them right at the end. If nobody voted to skip, one vote is enough for an eject. This tip is very situational, and makes you look pretty suspicious, but there are situations in which it could be useful.
That should be everything you need to go out there and betray everyone in sight. Just for good measure, we’ve found you a copy of the Among Us crewmate guide – know thy enemy, as they say. Now go out there and get stabbing at your leisure – now there’s no more Among Us 2, these tips won’t go obsolete in a hurry.