Among Us

Among Us spent nearly two years as an obscure 2018 release before a 2020 streaming wave turned it into one of the defining cultural moments of that year. Six years on from that peak, the more interesting question isn't whether it was good then — it's whether it's still good now, and reading widely through its review history, spanning every year since launch, gives a clearer and more specific answer than the "it was a 2020 thing" dismissal it sometimes gets.

The formula that still works

The core loop hasn't changed and doesn't need to: crewmates run tasks around a map while one or more impostors sabotage and kill among them, with the entire group periodically stopping to argue, accuse and vote someone off based on circumstantial evidence and social reads. It's a formula reviewers across every year of this game's history credit as genuinely clever rather than just well-marketed — simple enough to teach in a minute, deep enough to sustain arguments that go on far longer than the matches themselves. At NZ$7.49 for up to 15-player games with friends, reviewers consistently frame it as exceptional value regardless of when they discovered it.

A real accessibility fix worth crediting directly

Here's a specific story worth telling in detail rather than glossing over: the single most-upvoted negative review in this game's entire history, sitting at 6,163 votes, is a 2020 complaint that crewmate colors were nearly indistinguishable for colorblind and color-deficient players — lime versus yellow, blue versus purple, described as making basic gameplay genuinely difficult. That's not a fringe complaint; it's the most-upvoted piece of criticism the game has ever received on Steam. Innersloth's June 2022 patch directly addressed it, adding a colorblind text option that labels crewmate colors by name during gameplay and meetings, plus symbols on wire-connection tasks so players don't have to distinguish colors to complete them. The result shows up clearly in the data: that specific complaint is essentially absent from negative reviews written after the fix shipped. It's a genuinely good example of a widely-flagged accessibility gap getting addressed rather than ignored, and it deserves to be credited as directly as the original complaint was.

The complaint that never went away

What hasn't resolved is different, and it recurs with real consistency from 2020 through the most recent reviews in this sample: public lobbies are widely and repeatedly described as chaotic, dominated by very young players, and prone to a specific frustrating pattern — players quitting the instant they discover they're a crewmate rather than the impostor. "This game desperately needs a ban system to counter act that behaviour," reads one review from the game's early peak, and reviewers in 2025 and 2026 are still describing essentially the same public-lobby experience. A separate, specific complaint concerns quick-chat restrictions applied to some accounts, which several reviewers say flattens meeting discussions into a rotation of pre-set phrases rather than the free, clever back-and-forth that makes accusations land. A 2022-2023 wave of reviews also describes a genuinely serious account-lockout bug tied to a new age-verification requirement — entering a birth year could permanently lock an account behind a "Guardian" email flow — though this specific complaint is largely absent from the 2024-2026 sample, suggesting it was substantially resolved even though it isn't documented here as thoroughly as the colorblind fix.

Reading the completion data

With 33 achievements, the completion curve reflects broad, casual engagement. Core survival and early-task milestones sit around 40-48%, showing most buyers who launch the game experience its basic loop. The rarer achievements, tied to specific hide-and-seek mode wins on harder difficulty, fall under 1%, reflecting how much smaller the audience is for the game's newer, more demanding modes compared to its classic format.

7 out of 10. Among Us earns real, lasting credit for a design that still works six years past its viral peak, and for a specific, well-documented example of Innersloth fixing a widely-flagged accessibility gap rather than letting it sit. It's held below the top tier by a genuinely persistent public-lobby problem that reviewers have described consistently since 2020 and continue to describe today — this is a game best played with people you already know, not one to expect a great experience from in open matchmaking with strangers.