Two years ago, in 2020, a pretty basic game named "Among Us" launched into the mainstream a genre wrongly called 'Social Deduction'. If such a thing as 'social deduction' exists as a game genre (which I'm reticent to believe) this is not it.
There's some kind of backstory or tutorial at the very beginning, but it's purposely displayed at unreadable speed for some reason, so when the game starts you are tossed into a very confusing sci-fic setting, in some ship that you don't know and you can't walk through with some pretty dumb AI (quotation marks on 'intelligence') that you know nothing about heading towards a planet or a system that you don't know either for a reason that you ignore.
At all this, an alien race popped out of the blue, with absolutely no explanation about how bad can the security be friggin' aliens boarded the ship, and no one noticed until it was too late because now for some reason you also ignore these aliens (yes, plural) are taking on human hosts which behaves exactly as they did before being 'infected', meaning, certainly not mature enough neither physically (most are 18 when they should be on their thirties) nor mentally (When a character named SQ said for no reason at all, and I quote, "Ohh - Emm - gee! Setsu it's like, super sketchy you know" I lost it) to be in a space program.
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| For people that don't know astronauts look like this |
Then, the vote starts. 'For what? What is going on!?' you scream in despair, but the only answer you get is 'Vote who goes to cold sleep'
"Cold sleep? Do you mean like cryostasis? We got a friggin' alien on the ship, what happens if we froze the wrong guy?'
'Then someone will get killed'
'Don't we have a better way? Like, oh I don't know, maybe run a test on the crew to detect who's the alien!?'
'And what happens if this 'better way' is proposed by the alien? We'd be falling right into his trap'
'Use logic, deduction, imagination! Think for yourself! Is not like it can get worst than freezing random people!'
Because that's the 'gameplay' it's like, characters randomly accusing other characters with no arguments except "Yeah, this crewmember... Kinda sketchy you know' " or "defending" them with similar arguments "No, man. He's my buddy. I'd rather trust him than trust this other character that I don't like for unknown reasons" and the game tells you to join in this circus accusing or covering for other characters with no clues and no arguments.
It just says "You accused X. You cover for X." and depending on some also illogical "stats" that you "level up" after undergoing "loop" after "loop", yes the game loops sometimes changing what characters are the aliens sometimes adding more aliens, you get better at your very well constructed deductive logical device of arbitrary pointing fingers to decide who gets the trip to the freezer (Realistic, right?).
Allegedly, there's an "engineer" character but the AI can't check the credentials and you can't ask them to prove their engineers by, crazy ideas, asking things only an engineer would know. That's it, guys. Social deduction. And people around the net are losing their heads saying how good the game is, how marvelous the character design is, and how incredibly profound knowledge of the human psyche the developers applied. They are like "Oh-em-gee". I blame drugs. 1/10

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