Inner Sloth's Among Us has skyrocketed to fame in recent months, thanks largely to the current health situation. Among Us is a social deduction game where a crew has to suss out which one among their ranks is no longer a crewmate and has actually been replaced by a shapeshifting parasitic impostor trying to sabotage them. Players start in a matchmaking lobby, and as the game begins, one or more is randomly picked out as the impostor.
Everyone else has tasks they need to carry out all over the map, which, upon completion, gives them a win. However, the impostor need only take everyone out either by killing them or by getting everyone else to suspect each other and ejecting them into the cold reaches of space. The game has had quite a few notable updates since launch -- adding new locations to run about in, being able to customize characters with funny hats and outfits and more. One update added pets for your crewman to take with them.
Pets were introduced in Among Us as an update to add to the cosmetic customizations players can make to their characters. While running around with a tiny version of yourself, a hovering mini-UFO or even an alien headcrab makes for a fun experience, it doesn't really do anything for the players.
Depending on the pet, kill sequences can have additional animations for the pets themselves, making for a refreshing addition to the game. The sad part comes after killing a crewmate with a pet. After murdering the hapless crewmate, their pet stays by the dead body until it is found and reported. At this point, more sensitive players would already be getting Hachiko flashbacks -- or even that scene from Futurama's Jurassic Bark episode with Fry and his dog.
While the rest of the crew bicker and debate over who killed whom and point fingers over who may be the nefarious parasite out to get everyone, the poor little pet is just left there standing over the corpse much like Bruce Wayne over Thomas and Martha's bodies in Crime Alley. And as someone gets the boot and gets voted off, should life go on and the crew carries on running further tasks, any recently orphaned pet is left sitting there still -- even after the body is cleared out.
Inner Sloth has even made it even sadder by giving each pet actual renders for when they're just there slumped on the floor. For as little detail as can be added in keeping with the game's rather simplistic art style, some real emotions are observed there. In particular, the dog is one of the saddest things to be seen in this game of blatant blame-shifting and paranoia.
Pets are in no way game-changers for Among Us. But it's nice to see how a game that focuses on so much self-preservation over everyone else can add such a minor feature that could inject so much humanity into it. One that has been sorely lacking from the stoic designs of the crewmembers themselves.