8 Best Social Deception Games Every Traitors Fan Must Play

5

Deceit

Why nobody’s safe here: One touch turns you into the thing everyone else is hunting.

In Deceit — a first-person, multiplayer PC game — you play as one of six people trapped inside a dungeon-like facility with no memory of how you got there. Two of you have already been secretly infected with a virus that spreads on contact and turns anyone it touches into another Infected. The Infected win by spreading their infection to the whole group before a single person escapes. Everyone else wins by finding and stopping the Infected, first. Usually with whatever crossbow, trap, or blunt object that happens to be nearby.

4

Werewolves Within

Why nobody’s safe here: Your own face can give you away, even when you’ve decided to lie.

Werewolves Within is a VR game, compatible with the original PlayStation VR (but not PSVR 2!) and Oculus Rift. In Werewolves Within, you and your fellow investigators are villagers by day and werewolves picking people off by night. The twist for this game lies in its face and hand movement tracking: Since the VR headsets have that information, the game uses it…usually to your disadvantage. The tells that tend to get lost over voice chat or text — think: A flinch, a too-long pause, an avoided glance — are right there, in-game, for everyone else to read. While text-based deduction lets you compose yourself between messages, VR and Werewolves Within don’t give you that break. Try to remember what your face and hands are doing at all times (while you’re under intense scrutiny and pressure). Good luck!

3

Space Station 13

Image: Exadv1

Why nobody’s safe here: Everyone clocked in for the same shift. Only one of them has a second job.

Ever wanted to work on a space station? Potential betrayal aside? Here’s your game: Space Station 13 is a free, browser-based multiplayer sim where dozens of players log in as staff on a working space station. Each gets assigned a job — engineer, doctor, security officer, botanist, chef — with tasks they need to complete before the end of their shift. One or more players get a secret second job, like being a Syndicate agent working sabotage or scheming an assassination from the inside. Space Station 13 is an older game — it came out in 2003 — but people are still playing it today because it inspired entire communities with distinct gameplay rules, game modes, and custom codebases…making a two-decade-old game feel surprisingly fresh and constantly replayable.

2

Secret Neighbor

Image: Dynamic Pixels

Why nobody’s safe here: One of your fellow kids is not a fellow kid

What about a true horror take on the familiar social deduction game formula? Secret Neighbor is a multiplayer horror game for PC and console. In it, you play as one of a group of kids sneaking into a neighbor’s house to rescue a friend locked in the basement. As you and the other children search for various keys and clues, one member of the group is the menacing Neighbor in disguise working hard to slow the rescue by any means possible. Set in the same universe as the Hello Neighbor games, Secret Neighbor swaps the genre’s usual conversation-and-accusation loop for something closer to realizing, mid-search, that you’ve been standing next to the real threat the whole time.

1

Among Us

Image: Innersloth/YouTube

Why nobody’s safe here: You can be totally innocent and still end up stranded in deep space?!

Among Us is a multiplayer PC, console, and mobile game where you play as an innocent crewmate (or an insidious imposter) aboard a spaceship. As is the case with Space Station 13, you’ll be assigned a normal, necessary job to give you the cover of tackling basic chores — wiring, fuel, medbay scans — to keep the ship operational. Impostors fake their way through the same chores while killing crewmates in empty rooms, or by sneaking through vents between rounds. (It’s a lot to juggle — it’s hard work being an imposter!) The group stops for emergency meetings to argue about who’s lying, vote someone out, and find out immediately whether they got it right or just ejected an innocent crewmate into space.

Set the same basic premise on a spaceship, in a snowed-in survival camp, or in a Scottish mansion with Alan Cumming, and the central fear barely changes: Someone in your group — someone you trust, someone you’re working with toward a common goal — is lying. You won’t know who that is until it’s too late. The 22 people walking into this season of The Traitors are about to learn what these types of games teach: Knowing the traitor is out there doesn’t actually help you spot them — at all.