Small Details You Missed In Among Us

Among Us is a game that rewards players who pay close attention to the details. If you want to master this online social deduction game, you have to be vigilant at all times, paying close attention to everything you see. If you do so, the game will reward you handsomely, not just because careful observation can help clue you in about which members of your crew are actually imposters but because Among Us is a game that is positively crammed with little secrets for sharp-eyed players to discover.

These hidden details are practically everywhere, and they come in many forms. Some are little visual gags that are easy to miss if you aren't paying attention. Others are references to classic movies or previous Innersloth games. And while most of these are just jokes, we'll also be discussing a couple lesser-known exploits and game features that Among Us doesn't advertise but that you can use to take your game experience to the next level.

Like many competitive online games, Among Us has some special features that are only available for a limited time each year. There are small changes to the maps and unlockable cosmetic items that you can only experience by playing the game on certain holidays. However, what makes Among Us different from most of these other games is that you can actually play with these seasonal features at any time of the year, on both PC and mobile, if you manually change the date on your device's calendar.

If you set the date to October 31, you'll unlock some spooky Halloween costumes for your avatar to wear, including a witch hat, a knife through the head, and a Jason Voorhees-inspired hockey mask. Along similar lines, if you set the date to December 25, you'll unlock a variety of Christmas-themed cosmetics, like a Santa hat and reindeer antlers. And in both cases, just doing this a single time unlocks these cosmetics permanently, regardless of what the date on your device shows in the future.

But this last one is our favorite. If the person creating the game has the date on their device set to April 1, the entire map appears backwards. It's incredibly disorienting, especially for experienced players who have gotten used to the game's normal layout. Talk about an Easter egg ... or would that be an April Fool's egg?

Someone at Innersloth must be an enormous fan of the animated series Futurama, because there's one aspect of that show's setting that Among Us loves to reference repeatedly throughout the game: brain slugs.

In case you're not aware, in the setting of Futurama, brain slugs are a minor recurring alien species. These tricksy little alien parasites are instantly recognizable and strangely cute, with their green blobby bodies, two antennae, and one big eye. Brain slugs survive by attaching themselves to the heads of sapient beings, allowing them to both feed on the host's brain waves and take total control of the host's body. What adorable little rascals!

Brain slugs appear in multiple places throughout Among Us. On the Polus map, when you're completing the "Insert Keys" task within the Dropship, there is a prominent brain slug keychain on the left side of the screen. But that's not all. Brain slugs also appear as possible cosmetic items, both as a little pet that follows you around or as a hat, y'know, in case the little guy gets hungry.

This next secret isn't so much a deliberately hidden feature as much as it is a poorly communicated one. Among Us has an incredibly useful hidden option that you can use to get yourself out of an unfortunate jam, but unless someone points it out to you, you'll probably never notice it.

Has this ever happened to you? You're playing online with some random strangers — ordinarily a somewhat dicey proposition — but you happen to get lucky and end up in a solid group. Everyone's having a great time when suddenly, there's a hiccup in your internet connection, and you disconnect. "Oh no!" you lament. "I finally met some cool players, but now they're gone forever!"

You might not realize it, but Among Us has a way to jump back into your previous group without needing to know a room code. From the main menu, choose "Online," and you'll see a screen that seems to have three options: "Host – Create Game," "Public – Find Game," and "Private – Enter Code." However, there is also a hidden fourth option . If you look to the right of the button that says "Private – Enter Code," you'll see a white arrow. If you click that arrow without entering a code, you'll rejoin your last game, assuming it's still running. This feature might not be as flashy as some of the other secrets we're discussing today, but trust us, you'll thank us later.

If you're on the hunt for comedic Easter eggs in Among Us, you'll find two solid hidden goofs in the Office room on the Polus map, and both homages to famous rappers, strangely enough.

If you are assigned the "Scan Boarding Pass" task, you may notice that the little cartoon ID Card that pops up when you begin the task has what looks like a real QR code on it, and that's because it is one. If you scan the code with a smartphone, you'll see a message pop up that reads, "Yo holmes, smell you later," a reference to the opening theme song of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

But that's not the only hidden joke inside this task. When you pull up your ID card, it shows a random still image of your character in one of a few different poses. Two of these poses are actually references to the popular meme format which shows two images of the rapper Drake from the video for "Hotline Bling," one expressing disgust and the other showing approval. This one is a bit difficult to spot, because you're only ever seeing one image on your ID card at a time, but seeing both the images together, the similarity is undeniable.

Though most of the Easter eggs in Among Us are fairly easy to find, there's also one that's hidden in a map location that's theoretically impossible to reach during normal gameplay. The only way to way to find it is to die.

If you're a ghost on the Polus map, try exploring the lower right corner of the map, and you'll soon come across a handful of figures gathered around a dead body. They appear to be made of snow, but given the game's cartoony art style, it's not totally clear whether these are supposed to be snowmen or actual people who've frozen to death.

We can't be sure exactly why this is here, but we think it might be an homage to John Carpenter's The Thing. Just like Among Us, The Thing tells the story of a group of people with a shape-shifting alien killer in their midst. There's a scene in the film where the team discovers that one of their own has become a "thing." As the half-human half-alien creature crawls along the icy ground, our heroes surround it and burn it alive. As they watch the creature die, they end up standing around it in a manner quite similar to how these figures are arranged.

We can't be totally sure that this is what Innersloth was going for, but given that both The Thing and the Polus map are set at snowy scientific research stations, we find it hard to believe that the team wouldn't include a reference to this film somewhere on the map.

Depending on which map you're playing on, Among Us offers a variety of ways for suspicious players to be executed. In addition to the time-honored classic of blasting someone out the airlock on the Skeld, players who get ejected on MIRA HQ get tossed off the side of the floating station, and on Polus, they get dropped into a lava pit. But in that last case, if you look closely when a player is taking a lava bath, you'll sometimes see a clever reference to a classic film if the crew voted correctly.

If Confirm Ejects are turned on, then when imposters are tossed into the lava, they give a thumbs up as the lava consumes them, unlike regular crewmates, who just raise a single pleading hand in their last moments. This is actually a reference to the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day. At the end of that movie, once the villainous T-1000 has been defeated, the heroic T-800 realizes that his work protecting the young John Connor is done, so he asks John to lower him into a glowing orange pool of molten metal. John reluctantly agrees, and as the pool consumes his faithful cyborg companion, the Terminator raises his hand, giving his friend one last thumbs up. So wait, by the logic of Among Us, does this mean that the Terminator was an imposter? Hmmm ... now we know why Sarah Connor always thought he was sus.

Hidden all throughout the world of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild are hundreds of camouflaged creatures known as Koroks. Whenever Link finds a hidden Korok, it gives him a prize, so experienced Zelda players are always on the lookout for anything around them that seems out of the ordinary. They know they must be vigilant, because these adorable little plant creatures could be hiding anywhere.

However, there's one hidden Korok that we're guessing you missed during your last Breath of the Wild playthrough, because this one's hiding in a totally different game. In Among Us, one of the tasks that you might be assigned on MIRA station is to water the plants in the greenhouse. Once you retrieve the watering can from storage and start the task, you may notice that the third plant from the left looks a little strange. Your eyes aren't deceiving you: That's actually a Korok, apparently trying to stand very still so that you don't notice it. Unfortunately, unlike the other Koroks, this little fella won't give you a prize for spotting him.

If you didn't grow up on Newgrounds, you might not be able to parse a decent chunk of the hidden jokes made in Among Us. That's because the thing that Among Us loves to pay homage to the most, by far, is the team's other major project: the Henry Stickmin series of adventure games. Let's run down all the references we could spot.

There's a framed photo of Henry in a hallway on Polus and a poster for the Henry Stickmin Collection in the Office at MIRA HQ. There is an NRg drink in the vending machine in MIRA HQ, a brand of drink from Henry Stickmin. The empty garbage task occasionally features two items from this series mixed in with the usual trash: the famously unreliable teleporter and the titular diamond from the game Stealing the Diamond. That diamond also reappears in the Store Artifacts task on the Polus map. 

Speaking of Polus, there's a minor character in the game Fleeing the Complex named Polus Petrovich, and when you view his bio, it claims that he got to name a planet after himself as a prize for winning a sweepstakes. Also, at a few spots around the Polus map, you can find a list of the names of the various weather nodes around the base. They have names like Node_GI, Node_IRO, Node_PD, Node_TB, and Node_CA. These codes actually correspond with the different endings of Fleeing the Complex, such as Ghost Inmate, International Rescue Operative, Presumed Dead, The Betrated, and Convict Allies.

There are several more funny details crammed into the various computer terminals around the game's three maps. The Office in the Polus map has a "Simsong"-branded computer, a reference to "Samsung," and the Security room has a "Bell" computer, a parody of Dell.

There are also a pair of computer screens in the upper left corner of the Office in MIRA HQ that seem to be running ... something. Given the extremely low resolution of these screens, it's a little difficult to tell exactly what they are supposed to be are displaying, but the general consensus is the one on the right is showing Discord, an application that most Among Us players are highly familiar with.

But without a doubt, our favorite little detail on a computer screen in Among Us is in the Admin room on Polus. There's a widescreen TV in there that appears to have that classic DVD player screen saver. You know the one, with a logo that says "DVD" bouncing around the screen, changing colors with each impact. It might not seem like much, but honestly, we could just watch it for hours. We swear we saw it hit the corner one time.

Some of the hidden jokes in Among Us are things you wear. There are numerous additional jokes and references in the various outfits and pets you can apply from the game's cosmetic customization menu.

Some of these joke-filled items are replicas of stuff from other pop culture properties. For example, there's the Hunter Hat, an exact duplicate of the hat warn by Elmer Fudd from Looney Tunes. There's also the "Bedcrab" pet, clearly a reference to Headcrabs from the Half-Life games. And finally, there's the Robot pet, which looks a lot like the titular character from Wall-E.

Many of the game's cosmetics are also costume pieces that were originally worn by characters from the Henry Stickmin games, such as the police hat, which is similar to those worn by the police officers in Escaping the Prison. The towel hat is most likely a reference to Gastro from Fleeing the Complex. And as we all know, the double top hat is a look that was popularized by Reginald Copperbottom. Why, after the release of the 1 Million Downloads Hat Bundle, even Henry Stickmin himself can be a hat!

Finally, there are some cosmetics that have some funny quirks to the way that they are animated, such as the Flamingo Hat and the Cat Head Hat, the eyes of which turn to X's when the player wearing them is killed by an imposter. There's also a strange quirk to the "Dum Sticky Note" hat, which becomes inverted when the player is facing left, changing the message on it to "MUD."