Welcome to The Backlog, a series in which we will take a look back at 12 games from 2020 that, in one way or another, had a lasting impact on the video game industry.
The summer of 2020 was a strange one. I remember spending afternoons in a park by my apartment in Brooklyn, a park that had drawn circles in the fake grass six feet apart from each other. I saw friends there, sat on picnic blankets and drank out in public, and even got a ticket for it once like an idiot. It was a beautiful summer, as far as the weather went, and for every long walk I took, I could push down a bit of the existential paranoia that crept along day-by-day as the COVID pandemic raged on with only whispers of a future vaccine to ebb the tide of disease and death.
Mostly, though, I spent the summer of 2020 the same way I spent the spring: holed up inside, playing video games. I spent most of that time playing and replaying Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Persona 5, while on one of my many World of Warcraft breaks throughout the years. Those are great games, but they are lonely games, and they were lonely during a time when effort had to be made in order to talk to another person. Given that I didn’t have the social aspect of WoW to keep me grounded in human communication, I needed something else, something that forced me to not retreat into myself and my JRPGs. I needed Fall Guys and Among Us.
These two games were recipients of good timing. Fall Guys (officially Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout until 2022) released on August 4, 2020, and immediately took off as the most popular game of the moment … at least until Among Us divebombed in, two years after its actual release, to redefine social connection during the pandemic. There were flaws in both games, mostly baked into their popularity outstripping the developers’ ability to keep up with demand, but both games succeeded simply by forcing players to interact with each other. You could play both solo, with and against random strangers, but they were more fun with friends; Fall Guys allowed you to team up against a plethora of opponents, while Among Us was always at its best when you had a full lobby of friends, ready to scream and shout at each other as the hours of this time-frozen year webbed away. They were both simple games with bright colors, and in a summer of isolation and despair, they were the games that were needed in the moment.
What Are They?
Though the core appeal was very similar for Fall Guys and Among Us (play with your friends!), the actual gameplay could not have been more different.
Fall Guys was essentially a colorful evolution of the battle royale genre that spawned from PUBG and Fortnite. In the default mode, 100 player-controlled “beans” compete in a variety of Mario Party–esque mini-games, eliminating some amount each round until a final stage decided a winner. The loop was pretty simple and easy to pick up, and each of the beans had only a few controls: They could run, jump, dive, and grab onto platforms and ledges and items. Oh, they could also grab each other, which led to trolling and some elite-level defense in equal parts. None of the mini-games were all that complicated, running the gamut from a simple memory game to soccer and plenty of obstacle courses. Getting farther in each round was its own reward, but experience points and the all-elusive crowns that came from a first-place finish allowed the player to buy cosmetics for their beans. (There were also micro-transactions for more cosmetics, but I never bought one, because I am staunchly against micro-transactions.)
Among Us on the other hand was a lot more straightforward: It was Mafia, it was Werewolf, it was a whodunnit mystery. Ten players are put on a spaceship or other miscellaneous base. Eight of those players are “crewmates,” in charge of completing various tasks around the map in order to fill a meter. Meanwhile, the other two players are “impostors,” and their goal is to kill all of the crewmates before they get caught and voted out, Survivor-style. (Instead of leaving the tribe, you see them ejected out of the airlock or thrown into lava. It’s great.) After someone finds and reports a dead body, everyone talks about what they saw during the round, and either someone gets voted off or enough people skip voting to gather more clues. There are more complexities involved, but that’s the general idea.
What Went Right?
Answering this question with anything other than “timing” would be disingenuous. Both games are very good at what they do, but neither game would have become mainstream phenomena without quarantine. In fairness, Among Us had released two years prior, so it wasn’t as “lucky” to release when Fall Guys did, but Twitch streamer Sodapoppin, the first massive streamer to jump on the Among Us train, might not have made it his main focus if not for the pandemic, which helped turn the game from a curio to something that was everywhere very quickly.
Still, though, the games did have to be good, and both were. Fall Guys required a bit more dexterity and controller skills, and it was more insular. While you were playing against 99 other people, you could only really group with three friends. This was a bit of a hassle for my group, as we would have to split into various parties in order to play together, and it was almost impossible to coordinate queueing so multiple groups of four could be in the same game. The “beans” didn’t control perfectly, but that was part of the charm: navigating these clunky guys around increasingly complex obstacle courses. The randomness of which mini-games would appear made it so that it never felt repetitive to load into a Fall Guys experience.
Among Us, on the other hand, had a lot less content. During the time of its peak popularity there were only three maps, and while you could customize the ruleset of each game, the general gameplay was always the same: crewmates vs. impostors. However, within these simple rules there was plenty of room for improvisation and strategy, from both sides. Some impostor duos would gel and work perfectly as a team, amassing double kills and covering for each other. Others would throw each other under the bus in order to deflect suspicion. I had a friend who once killed someone immediately, reported the body, then blamed me, his impostor partner. I got kicked off and he won that game. I was furious, but also it was objectively hilarious.
That’s what I remembered most about Among Us whenever I wasn’t playing it, and why I kept bothering all of my friends to find nine other people to play a full game. The fun came from moments like that betrayal, or a perfectly executed gameplan, or a fine bit of detective work that caught the impostors and won the game for your fellow crewmates. I also remember the screaming. So much screaming occurred in the roundtable discussions to try to find the impostors. There was no comparison in terms of which of these two games elicited more emotions from its players, and friend groups were both torn asunder and stitched back together throughout the course of a night session of Among Us.
What Went Wrong?
So was timing the death knell to their world-conquering popularity. For Fall Guys, the timing that crushed it was simply the Among Us wave. For the reasons above, and even though Fall Guys is almost certainly the better capital-g Game, Among Us captured more people and more of those people’s imaginations: At their respective peaks on Steam, Fall Guys had around 172,000 concurrent players in its first week, while Among Us almost tripled that peak in September, with around 439,000. It was a lot more fun to play with nine friends in a game where everyone could play on their phone, and no real motor skills were needed. Fall Guys, at launch, needed either a good-enough computer to run the game, or a PS4.
As for Among Us, the vaccine immediately set a ticking clock for its lifespan. When the game started gaining popularity in late July of 2020, the vaccine was still in the works, but by December, I knew people who were getting it in early trials. It appeared a safe assumption that the spring of 2021 would bring a slow return to the outdoors, and it would become a lot harder to gather 10 people at once to play Among Us.
Timing isn’t the only thing that went wrong with Among Us, though. The lack of content really hurt the game’s staying power. Despite rumors of a fourth map as far back as, if my memory serves, October of 2020, that fourth map, the Airship, didn’t release until March 31, 2021. (Anecdotally, that was the day I got my second vaccine dose.) The map also didn’t really fit what the game had been: It was clearly designed for the planned bigger lobbies of 15 people, and at least in my friend groups, it was already getting tricky to find nine others to play at any one time. Adding in a huge map that demanded five extra people—a mode that didn’t release until June of 2021—was just not what anyone was looking for, so we were left with either playing on the same three maps we had been binging for seven months or just moving on with our lives.
Not to keep picking on the Among Us developers, who were certainly blown away by the support the game got two years after its release and who were pretty clearly not ready to fully capitalize with their small team, but the other issue was that the game never received Apple support. I would wager that allowing players to play on their Macs would have helped lengthen the popularity moment, and it also would have added the ability to use mods, which did shake up the game but which were not available for groups that had people playing on phones. Add in some server instability that could derail an entire planned session, and there were just enough annoyances that the game didn’t survive in its all-popular stage past the spring.
Were People Normal About These Games?
This might be the only time in the series were the answer to this is a resounding “no,” but meant in the best possible way. The excitement around Fall Guys was more short-lived, but thanks to the candy-coated aesthetics and the ease of play, I began to see the beans everywhere. People were excited to compete against each other and shoot the shit while trying to earn crowns.
As for Among Us, the reaction was even more outsized. Everyone got in on the Among Us waves, from gamers to non-gamers to brands to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, who played alongside some of the more famous Twitch streamers in a get-out-the-vote initiative. (Omar was much better at the game than AOC, for what it’s worth.) One of those streamers, former Hearthstone creator Disguised Toast, successfully jumped on the Among Us train and gained over two million subscribers between September of 2020 and January of the following year, thanks to regular video uploads of his gameplay.
It seemed like everyone wanted a piece of Among Us, whether to watch it or play it or talk about. Personally, I was able not just to get people I never thought I’d play video games with to get on for Among Us, but to enjoy the hell out of it, whenever they weren’t yelling at me for killing them.
What’s Happened Since?
In a bit of an upset, Fall Guys has had the better post-2020 lifespan. In 2022, the game went free-to-play under the Epic Games banner, adding in even more micro-transactions but re-launching with a seasonal model of content that breathed new life into the game, letting more people play it without spending any money and without, really, getting tired of the same old mini-games. Eventually, developers Mediatonic would eventually phase out seasons in 2023, but the game kept adding new content on a regular enough basis that there’s still plenty to do if one were to load up and take control of the beans once more. There’s even a ranked mode now for the true competitive sickos.
Among Us, on the other hand, has mostly faded from view. The aforementioned Airship map release didn’t do much to keep people in the game, and though there has been a bit of extra content since—there was another map released in October of 2023, the Fungle, and the biggest update by far came in November of 2021, when they added four new roles with special abilities for crewmates—the moment has passed. Even the late 2022 release of Among Us 3D, in which the player eschews the top-down view from the original and instead inhabits their crewmate/impostor’s point-of-view, had stumbles, as it was only available to play with a VR headset until May of 2025, when a VR-less version finally came out. If anything did keep Among Us alive, it was the modding, but given that most people had moved on by the time those mods actually became good enough to play—along with the phone barrier to utilizing them—it felt like the mods were more for die-hards than the general populace who was so enraptured by Among Us in the second half of 2020.
Are They Worth Playing In 2025?
This is a tricky question to answer, because what you get out of Fall Guys and Among Us depends on what you put in. In terms of experiencing new things five years later, Fall Guys does a clean sweep here, with regular updates and the 2022 revamp helping to keep it alive and vibrant. Among Us is roughly still the game it was in 2020, and that’s both a curse and a blessing. If you played hundreds of hours of Among Us back then, you might have gotten your fill, but I would wager that grabbing nine of your friends to play now would be just as fun as it was in 2020. It might not happen as often, or feel as necessary, but the skeleton of the game is still fantastic. It’s just mostly the same. For those reasons, Fall Guys earns an 9.1 on the Defector Replayability Ability Scale and Among Us earns a 7.9.
