The reality competition show The Traitors thrives on the question of who can be trusted when anyone might be a saboteur. With The Traitors: New Blood premiering this week on NBC, featuring a cast of civilians rather than celebrities, the core drama remains the same: Can you identify the liars before they betray you? Video games have been exploring this very dynamic for years, offering a wide range of experiences that tap into that same sense of paranoia and deduction.
Town of Salem
In Town of Salem, a free-to-play browser and mobile game, players are randomly assigned roles in a colonial town. The game operates on a day-night cycle, where players discuss and vote during the day, and take secret actions at night. With around 30 possible roles, including hidden threats like the Serial Killer or Werewolf, and the ability for the Jailor to interrogate players, the complexity and potential for deception are high. While some roles aim to help identify threats, others benefit from sowing discord and misdirection, making collective trust a difficult commodity.
Goose Goose Duck
Goose Goose Duck is a free multiplayer party game available on PC, mobile, and in-browser. It shares similarities with Among Us, but features a cast of geese completing tasks on various maps while hidden ducks work to sabotage their efforts. The game boasts over 20 roles, such as an amnesiac who can forget their allegiance mid-game or a vulture that can hide bodies. Its seemingly harmless cartoon art style and honking sound effects belie a core gameplay loop of suspicion and deduction.
Project Winter
Project Winter is a survival game for up to eight players on PC and consoles. Stranded survivors must cooperate to escape a harsh, snowy environment by gathering resources, hunting, and repairing structures. However, hidden traitors within the group actively work to sabotage their efforts and eliminate innocent players. Every interaction, from sharing resources to deciding who to trust near a campfire, is fraught with the tension of potential betrayal, as traitors aim to prevent the survivors from being rescued.
Deceit
This first-person multiplayer PC game places six players in a mysterious, dungeon-like facility. Unknown to most, two of the players are infected with a virus that transforms them into aggressive monsters after a period of time, or upon contact. The Infected win by spreading the virus to everyone else, while the uninfected must identify and eliminate the Infected before escaping. The game's mechanics encourage direct confrontation and the use of found weapons, turning trust into a matter of immediate survival.
Werewolves Within
A virtual reality title compatible with the original PlayStation VR and Oculus Rift, Werewolves Within tasks players with identifying werewolves hidden among villagers. The game uniquely leverages VR's facial and hand-tracking capabilities to pick up on subtle tells like flinches, pauses, or averted glances, which can betray a player's true allegiance. Unlike text-based deduction games, Werewolves Within offers no breathing room, demanding constant awareness of one's own expressions and gestures under scrutiny.
Space Station 13
This long-standing, free, browser-based multiplayer simulation drops dozens of players onto a space station, each taking on a specific job role like engineer or doctor. The catch is that one or more players are secretly Syndicate agents tasked with sabotage or assassination. Space Station 13's enduring appeal lies in its complex systems and the diverse communities that have built custom game modes and codebases over its two-decade history, ensuring a consistently fresh and replayable experience.
Secret Neighbor
This multiplayer horror game, set in the Hello Neighbor universe, puts a group of kids on a mission to rescue a friend from a neighbor's basement. Among the kids is the menacing Neighbor in disguise, who works to thwart their progress. Instead of typical social deduction conversations, players must realize mid-mission who the imposter is, often by being in close proximity to the threat.
Among Us
Among Us is a massively popular multiplayer game available on PC, consoles, and mobile devices. Players are crewmates on a spaceship, performing tasks to keep it running, or they are impostors who secretly kill crewmates and use vents to move around. Emergency meetings are called to discuss suspicions, vote out players, and immediately discover if they have wrongly ejected an innocent crewmate. The core loop of deception, accusation, and deduction makes it a prime example of the social deception genre.
Whether set on a spaceship, a survival camp, or a virtual mansion, the fundamental fear in these games—that someone you're working with is lying—persists. As players in The Traitors will soon discover, knowing a traitor is present is far from enough to identify them.