It turns out that Among Us has many annoying tasks.
Multiple maps
- The "Swipe Card" task in the Admin room is incredibly finicky and deceptively simple. It's difficult to find the middle ground where it doesn't complain about it being "Too Fast" or "Too Slow" - and if you don't pull the card all the way, you get a "Bad Read". It isn't uncommon for it to take at least three to five attempts to complete the Swipe Card task and particularly egregious examples on YouTube can reach double-digit attempts before completion! Weirdly enough, this task is much easier on mobile, presumably changed to account for a touch screen being less sensitive than a mouse, but the Polus weather node task isn't adjusted at all.
- Perhaps one of the worst parts about this task is that it is required to open doors on the Airship map, meaning Crewmates will have to spend long periods of time opening each door. Fortunately, it seems to be a bit more forgiving than the task version, but still an unwelcome mechanic when you're locked in the hall with a potential Impostor.
- In a console-exclusive aversion, "Swipe Card" is decidedly easier in the Nintendo Switch release, as instead of the speed of the swipe being based on how fast you swipe your mouse or finger, the card speed is controlled by how fast you spin your control stick. Once you get the speed right, it's easy to get locked into a pattern for how to spin it.
- As a sign of this task's infamy, when the game was given achievements, completing the "Swipe Card" task on your first try was considered noteworthy enough to unlock an achievement called "IMPOSSIBLE TASK" as the only achievement thus far based around completing a certain task.
- As if this task wasn't bad enough in normal mode, it's particularly bad in Hide and Seek mode. The task itself is unchanged, but trying to swipe the card just right is a lot harder when the Impostor is roaming around unabashed with nothing to stop it from killing you as soon as you're in sight, especially since half of your focus will most likely be on the danger meter and the music but not on the task at hand. Since said meter and music don't account for walls, you may well end up repeatedly abandoning the task or messing it up because the Seeker ran through a corridor adjacent to the room you're in and set the meter off despite not having seen you. Given that completing tasks in this gamemode just decreases the time to survive faster (meaning less time you have to hide for), it's almost not worth it to attempt this one anyway unless you have the technique burned into your muscle memory.
- The "Start Reactor" task is uncomfortably tedious to perform, being essentially a nine-button "Simon Says" Mini-Game, done five times in a row, with more tiles to push as it goes along. While not hard, this task is irritating to perform due to how slow it is, and the huge minigame interface basically obscures every possible angle of view where an Impostor could be sneaking up on you. Also, on the rare occasion where a mistake has been made, the buttons reset to the very beginning, taking that much longer to complete. Many players collectively loathe this task with a passion due to how often they get killed while doing it, and not helping matters is how commonly they are interrupted by a meeting, which pauses task progress. Most of the time, only dead Crew members can successfully pull this off, since they can no longer be accosted by Impostors in the process, though live Crewmates with a Big Red Button can still pose a major hindrance. And like Swipe Card, it becomes a lot harder in Hide and Seek mode purely because of the extra anxiety and needing to keep half an eye on the danger meter.
- "Upload Data" is one of the most disliked Tasks in the game. It requires you to stand still for around ten seconds while a meter fills up, during which time your view is obscured by a huge interface. If an Impostor (or the Seeker in Hide n Seek mode) shows up, they'll be able to kill you and you likely won't even see them coming aside from an audio cue when playing Hide n Seek, and even then you might not be able to guess where the Seeker is coming from. It also resets if you don't complete it/are interrupted. Worse still, Upload Data is usually paired with Download Data, the same task in a different location, so that's two opportunities for an Impostor to kill you.
- Adding to the suckiness of this task, a fellow crewmate could be killed within your vicinity and their body reported all the while you're in the middle of downloading or uploading, with the huge GUI blocking your FOV. You may have no choice but to prepare for the Impostor accusations.
- "Submit Scan" is an absolute migraine for the Impostors to work around, no matter how convenient a killzone the Medical Bay is on a given map. This is due to the Med-Scan being both the one task that can completely 100% confirm a crewmate as innocent, and the one task Impostors absolutely cannot fake - the scan has a lengthy animation, a visual cue for when multiple crew attempt to use it, and the user visibly walks into position for the scan, with only the scanner animation being disabled if visual tasks are turned off. Scanned crew are above all suspicion and trusted completely, which turns their accusations during meetings into death sentences and makes them very difficult to eliminate, as they'll almost always have at least one other crewmate at their side. If two crewmates perform the scan together, the only thing that will ever separate them is extremely clever sabotage play, and they will automatically vote you off the ship if it comes down to three crew remaining.
- The Engineer role makes this even worse, especially in the Mira HQ map. When you see another crew member scan, then hop into the Med Bay's vent, you know you're going to have a problem; they can chase you everywhere, dive underground if they suspect an attack, and sneak off to the meeting button in a flash if you slip up, with only their time limit balancing it out.
- Fixing Comms is hell on mobile, due to the precision needed to match the waveform being difficult to achieve on a touchscreen. It can eat a lot of time and lets the Impostor take out others while several can be busy doing the fix.
The Skeld:
- The Electrical room in general is infamous for being a room you're almost guaranteed to die in if you aren't in a group. It has a vent for easy Impostor access and escape, a server wall that blocks the view of anyone passing by the hall entrance, and four possible tasks, meaning you'll likely have to go in there, which gives Impostors plenty of opportunities to find a potential victim. Also, two of the tasks have you stay in the room for a long time. One of them has a very timed spinning dial that you must have amazing timing to complete on the first go, and the other is a task where you must stand still and download information... directly over a vent. You are very likely to die in the middle of these tasks. On top of that, that's also where lights are located, and whenever lights are called, a body or two could be waiting inside, or the Imposter could be lying there, ready to kill the first Crewmate that walks through the doorway.LazarBeam
: When in doubt, someone's dead in Electrical.
Polus Outpost
- Almost every room on the map provides difficulty and/or significant danger for the Crewmates:
- Storage only has one task related to it (Fuel Engines), but it has only one entrance, and is located between pretty much all three of the biggest buildings in the game. Due to this, if someone gets the Fuel Engines task, it is very easy for someone to go there and get killed and never be noticed the entire game simply because it's so underused task-wise. The fact it has a vent right in the bottom corner of the room that connects to a vent outside Communications and Office/Admin means an Imposter can easily kill a player, jump in the vent, and quickly seem like they didn't do it without having to worry. Oh, and Storage also has a closable door, so if only one person is assigned fuel duty, their corpse can be safely sealed up in the room and left to rot for the rest of the game.
- The Lab in the northeast corner is known as "the Electrical of Polus" due to it being just as isolated and easy to access via vent. A body positioned just right can go completely unnoticed for several minutes, allowing the Impostors to secure additional kills.
- The Specimen room is the most isolated area on the map, with only two long hallways and no windows, and both doors out involve an airlock that's time-consuming to traverse. It's also the home of the tedious "Start Reactor" task which leaves you very vulnerable to anyone who's accompanied you here. Thankfully there are no vents, but a successful kill in this forsaken corner can go completely unnoticed until another body is reported.
- All the tasks in Communications take some time to do, and are all in the back of the room, where an Impostor can hide well away from the door (if they don't just close it) to avoid detection long enough to escape unseen.
- Weapons has the exact same issue as Communications—the actual task node is out of sight of the doorway, which, again, can be closed. Additionally, this is the home of the Destroy Asteroids task, so everyone can see the base cannon firing if visual tasks are on. The Crewmate you see join you in the room could be a friend who can now fully clear you as innocent, or an Impostor poised to eliminate someone who cannot be placed under suspicion.
- The Weather Nodes are infamous for phone players for two reasons: one, the general inaccuracy of a phone's touch screen doesn't play nice with the precision needed to complete its maze minigame, and you have to start over from scratch if you make a mistake; and two, the maze is navigated left-to-right, which means if you're a right-handed player, your hand's going to be covering up the majority of the maze most of the time. Even for PC players, the maze can still be a source of frustration, especially if they're trying to rush it.
- The "Open Waterways" task involves having to spin a large round valve a full turn to complete, and you'll have to wait for the waterways to slowly fill. Not only is this a fairly slow and boring task, it has to be done in three separate locations, two in one room and one almost halfway across the map. You also have to watch the waterway completely fill to register that task as complete, and tapping out or getting interrupted will pause progress. To cap off the frustration, the minigame interface completely covers the screen, meaning you are guaranteed to die if an Impostor finds you.
- "Check Keys" is the one Common Task that can trip up even the best Impostors. If it procs as a task, it will always be given to the entire crew, and since it's right inside the dropship starting location, it will always be the first task the crew tackles, meaning if you leave the task space too quickly, savvy Crewmates will instantly rush to the meeting desk and sentence you to a lava bath before the game has even really begun. On the flipside, if one Crewmate forgets to do the Keys, it becomes a very useful Chekhov's Gun you can pull out at an opportune moment to discredit them and almost guarantee an ejection. For bonus points, which keyhole you get isn't random—it's based on lobby entry order. So if a particularly smart Crewmate asks you which keyhole you had and you get it wrong, enjoy your lava bath, regardless of whether you're an Impostor who failed to fake it, or a Crewmate who didn't know this fact and so just forgot which you had. And as if that wasn't bad enough, Check Keys is one of the most popular situations for Imposters to perform a "stack kill" - murdering someone inside the stack of players where only noticing the extremely brief kill animation and the small amount of movement it causes will alert even the most attentive and paranoid Crewmates, resulting in a high-tension meeting where saying the wrong thing can get anyone ejected.
MIRA HQ
- MIRA HQ's reactor room is secured by a long decontamination tunnel that has a vent inside the tunnel, two vents inside the reactor, and another outside the decontamination. Entering it locks crewmates in for a good few seconds before it opens up. The whole thing is a huge deathtrap, with the added wrinkle of putting a huge time sink in attempts to undo sabotage, even with the fairly generous 45-second timer.
- Every vent on this map is interconnected in some way, allowing an Impostor to kill someone in the reactor, scuttle under the map to the hallway south of the cafeteria, and rejoin the crew just in time to "discover" the body with them, or call a meeting to clear any bodies currently rotting.
- In Hide n Seek, the long decontamination tunnel becomes a huge headache for the Impostor especially since in this mode the Crewmates can vent while the Impostor can't and has to go through, wasting precious seconds while their intended victim simply vents to the other side. The Crewmates can also use it to shut the Impostor behind for a few seconds. While the Crewmates have a limited number of times to vent, several crewmates can pull this off near the end of the game and the Impostor can't do much about it.
The Airship
- The Airship is a huge map, to the point that you get a choice of randomized rooms to spawn in at the beginning of the game and after each meeting. It's also got its fair share of dead ends to make navigation less straightforward. Even with a full lobby of 15, you can easily go a long time without seeing anyone, giving Impostors plenty of time to silently kill the Crew even with a long kill cooldown.
- In Hide and Seek mode, the Airship turns into Impostor kryptonite, not just because of many vents the Crewmates can use to get anywhere they want, but also because of a ladder glitch where, as long as a Crewmates uses it repeatedly to go up and down, you won't be able to kill them.
- While it may be daunting to navigate a new map for the first time, after long enough, you get used to it and can even memorize the location of some areas of interest. The Airship's Electrical doesn't offer this solace. It's composed of several smaller rooms, all interconnected, but when the game starts, a random number of doors within Electrical are permanently shut, ensuring that the place is never the same for two games in a row. What's worse is that a possible long task is "Reset Breakers", where you have to pull each switch in Electrical from 1 to 7, and they too will have their positions randomized each game.
- The "Upload Data" task comes with a new twist—instead of going to "Admin", you instead go outside and basically hold up your tablet, moving it around to get a signal. Depending on how lucky you are with where you move it, this can either be much faster than the standard upload if you get a perfect signal quickly, or slower if you're stuck with a poor signal for most of it. Did we mention that there are vents close to these outdoor areas?
- "Unlock Safe" requires you to go to the cargo bay and unlock the safe there using a set of instructions. This is not an easy task, as you are required to spin the safe in a certain direction to reach the number in the combination, even if it would be quicker to spin it the other direction. Also, the safe is in an isolated area at the back where Imposters can easily kill anyone trying to do the task, especially if they take too long trying to get the whole combination right because of bad controls.
