Among Us went from relatively unknown game in 2018 to overnight worldwide sensation in 2020, when the world was locked away in their homes. The success spawned various console ports, merchandise, and even an animated streaming show on Paramount+. While initial plans for a sequel were put on hold in favor of continuously supporting the original game, the team at Innersloth has been working on a spin-off, Among Us Story: On Guard. We got our hands on the demo before its public release and came away intrigued, despite the demo's short length.

You play the role of the Operator, someone hired to help reduce the crew member drop-off rate the company has experienced due to the actions of The Impostor. To do this, you're strapped up to a simulator to take on the role of The Guard. The purpose is to place you in different situations and solve various virtual mysteries in hopes of sharpening your deductive skills to correctly (and quickly) identify The Impostor before they kill more crew members. For your first virtual case, you'll solve the murder of The Cook.

This is a completely single-player experience with no option for multiplayer, and this allows the developers to add some personality to some of the crew members, even if they're only ever referenced by their given roles. For example, The Captain is rather gullible, while The Doctor is mostly interested in being the next streaming star. Meanwhile, The Guard is quick to quote a whole book of cliches about dispensing justice and the law. Whether any of this makes the game more humorous or better is up for interpretation, but it is good to see that there was some effort in creating characters rather than going with blank slates.

While it would've been easy to take the main game's presentation and fit it into the new single-player experience, there have been some pretty big changes. For audio, the most noticeable change is the inclusion of music throughout the game — and not just during the big moments, so you aren't accompanied by silence for a majority of the time. There are no voices, but their exclusion isn't a big deal. Visually, the game has been polished up to deliver a look that's more high definition, minus some of the black outlines for the characters. The colors are more vibrant, and the camera is zoomed in more to provide more focus on your character and less on the environment.

The core gameplay loop shares some similarities with the main game. Mainly, you'll perform some tasks to make progress in the game. The infamous card swiping task is present, and you'll use it to unlock and lock sliding doors. Even though the mechanic is mocked in the game, you'll do it so often in the demo that you'll either be forced to master it or refer to it as an annoyance. The other task in the demo is making coffee, which is a multistep process that sees you placing the cup in the coffee maker, opening a jar of beans, putting the beans into the machine by hand, and waiting for the cup to fill before placing it back on the saucer. Like all of the tasks in the main game, it's meant to be tedious, so its inclusion makes the game feel faithful to the source material.

The new gameplay elements seem small initially but end up being pretty important when it comes to giving On Guard its own identity. There are dialogue options, but don't expect that to branch into different story paths. There's a part where you have to avoid flashlights and another part where you need to chase down someone, but it doesn't feel all that different from the normal game. The major change comes with vent traversal, as you now control the game from a first-person perspective. Movement is stunted like an old dungeon crawler, where you'll be moving in one of four cardinal directions one square at a time. While the demo never showed off any surprises for this section, it is neat to be manually travel through what is an important part of the Among Us experience.

The major drawback is the brevity of the demo. Once you find The Cook's body for a second time, you're pulled out of the simulation and told that the experience will only continue when the full game is released. That part is fine, since a demo isn't meant to show off every facet of a game, but it never really felt like you did much overall. Instead of feeling like a slice of gameplay, you're offered up a sliver since you can't explore much of the ship. That is only good enough to give you a faint idea of the normal gameplay loop.

The short Among Us Story: On Guard demo has left us intrigued and curious. How many scenarios are there in the game? How long is each scenario on average? Will you get to perform investigations in all of the different locales from the main game? Does the list of cast members change per scenario? Without much to go on, it is difficult to predict how good the final game will be, but having a solo game in this universe remains a welcome thing for those who want to play without going up against friends or random strangers. Hopefully these questions will get answered as we learn more about the full game, including a release date.