Last week, Innersloth announced a sequel to Among Us — for the second time. Back in 2020, Innersloth canceled its first attempt to follow the deduction game up, Among Us 2, so that it could dedicate more resources to the newly mega-popular original. Five years later, the series is finally taking the next step with Among Us 3D.
If you’re wondering what the big change is this time around… well, the clue is in the title. Instead of moving your Beans around a top-down space station, players will now explore in three-dimensions. The teaser showed The Skeld from the original game, and it’s unclear how much this new outing will diverge from the first game. But often, 3D is enough.
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Instant Sequel
Ever since Super Mario 64, video games have had a simple formula for big changes: make it 3D. Some series make the transition so well that they’re only really remembered for their 3D entries. I’d reckon a healthy portion of Metal Gear Solid fans have never played Metal Gear (1987) or Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990). For most, 1997 is when the series they know and love was born. Ditto GTA and GTA 2. Helldivers 2 seems to have taken its previously top-down series in a similar direction.
Others struggle to make the jump. Castlevania got its first 3D game all the way back in 1999, but is still overwhelmingly thought of as a 2D series. It even gave us one half of the name ‘Metroidvania’ that we use to describe 2D exploration-focused action games.
Ideally, a series gets great games in both form factors. Metroid, the other contributor to ‘Metroidvania’, for example. Nintendo is really good at this. Almost all of its core franchises began life as 2D games. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Fire Emblem, Kirby, and Pokemon all started out as 2D games, before getting defining 3D entries that enabled the series to operate on parallel tracks going forward. For a publisher like Nintendo that makes home consoles and handhelds, that’s the dream. Big new 3D entries to play on your TV, and smaller 2D games to play on the go.
Pokemon has, historically, been the exception. Until the Switch blurred the lines, its big mainline releases were always the portable ones.
What Makes A Sequel A Sequel?
At its core, a sequel is primarily trying to do one thing: take something familiar and make it feel new again. There are plenty of ways to do that. Super Smash Bros. Melee added new characters and stages. Half-Life 2 radically expanded the physics and storytelling techniques of the original. The Witcher 3 went open-world. In recent years, adding a second playable character whose story interweaves with a protagonist from previous games (The Last of Us Part 2, God of War Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart) has been a popular approach for Sony.
But the most fundamental change a sequel can make is adding another dimension. The gameplay of Metroid Prime, for example, isn’t all that different from Super Metroid. You explore an interconnected world, finding new tools and weapons that allow you to access previously inaccessible areas. Yet, experiencing the world in first-person radically alters how it feels. I love both 2D and 3D games, but if you really care about ‘immersion’, playing a 3D game tends to accomplish it more successfully. In first-person, you literally see what the character sees, which gets you much closer to feeling what they feel.
The 2D Super Mario games had beach levels, but nothing made me feel like I was at the beach quite like Super Mario Sunshine. Among Us 3D has the same potential. Even if the gameplay doesn’t change one bit, seeing these familiar locations with an added dimension is a tried and true recipe for sequel success.
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