As The Traitors returns to NBC with a fresh civilian cast on Thursday, Sept. 17, the social deception genre it helped popularize is enjoying its own renaissance in video games. From free browser titles to immersive virtual reality experiences, eight long-standing favorites offer the same nerve-wracking premise that drives this week’s new season: figuring out who in your group is lying directly to your face.
The television franchise built an entire phenomenon around a single question—whom do you trust when anyone in the room could be deceiving you? This year’s installment, The Traitors: New Blood, trades its usual roster of celebrities for ordinary contestants while foregrounding those same tensions. Video games have been running this exact experiment for years, and several standouts remain worth playing if this season has left you hungry for more.
A Free-to-Play Classic With Endless Complexity
Town of Salem drops players into a bustling small town where each round assigns a random role from roughly 30 possibilities, including Werewolf, Serial Killer, and Sheriff. Rounds follow a strict day-night cycle: talk and vote during daylight hours, then act in secret after dark. The sheer number of roles means every match grows complicated quickly, whether you choose to betray your lobby or cooperate with it.
The Jailor stands out as particularly punishing, able to lock up and interrogate opponents before they can lie their way free. That single mechanic captures the genre’s central dread: safety is never guaranteed, no matter how carefully you plan.
Cartoon Geese With a Ruthless Core
If Among Us featured a flock of fowl committing foul deeds, you’d arrive at Goose Goose Duck, a free multiplayer party game available on PC, mobile, and in-browser. Players control geese—or ducks in disguise when playing as the traitor—completing chores across barns, manors, and campsites while saboteurs work from within.
More than 20 roles appear at random each match, ranging from an amnesiac who forgets their own alignment mid-game to a vulture that drags bodies off to a hidden nest. The cartoon art style and honking audio cues make the experience seem harmless when it is truly anything but.
Project Winter combines social deduction with genuine survival pressure on PC and console for up to eight players. Stranded travelers must chop wood, hunt food, and repair a radio tower before freezing or starving—while hidden traitors sabotage supplies and pick off innocent survivors one at a time.
The genius lies in its ambiguity: nobody needs to actively hunt you, because the cold will take care of that. Every decision about whom to trust near a fire or protect from comes down to whether someone wants you dead before rescue arrives.
A First-Person Horror Take
In Deceit, six strangers trapped in a dungeon-like facility with no memory of how they arrived must uncover two secretly infected players. The virus spreads on contact and turns anyone it touches into another Infected, who win by infecting the whole group before someone escapes.
The rest fight back with crossbows, traps, or blunt objects lying nearby. One touch can turn you into the very thing everyone else is hunting, making every close encounter potentially fatal.
Virtual Reality Where Your Face Betrays You
The tells that tend to get lost over voice chat or text—a flinch, a too-long pause, an avoided glance—are right there, in-game, for everyone else to read. VR doesn’t give you the break that text-based deduction allows.
Werewolves Within
Werewolves Within is compatible with the original PlayStation VR and Oculus Rift, placing villagers and werewolves into a game where face and hand movement tracking works against you. While text-based deduction lets you compose yourself between messages, this experience offers no such respite under intense scrutiny.
A Two-Decade-Old Simulation That Never Dies
Space Station 13, released in 2003, remains a free browser-based multiplayer sim where dozens of players log in as station staff with assigned jobs like engineer, doctor, or security officer. One or more secretly take on second jobs as Syndicate agents running sabotage from within.
The game inspired entire communities with distinct rules, modes, and custom codebases—making a two-decade-old title feel surprisingly fresh and constantly replayable today.
A Horror Spin-Off of a Beloved Franchise
Set in the same universe as the Hello Neighbor games, Secret Neighbor reimagines the social deduction formula as multiplayer horror on PC and console. Players control kids sneaking into a neighbor’s house to rescue a friend locked in the basement, only to discover one member of the group is the menacing Neighbor in disguise.
The game swaps the usual conversation-and-accusation loop for something closer to realizing mid-search that you’ve been standing next to the real threat all along.
The Game That Defined a Generation
Among Us remains the most recognizable entry in the genre, casting players as innocent crewmates or insidious impostors aboard a spaceship. Crewmates tackle necessary chores like wiring and medbay scans while impostors fake their way through the same tasks before killing colleagues in empty rooms or sneaking through vents.
Emergency meetings erupt to argue about who’s lying, vote someone out, and immediately reveal whether players ejected an innocent crewmate into space—a constant reminder that innocence offers no protection.
Looking Ahead
Set the same basic premise on a spaceship, in a snowed-in survival camp, or in a Scottish mansion with Alan Cumming, and the central fear barely changes. Someone in your group—someone you trust, someone you’re working toward a common goal—is lying, and you won’t know who until it’s too late.
The 22 people walking into this season of The Traitors are about to learn what these games have always taught: knowing the traitor is out there doesn’t actually help you spot them at all. As new episodes air Thursday, Sept. 17 on NBC, players can turn that same dread toward their favorite digital companions.
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