First Class Trouble Trust No One On Board

Every round splits the group: human Residents trying to shut down the ship's AI, and Personoids, robots that look human and want the opposite. You gather information about the passengers, decide who seems trustworthy, and vote out the suspected robots before they pick you off. As a Personoid, you blend in, sabotage from the shadows, and strike when someone gets too close to the truth. Proximity voice chat means you hear people right next to you, so a well-timed lie lands in someone's ear, and so does a whispered accusation. One wrong read of the room and the wrong person walks out the airlock.

The ISS Alithea is packed with ways to remove a fellow passenger without lifting a finger yourself. Fires break out, wiring goes bad, and chandeliers hang exactly where a nudge sends them falling. You can whack a friend across the pool with a racket, shove a foe toward the flames, or simply look away at the convenient moment. Every interaction is physicalized, so bodies fly, tumble and collide in ways that turn a murder into slapstick. Each level has its own theme, items and hazards, which means new accidents to arrange every time the group moves deeper into the ship.

Between rounds, the ship's onboard mall lets you spend Infinity Coins on new clothes and accessories, so your passenger can look sharp while lying through their teeth. There is also the Vruumba (trademark not pending), your personal companion, ready for a cash-funded upgrade. The look of the game fits the setting: a charming, retro-styled luxury liner with an unsettling streak underneath, which suits a game where the person complimenting your outfit might be a robot planning your demise.

Custom games take 4 to 12 players, and standard games run with 6, so there is room for the whole group and then some. The rules take a minute to explain: humans shut down CAIN, robots stop them, everyone argues about who is who. Rounds are short and every one plays out differently depending on who gets the robot roles and who talks their way out of suspicion. An emote wheel and in-game text chat keep the table talk going even when someone's mic dies. It is the kind of game where the argument after the vote is half the fun.

On paper, this is a co-op job: collect key cards, solve puzzles, work together to reach CAIN and shut it down before the ship is lost. In practice, one or two of your teammates may be robots helping you just enough to stay trusted. That is what makes the teamwork fun: you genuinely need each other to progress, and you genuinely cannot be sure who is worth trusting. Success takes coordination and communication, and the moments where a plan comes together right before someone betrays it are the ones you will retell for weeks.