Sample Coverage
“I absolutely adore the traitor mechanism.”
– Dave Neumann (Pocket Tactics)
Deceive Your Friends as an Alien Traitor or Eliminate the Xeno Threat Through Teamwork in Who Lurks
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Gather 2-5 of your closest friends and get ready for a test of wits, reflexes, and memory in Who Lurks — a one-of-a-kind party game of deception launching today on smartphones and tablets. Can you uncover the identity of the Alien among you before it’s too late?
Developed by United Arab Emirates studio Hybrid Humans, Who Lurks challenges players to identify the Alien disguised as a crew member aboard the AE Hybrid spaceship — currently on a mission to find a new home for humanity. At the start of the game, the Alien player is randomly selected and must secretly sabotage the ship before it can reach its destination. On the opposing side, the crew’s objective is to “search and destroy” — or basically survive until the end of the game. With five or six players, a second alien might be added to the mix — making things even more tense!
Everyone (including the Alien) is assigned a role as part of the AE Hybrid’s crew: Captain, Soldier, Pilot, Engineer, Doctor, Chef. While aboard the AE Hybrid, players will encounter missions that are carried out through minigames. For example: In “Prisoners,” players must place colored dots in a “prison” of a matching color before time runs out; “Maze” generates a randomly-shaped maze that players must successfully navigate with their fingers; and “Patterns” presents players with five colored circles and a rhythm that must be duplicated.
At the start of each scenario, the crew selects a specialist for that mission. Each role excels at certain tasks and can give the entire crew certain benefits as long as the right specialist is chosen. However, if the wrong specialist is chosen, the mission becomes much harder — and if the specialist fails the mission, the damage to the ship can be catastrophic. If the Alien is chosen as the specialist, the player will have to choose between purposefully failing the mission to cause the most damage or successfully completing the mission and staying hidden from suspicion. Once per game, Aliens can deploy a special mutator to make missions more difficult for the specialist players (such as adding mines to the Maze game or forcing players to repeat patterns in reverse) — giving them a greater likelihood of failure.
Players take turns playing each minigame by passing the device around the room until everyone has taken a turn. At the end of each round, players can view each other’s stats to uncover how many missions a crew member has completed or failed. Then the crew as a whole gets to eliminate one member as a possible Alien traitor! Players must choose carefully; for every innocent lost crew member, the player loses that member’s specialization — and the Alien is one step closer to victory.
In single-player mode, the player is the last surviving member of the crew and must perform missions alone. After completing enough missions, a special module can be unlocked that will enable the player to discover the identity of the Alien in multiplayer games.
“With Who Lurks, our goal was to faithfully recreate on mobile that old-school experience that only traditional deception games such as Werewolf used to offer,” says Fakhra AlMansouri, CEO and game director at Hybrid Humans. “Having a touchscreen makes all the difference in the world: There’s nothing quite like having to figure out in real time if crewmates are legitimately bad at their jobs … or Aliens in disguise!”
Key Features
- Experience a thrilling party board game in a digital format.
- Practice your poker face with local multiplayer and 2-5 of your closest friends.
- Play with a single device in pass-and-play mode.
- Perfect your Alien abilities and disrupt the human players.
- Enjoy a fast-paced single-player mode and unlock more content.
- Challenge your friends in Hard mode, where high tension can result in more mistakes — leading to more ship damage and even more difficulty locating the Alien(s) among you.
Pricing & Availability
Who Lurks can be downloaded for FREE on the App Store and Google Play. The game contains three distinct in-app purchases:
- Remove ads: $1.99
- Hack system + remove ads: $2.99
- Full unlock (bundle): $4.99
About Hybrid Humans
Founded in 2014 and based in Abu Dhabi, Hybrid Humans is a creative independent game studio dedicated to crafting memorable and exciting gaming experiences. Led by chief executive officer and game director, Fakhra AlMansouri, the team passionately believes that games can have a positive effect by making the world a happier place and inspiring everyone to make a difference. Who Lurks is the studio’s second title — following on the heels of the puzzle action game, Hop Hop Away.