Shift At Midnight: Who Is the Impostor?

I recently saw a streamer playing this game, so I tried it with some friends. It was pretty fun; I wonder whether future updates will add more ways to play.

How the game works

Running a gas station is hard work. You must keep the shelves stocked, sell enough goods each night to meet the quota, receive deliveries, and keep the store clean.

While serving customers, question every one of them carefully. Some customers are not human—they are doppelgangers. If you let one slip through, it will return later in the shift and try to kill you and your friends… If you think someone is not human, execution on the spot is recommended; clean up afterward.

If you mess up, be prepared… When the doppelgangers return as terrifying monsters, you must set traps, barricade the doors and windows, and hide.

In Shift At Midnight, you work the night shift at a supermarket. After meeting the daily revenue target, you can spend the extra money on items.

Your main task is to determine whether each customer is an impostor. Use the computer at the register to look up information, then talk with the customer and look for inconsistencies.

Once you identify an impostor, you must shoot “it”. Otherwise, when the shift ends, the impostors will attack.

In short, the core mechanic is the familiar “identify the impostor” format. Unlike games that punish a wrong decision immediately, this one gathers every impostor you spared during the day and punishes you all at once. The more you let through, the stronger the attack.

Who is the impostor?

On my first run I had no experience and spared a crowd of impostors, so the night invasion felt like a sudden zombie horde.

By the second run I had learned a few things:

  • Pay close attention to times mentioned in conversation. If they do not match the computer’s records, the customer is an impostor.
  • Customers sometimes mention other NPCs. Look those NPCs up and check whether they are listed as “deceased” or do not exist.
  • Watch physical details such as tattoos and scars.

With practice, you can identify most impostors.

I also found ShiftAtMidnightDB, which collects detailed NPC information and lists which NPCs are impostors and what clues reveal them. It is handy for making confident bets with friends 🤣.

A few special tricks

Multiplayer is recommended. Later on, one person cannot handle the register, gas station, cleaning, and purchasing alone.

Here are a couple of item-duplication methods:

  • For items that respawn indefinitely at a spawn point, such as the register pistol, press E rapidly. You can produce up to as many items as you have inventory slots.
  • After buying a single item, such as a shotgun, press E to pick it up and then tap G rapidly several times. You may throw out two identical items. The duplicate is exactly the same as the original.

Have funヾ(≧▽≦*)o