Are you ‘sus’?
Among Us – the game that popularized the word ‘sus’ (short for ‘suspect’ or ‘suspicious’) and merged the party game Mafia and the sci-fi horror film The Thing.
It’s a murder-mystery game that was conceptualized by Marcus Bromander and published by his company, Innersloth on June 15, 2018 for iOS and Android. Two months later, the PC version came out on Steam.
Of the ten players who can be in a game at once, the main characters are Crewmates. They have up to three Impostors among them whose goal is to sabotage their location and kill everyone while the Crewmates go about designated tasks and try to discover the identity of the Impostor(s). The Crewmates win once they have completed all their tasks, or once they have voted all of the Impostors out.
The Impostors are randomly chosen and their objective is to blend in by pretending to attend to various duties while actually carrying out acts of sabotage like turning off lights and depleting the ship’s oxygen; but their chief target is to murder the Crewmates one by one until there is an equal number to Impostors and Crewmates left. This way, they cannot be voted out and are therefore the default winners.
There are four locations and they each have labeled maps: a spaceship called “The Skeld”, the very tall building that is the headquarters of the company MIRA, a research base on the alien planet Polus, and an airship.
Players communicate via text-only in-game meetings where they discuss who the Impostors might be and vote off whoever the majority thinks is guilty.
You have twelve colours to choose from if you want to customise your character, plus ‘skins’ which are outfits like police officer, military, captain, chemist, miner, etc. These require payment in the mobile version of the game and are available on PC after purchase. Skins were added in 2019. The year before, a wide variety of headwear was added to the game. This ranges from top hats and uniform headgear to a snorkel, a banana peel hat, a flamingo hat, and a mohawk. Many are Halloween or Christmas themed as well.
Your character can be a pet owner too! Each of the 11 different pets has unique animations and reactions to their owner dying.
Some of these pets include a squig, a brainslug, a UFO, a mini Crewmate, a robot, and a dog.
The game went viral in mid-2020 after several prominent Twitch streamers and YouTubers featured the game on their channels. YouTube videos about Among Us were viewed 4 billion times in September 2020 alone and the next month TikTok had over 13 billion views on Among Us related videos. When YouTuber CG5 wrote a song based on the game, titled “Show Yourself”, it got over 60 million views in four months. The number of players peaked at 3.8 million in late September 2020, overloading the game’s free server and forcing the game’s programmers to rush to resolve the issues.
Among Us has inspired an enormous number of songs, fanart, and memes. Forest Willard, one of the game’s original programmers, says that fan-created content “really is the best part” and Bromander said it is “my favorite thing to see”.
Some U.S. Representatives even streamed themselves playing Among Us on Twitch in October 2020 in order to encourage people to vote in the US presidential election.
A few tips for playing the game as a Crewmate:
- Be aware of your surroundings while you complete your tasks. If someone suspicious is around, maybe keep an eye on them instead of focusing on your task.
- At least in the beginning of the game, try to partner up with one of two other people you trust to lessen your chance of being stuck alone with an Impostor.
- Let others see you doing tasks so they’ll know you’re not an Impostor and check on other people so you can see whether they are actually completing tasks too.
And a few tips for the Impostors among us…
- In case anyone asks, have an alibi for what you were just doing and where. The more specific, the better.
- If someone accuses an innocent person in a meeting, back them up. If you can get a Crewmate voted out, that’s one less person to have to eliminate later.
- Have a strategy. If you were just accused and then someone who was near your location turns up dead in the next round, you are going to appear mighty ‘sus’.