The PlayStation port of Innersloth’s treacherous multiplayer masterpiece, Among Us, has beaten out triple-A heavy hitters like Call of Duty: Vanguard and FIFA 2022 to emerge triumphant as the most downloaded game on PlayStation for the holiday season 2021. Among Us topped the charts on both PS4 and PS5, and in both North America and Europe. Not bad for a three-year-old mobile game that was so lowkey on its initial release that Innersloth almost canceled it numerous times.
Of course, Among Us was actually released in December, while all the other games on the most-downloaded lists were from November or earlier. It pretty much had the December new releases list all to itself, but this is still an impressive achievement for an indie game. It’s also a further indicator to triple-A publishers that players might just be starting to get tired of annual iterations of the same franchises at the same time every year.
Among Us was inspired by the classic card game Mafia and by John Carpenter’s The Thing (also a classic). The idea is that among between five and fifteen players, up to three are randomly designated “imposters,” which means they can sneak around and kill everyone else. That is, unless the other players figure out who they are and stop them. It’s pretty much the only experience we can think of that makes intense, all-consuming paranoia fun.
