An artist on Reddit has recreated core Impostor versus crewmate conflicts of Among Us in beautiful Japanese-style fanart. It's the latest creative homage to the popular series, and unique in that it utilizes a classical Japanese style to represent a cartoonish Western-style game.
Among Us, the online co-op sleuthing game developed by indie studio InnerSloth, was initially released in relative obscurity in 2018, but gained a huge surge in popularity this year thanks in no small part to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Twitch streamers who introduced the game to the general public. Among Us's simple mechanics, cartoonish 2D art style, and massive replayability value catapulted it into worldwide stardom, and spawned a steady stream of memes, fan art, and parodies.
Fan art in particular is a popular vehicle for paying homage to the title, thanks in no small part to its simplistic art style and characters lacking in any particularly realistic or human features. Fan artists, especially professionals, have been trending towards Among Us in the third dimension. However, Redditor 3rgoProxy took a different approach by illustrating familiar scenarios from the game in Ukiyo-e, a traditional Japanese painting style popularized in the Edo period, which also meant giving the Crewmates and Imposters human features. All three of their inspired creations can be viewed in the Reddit post below:
It's a little jarring to see Among Us's trademark look translated into something that is stylistically the opposite - ukiyo-e prominently featured kabuki actors, beautiful women, and natural landscapes, while Among Us focuses on cartoonish bipedal blobs in space who only seem to have hands when they're using them to stab or disembowel each other. But 3rgoProxy uses the game's familiar mise-en-scène to make each scenario instantly familiar to anyone who's played the game, especially the image of an Imposter "venting" from beneath a wooden floor plank to sneak up behind an unsuspecting Crewmate occupied with wiring.
The well of creativity tapped by Among Us fans certainly runs deep, but most of the homages to the popular game kept it pretty safe by sticking as close to the recognizable cartoonish style as possible. While some have diverged more into the horror aspect of a game that involves players stalking and murdering each other, 3rgoProxy's artwork is unique because it shows that Among Us is so familiar to the internet at large that an image of a man in green kimono stabbing another man in purple in the back with a katana is an instantly recognizable scene.
Among Us is available on Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android, and it will launch on Xbox consoles in 2021.
Source: 3rgoProxy