Making an animated show is hard. Making one based on one of the most popular video game series of the past decade, with its own time capsule of memes, is an unenviable task, made all the more perilous when you’ve been beaten to the punch and its timeliness (or lack thereof) calls its very existence into question. Yet somehow, Paramount Plus’ Among Us show floats where others would sink, delivering an animated video game adaptation that’s easily one of the funniest cartoons we’ve gotten in a long time. Based on Innersloth’s mega-popular murder mystery game and animated by Titmouse (Star Trek: Lower Decks), Among Us follows a crew of colorful astronauts hauling ore across the galaxy for their corporate overlords. But as they sprint around the ship keeping everything running, crewmates start turning up dead—reduced to bloody chunks with a single comedic bone poking out of their jellybean‑like bodies like an anime meat gag. Turns out there’s an alien imposter among them, and the crew has to suss out who it is before they all wind up dead. The imposter, meanwhile, has their work cut out for them, because this crew wastes no time succumbing to The Thing-inspired paranoia, resulting in a mélange of the goriest deaths and sharpest jokes a cartoon—let alone a video game adaptation—has delivered in ages. Many video game adaptations have succumbed to the pitfall of justifying their existence to day-one gamers and newcomers by treating their narratives as reference checklists. This checklist invariably leads shows to contort themselves, dutifully cramming in every meme, Easter egg, and non sequitur for their fandom, making gamers point at their screens like Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s a dogmatic approach that’s good for a cheap pop with audiences and a low-effort social media post pointing out parallels that follows, but it also ages fast.