Is this the worst typography cockup of 2026?
by https://www.creativebloq.com/author/tom-may · Creative Bloq
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Every so often a piece of branding goes wrong in a way that (a) it goes viral, and (b) you think – especially in these AI times – that it's all a hoax. But believe me, this one's real. In fact, at time of writing, you could still go to the source, the listing for In Us on Steam, and see it for yourself.
In Us, in case you didn't know, is a co-op horror game from Engawa Games, an independent Japanese game development studio previously known for its chaotic co-op game Parking Together!.
The multiplayer survival horror title follows a team of exorcists around a village corrupted by demons. Players work together to spot which villagers are secretly monsters in disguise, then exorcise them before things turn nasty.
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It all sounds like the sort of game I'd love: part social deduction, part tense atmospheric horror, built for playing with friends.
Better still, it dropped with some deliciously eerie, atmospheric key art. A stained-glass window, candlelight, a robed figure, a gun-toting exorcist crow in a fedora. There's a lot of skill and imagination on show here, and Engawa Games certainly deserved for their new release to go viral. But unfortunately, it did so for all the wrong reasons.
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In case the image at the top of this page hasn't loaded, the problem is with the stylised lettering of the title: "In us" looks far more like "Anus". As DualShockers spotted, the effect is unmistakable once you see it, and impossible to unsee afterwards.
Why did it happen?
This isn't the first typographic fail we've seen, and why, you might wonder, does it happen? My guess is that, most of the time, it's a symptom of designers spending hours staring at a logo up close, at high resolution, usually on a big screen. After a while, you stop seeing the letters as letters and start seeing them as shapes to be balanced.
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Basically, once you really start digging into the details, your brain stops seeing the big picture. Which – unlikely as it seems – means it's easy to miss what a word looks like to someone glancing at it cold; at thumbnail size, on a phone, for half a second. Stylised display type only makes it worse.
It's all reminiscent of the "Invisible Gorilla" experiment created by researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons to show that people who are focused on one thing can easily overlook something else. To demonstrate this effect, they created a video of students passing a basketball among each other.
Viewers of the video were asked to count the number of times the players with the white shirts passed the ball. As result, many of them failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit appearing in the centre of the image. And I'll admit it, when I saw the video for the first time, I made that exact mistake myself. (Something my wife, who doesn't miss a trick, will never let me live down.)
I wasn't too surprised, because I'd already spent over 20 years working in print magazines. During which time, I would sometimes fail to spot a massive typo on the cover design we were working on until I'd seen it at least 30 times, because I'd be so obsessed with getting other aspects of the design nailed.
Sometimes (whisper it) these covers actually got printed with a typo - despite having been approved by a dozen other people up the publishing chain. Thankfully none of those errors related to embarrassing body parts. But as the saying goes: there by the grace of God go I.
In other words, enjoying mocking Engawa Games for their typography fail today. But prepare for tomorrow, because it could be your turn next. And watch out for that gorilla!