Monkey Island 2 in the Cryengine looks very pretty indeed. In fact, it’s astonishing, capturing the original style faithfully, but rendered in 3D.
“While the art style for MONKEY 1 is somewhat less defined due to the nature of the pixelated Deluxe Paint backgrounds, MONKEY 2 uses scanned hand-painted backgrounds. Simply redrawing the scanned artworks to work in higher resolutions would be a bit of a shame actually, but there is another way of bringing them into the high definition future. So, rather than loading up an original background or a scanned piece of concept art as a template and then repainting or drawing over the original, we’ll do something a little bit more sophisticated.
A camera mapping method is used to create higher image fidelity and detail from the original 2D concept art. The technique is normally used to produce 2,5D or 3D mattepaintings out of a 2D or photo source and to speed up the production process. But hey! There is no rule against using it to enhance a normal 2D background. The original art is projected onto simple 3d geometry that is built with the original viewpoint in mind. If done right, even basic 3d geometry can enhance lighting mood, shadows and surface details. On top of that camera mapping opens up possibilities for animation or a conversion into a faithful 3D level or 3D scene.”
Source: rockpapershotgun