We take a look at two exceptional video-game-to-movie adaptations that stand out from the pack of generally terrible, bone-headed "re-imaginings" - Mari Asato's "Fatal Frame" and John Hsu's "Detention." We talk a lot about East Asian Horror and what makes a good adaptation while dissecting the finer points of these surprisingly great films. Be warned - this is basically "Uncle Ali's J-Horror Corner Pt. II" so the tangents are real.

As a supplement to our discussion of race and gender in Deadly Premonition 2, we're making our Zero Brightness Plus episode on Representation (from January 2020) available to the public. If you like what you hear, we do an episode like this every week for our Patreon subscribers. You can sign up at patreon.com/zerobrightness to hear all 40-something episodes and get more every week.

We attempt to review the launch-day version of Deadly Premonition 2 - a feat that is mostly impossible due to a combination of broken gameplay, extremely buggy code and an offensive plot that has already been retconned (but not yet patched!). Was all of this a terrible mistake? Are our hazy memories of Greenvale just beautiful lies? Listen on to find out. This episode is spoiler-free until the last 30 minutes, which are marked with a very prominent audio tag.

We talk about two Horror SHMUPs, a rare sub-sub-genre of games that mix the gameplay of classic arcade shoot-em-ups with the aesthetics of horror. We discuss the visceral delights (and Bullet Hell-induced headaches) of dodging and shooting as well as the bits of story and Edward Gorey-inspired aesthetics sprinkled throughout these games.

We're talking about... Hitman? Listen, I don't have some amazing reason why we're talking about Hitman besides that it's really good and you should play it. We also talk about where we're at with the show, the joys of open-ended gameplay and the adventures of Agent Forty-leven, the world's shittiest super-spy.

We're talking Dreadout, a modern take on the classic PS2-style survival horror genre. Does it transcend its scrappy, low-budget development or is it just a mess? We don't agree, so we spend an hour trying to sort it out.

We attempt to cover The Last of Us Part II; the sprawling, controversial and eagerly awaited follow-up to Naughty Dog's modern classic. Fittingly, we have an epic-length conversation that covers everything from internet trolls to people being confused by bodybuilders. Somewhere in there, James assigns a numerical score to a video game and Ali pauses the show to freestyle about how much he hates the police. Just another episode, nothing to see here!

To tide y'all over until we have our Last of Us 2 episode read later this week, we've made on of our patreon-exclusive episodes free to the public. It's a highly relevant discussion of AAA action adventure games and if you like what you hear, you can sign up at patreon.com/zerobrightness

We finally tackle The Last of Us, Sony's megaton Horror exclusive that has been equally era-defining and controversial. Monica Coleslaw joins for a discussion of video game violence, TV adaptations, bad dads and the suspicious way in which all AAA video games are sorta the same. Press R1 to come back next week for a discussion of the sequel!

Our discussion of Amnesia: the Dark Descent turns into an "opposite day" version of our Alone in the Dark episode, wherein we debate the merits of historical significance versus the all-important "Fun Factor." It's a GamePro reader's dream!