Zero Brightness - A Podcast About Horror Video Games

We check out Echo Night 2, a game never officially released in the west and only recently patched with a fan translation. We discuss the many ways in which it tries to build out the basic Ghost Friendship Simulator gameplay of the first one - with results that vary widely in quality - as well as its super-90s goth aesthetic and incomprehensible plot. It's Echo Night, alright!

We try to answer the title question for ourselves. In the process, we discuss racism and bigotry in media, fair labor practices and what responsibility the consumer has in fighting for or against their own values when consuming media.

We discuss the asymmetrical online slasher movie simulator Dead By Daylight with our friend Vincent from our Discord. We try to talk about the finer points of the game but mostly end up debating whether it's best experienced as a competitive pursuit or an S-tier spooky hangout game.

We discuss two of the big Meta Horror games that keep coming up in conversations about all of the other weird/indie/meta games we've covered on the show. We discuss Eversion's simple yet effective mind tricks and Pony Island's utterly bizarre take on a Horror game. We also talk about working in a guitar store for a surprisingly long amount of time, but that's cool too.

We finally get around to talking about how The Evil Within 2 is an amazing, unsung gem of the eighth generation. We discuss its many quirks, from amazing open-world gameplay to a villain that can only be described as "Cutie Hannibal." You couldn't make this stuff up, even if you were injecting CBD straight into your neck like our guy Sebastian does!

Retro Month winds down as we check out Carrion, a unique twist on the Metroidvania formula that has you playing as the monster - an amorphous predatory blob hell-bent on turning a perfectly good space station into a blood-splattered mess of exposed wires and gore. What a jerk!

Retro Month takes a modern detour as we check out Faith, the Atari-style horror game developed by Airdorf Games and released in 2017. James thinks it's a masterpiece and Ali thinks it has more in common with the flawed-but-fascinating game we covered in the NES Horror episode.

We take a look at a few licensed horror games on the Nintendo Entertainment System and find a surprisingly ambitious cross-section of ideas that predict where the Survival Horror genre would eventually go. In this pre-history of horror, we're checking out Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and Monster Party. Turns out some of the crappy platformers on the NES have more going on under the hoo...

Retro Month Begins! Episode 73 finds us discussing a handful of Horror games that were available on the Sega Genesis, the 16-bit console favored by the cool kids who smoked cigs and watched R-rated movies. We are mostly talking Devilish, Decap Attack and Haunting Starring Polterguy but - as per usual - it goes all over the place.

We run through The Dread X Collection, a new virtual game jam inspired by PT and sharing some similarities with the Haunted PS1 Demo Disc. We talk about the highs and lows of the collection as well as why we love bite-sized indie games - especially after a summer of epic-length disappointments.

We're talking The Count Lucanor, the predecessor to Yuppie Psycho that established a lot of that game's style and mechanics. We break down the game's classically structured puzzles, heavy atmosphere and dark fantasy aesthetics. The Vibes Are Real.

We discuss D and D2, the bizarre works of auteur Kenji Eno. We breakdown his contentious relationship to the games industry and some of the influences that make this series interesting to read about but not very fun to play.

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 Corne...

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 las...

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 th...

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!

We have a discussion about police violence (largely centered around the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis) and what role art has in spurring on social change - relating it back to the topics we repeatedly bring up like media representation and messaging.

We’re discussing Alone in the Dark, the 1992 PC Game that is widely considered to be the starting point of Survival Horror. We go back and forth while trying to figure out if its a charming antique or a frustrating relic

We're talking about Nightcry, the irredeemably awful "spiritual successor" to Clock Tower that fails on every level. James mounts a small yet sturdy defense of the game as we both dissect its merits as a MST3K-style experience. Questions abound. like "is it so bad it's funny?" and - more importantly - "Why did we subject ourselves to this?"