If you’ve ever wanted to experience a haunted house through the lens of an unhinged soap opera and a broken Google Translate script, Back: Fade is your new obsession. This wildly bizarre full-motion video (FMV) horror game from an indie Chinese studio is a chaotic cocktail of jump scares, surreal storytelling, and dialogue so broken it loops around to genius.
Back: Fade is the second installment in the Back series and doubles down on everything that made the first game so strange. This time, protagonist Ren Xing awakens in a hospital, only to discover he’s been yanked back into the “Otherworld”—a supernatural hellscape where logic, pacing, and localization go to die.
🎮 What Is Back: Fade?
At its core, Back: Fade is an FMV horror adventure game. You watch live-action scenes play out and make narrative choices that guide the direction of the story. The goal? Solve puzzles, collect clues, avoid death, and uncover what’s really going on in this terrifying (and often hilarious) realm.
Mechanically, it’s part visual novel, part escape room, and part experimental horror theater. It’s a linear experience with branching paths, bizarre NPCs, and moments that will leave you either terrified or in tears from laughter.
🧠 Gameplay Overview
▶️ FMV Format
Back: Fade is essentially an interactive movie. The pre-recorded video footage stars live actors in various supernatural set pieces. Your choices dictate how the story evolves and what ending you reach.
🧩 Puzzle Solving
There are several sequences where you’re required to remember details or locate items. Clues include cryptic notes, haunted paintings, or items tied to the game’s ghost girl Lily. Solving these gives you better odds of survival—but miss one and you might find yourself possessed, dismembered, or yelling at a cursed TV set.
🧬 Choice and Consequence
Nearly every scene ends in a decision. Do you hide, run, scream, or offer a mysterious object to a floating ghost? Choices carry over into later sequences and lead to one of several wildly different endings.
🌌 What Makes It Special (or Deranged)
1. Surreal Horror Meets Camp Comedy
The scares in Back: Fade are real—but so are the moments of jaw-dropping absurdity. There’s one moment where a character delivers an emotional monologue while a ghost crab skitters in the background. It’s the kind of thing you couldn’t script—except they did, and it’s incredible.
2. Gloriously Bad Translation
This can’t be overstated: the English localization is a disasterpiece. Dialogue includes lines like “Please do not birthday her alone” and “The monster will inject you forever.” It turns what should be dramatic scenes into unintentional comedy gold.
3. Chinese Cultural Influence
Despite the chaos, there’s a genuinely unique tone here. The game draws from Chinese folklore, death rituals, and modern anxieties around family, technology, and mental health. This lens gives Back: Fade an identity that sets it apart from Western horror games.
4. Lore Beneath the Madness
There’s a surprising amount of recurring story beats—characters and elements from the first game reappear, and deeper exploration reveals themes of grief, trauma, and fractured memory.
🎭 The Cast and Cinematics
Acting is… enthusiastic. Performances range from melodramatic shouting to deadpan weirdness, with just enough sincerity to keep you wondering whether the cast is in on the joke. Add to this some erratic editing, disorienting camera angles, and sudden audio spikes, and you get an experience that’s more unsettling than outright scary.
🔁 Replayability and Endings
There are multiple paths through the game depending on your decisions. Some players might reach an “escape” ending, while others fall into a time-loop or face a gruesome demise. Unlocking every ending can take a few hours and adds genuine replay value.
✅ Possessed by Greatness (Pros)
- Wildly entertaining: Whether it’s the horror, the humor, or the pure WTF factor, Back: Fade keeps you engaged.
- Genuine uniqueness: No other horror game plays quite like this.
- Cultural variety: A rare look at Chinese supernatural storytelling in FMV form.
- Replay value: Multiple endings and decision paths keep things fresh.
❌ Cursed With Jank (Cons)
- Terrible translation: Often incomprehensible, occasionally problematic.
- UI issues: Clunky navigation during puzzles or decision scenes.
- Repetition: Backtracking and similar setups slow things down.
- Runs long: 2–3 hours feels stretched by the end, especially without tight pacing.
🧟♂️ Is It Scary?
Back: Fade isn’t traditionally scary—it’s chaotic, disorienting, and full of ghost tropes (dolls, bloody bathtubs, ghost kids), but the atmosphere is undercut by its own absurdity. Expect tension, not terror.
Back: Fade: Back: Fade is a hot mess—and it’s all the better for it. Equal parts terrifying and ridiculous, it’s a trashy horror gem that fans of FMV, cult cinema, and experimental storytelling will love. It’s not for everyone. But if your idea of a good time includes haunted birthday parties, possessed teddy bears, and dialogue so strange it could summon demons, Back: Fade is the experience you didn’t know you needed. – ColdMoon