When it comes to story-driven games, or those that are looking to communicate a message through play, the traditional rules kind of go out the window. Ranging from outright visual novels to games that have some limited forms of interaction, but remain hyper-focused on a specific idea or theme, they are typically a bit of an acquired taste. The thing is, if you’re willing to give them some time and attention their messages can even be quite profound at times, but they can be an investment for sure.

Fading Afternoon revolves around the final days of a middle-aged member of the Yakuza who has just been released from prison. Given a pretty grim diagnosis on his health, the focus of the game is essentially you trying to work out how to close out his life. You can certainly try to go out in some sort of blaze of glory, spend your time with more base pursuits, look for more calming activities to live out your days in peace, or some combination of any of the above. 

Depending on the decisions you make and the path you take you’ll receive a variety of endings, but with that open-ended nature one issue is that it can feel a bit aimless. Weirdly, that even may be the point to a degree, simply accepting that his life is in decline and realizing that it doesn’t particularly matter how you choose to go out. 

There can be some reflective value to this, for sure, but an issue is that aside from the specifics of the theme and story so much of this is reminiscent of earlier efforts like Arrest of a Stone Buddha and The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa in look and overall format. Yes, this is different, but mechanically with so much feeling the same it really took me out of the experience. Perhaps for people with a bit more patience there’ll be an opportunity for the message to come through better, but for me this felt like a very niche experience.