Review: Lost Records: Bloom & Rage
After a lifetime of playing games, I find that the ones that feel like they’re doing something properly “new” often do so by rendering something beautifully mundane – an experience, emotion or character that feels unlike what I’ve encountered in other games. A significant portion of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is spent engaging in one such radically normal scenario – a group of women in their 40s assemble at a bar to reminisce about an incident from their childhood, and chat amicably about the lives they’ve lived since the one summer in the 90s they all spent together.
For all the advances we can point towards in games in terms of diversity and depiction, characters like these – women in their 40s, who work normal jobs in a non-fantasy setting, who aren’t defined by being mothers or wives – are still dispiritingly rare, and that gives Lost Records a certain power. The game is developed by Don’t Nod, and many members of the team worked on the first Life is Strange, a game often praised for its depiction of young queer women. Fans of that game will find much to love here, too.
This review is based on the first half of Lost Records, labelled “Tape 1” – the second half of the game will arrive as a free update on April 15. It’s an attempt to replicate the episodic nature of Don’t Nod’s earlier games, but getting half the story feels very different from getting the first episode of a season: less “I wonder where this will go”, more “this feels incomplete”. But Tape 1 does an excellent job at setting the tone and getting things going.
Most of the game is set during the aforementioned 90s summer, as the girls grow close – before being driven apart by events that will be depicted in Tape 2. Player protagonist Swann – who you control and make choices for throughout the game – is a dorky teen, budding filmmaker and storyteller, who falls in with a group of cool girls after they defend her from a local bully. In the past, the game follows the girls as they hang out, play music, and start to explore the woods around their town of Velvet Cove, Michigan – and as is typical for stories like this, the woods hold some strange, otherworldly secrets.
In the present, the women reunite to vaguely hint at the supernatural events that drove them apart and to speculate on the contents of a mysterious, threatening box that has been sent to one of them, which bears the name of their old band: Bloom & Rage. These segments are more thematic and less active, but the dialogue choices you make here still feel impactful.
The horror elements of Lost Records feel like they’re ramping up to something in Tape 2, but it’s the quieter moments and potently nostalgic aesthetic sensibilities that stand out the most here. Swann carries a camcorder with her at all times, which you use to film cheesy short documentaries throughout the game. The scratchy tape and non-professional voiceovers feel spot-on to the character, an awkward dork whose mix of self-doubt and total sincerity feels extremely realistic and likable. The other girls are just as well-realised – each character is distinctly different and no one feels archetypal. My favourite is Nora, a rebellious 17-year-old with bad skin, Hollywood aspirations, and an inherent sweetness that manifests through the kind of bone-deep loyalty that defines so many teen relationships.
Making Swann’s short films is generally just a matter of pointing the camera and pressing record, and while you can switch out footage and edit the films there’s no in-game incentive to make the films “good” – and yet I loved the look and feel of this mechanic enough that I couldn’t help but spend time fixing up these documentaries so that they flowed more effectively.
Beyond that, the game is all exploration and personal choices. Will Swann develop a crush on one of the other girls? Will she act bravely, pragmatically, honestly? Who will become her best friend? The stakes aren’t high – there are no life-or-death decisions – but the game is reactive to the choices you make, and the story shifts around you in pleasing ways.
It’s worth mentioning that, on PS5 at least, it feels like the game is held together by masking tape and dreams: I encountered a huge number of visual glitches and some audio issues, some of which were quite distracting or ruined the tone of a scene. This is an ambitiously textured, visually rich game made by a small team, so some issues are to be expected, but hopefully Tape 2 sports a little more final polish.
I greatly enjoyed the first half of Lost Records, and even if Tape 2 ends up disappointing I can’t imagine I’ll regret having played it. By investing so much into its characters, Lost Records ensures that you’ll need to see what happens to them next.
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
James O’Connor has been writing about games since 2008. He is the author of Untitled Goose Game for Boss Fight Books.
