We’re just a day away from the launch of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, the new game from the team behind the first two Life is Strange games, following a lengthy development and an unusual delay into 2025.
Video games often skirt the launch of rivals to avoid launch date clashes on the release calendar, but the situation was more unique for Lost Records’ team, in that the clash it wanted to avoid was for the latest entry in the series it initially founded.
In this interview (conducted all the way back at Gamescom last year!) I ask Life is Strange and now Lost Records: Bloom & Rage’s creative director Michel Koch about the game’s postponement (before its concluding half’s further delay), the thinking behind its split into two episodes, and where the series – if successful – could go next, now Life is Strange is being handled elsewhere.
Life is Strange was always a multi-part series, though more recent entries developed after you guys’ left the franchise have been standalone – what was the thinking behind splitting Bloom & Rage, and why did you decide on launching in two halves?
Michel Koch: I noticed that I’m not invested as much in Netflix shows, I binge them and then forget them very quickly sometimes. And then I was watching some TV shows on Apple TV and HBO, where they are sticking to weekly releases, and I found that I was investing way more. And we were thinking, we made some good episodic games, why not still go for at least a part of that?
It also makes a lot of sense for the story. You know, the game is called Bloom & Rage, so Tape 1 will be Bloom, and Tape 2 will be Rage. The game’s past takes place over the summer of 1995, so Tape 1 is July, and Tape 2 is August. And there is an event – there is something that happens at the end of Tape 1 that makes sense to stop the game there and to reflect a bit, to just let the player take their time. To maybe play something else, wait a bit, think about what happened, and then go back to Tape 2, hopefully even more invested in the story, because you have had some time to reflect on what happened, and maybe talked with your friends or to other people online.
So the split was decided later on?
Koch: We decided around two years ago, it was not right at the beginning, at conception, but we decided to split it so it makes sense for the story, for editing, pacing.
Another big decision was the delay to 2025, to avoid launching against Life is Strange: Double Exposure. What made your mind up about needing to hold off? Were you sad to see Life is Strange plant its release date flag in the ground first?
Koch: There are not many narrative games with like, double A or high-quality. Life is Strange: Double Exposure is one, Lost Records is another. We thought, as players, I would love that the games are not coming at exactly the same time, as I want to play both. And for us as developers, it also gives us a bit more breathing room to polish things better.
One of the similarities between Life is Strange and Lost Records seems to be some kind of supernatural element to the game, which we can see in the trailer. There’s some purple glowing light in the forest, but we don’t yet know what. How far are you going to take the magic, or magic realism?
Koch: Magical realism is definitely important in our previous games, and is important also again here. As you saw in the trailers, the characters see something in the woods that we are hinting at. But we’re still telling a story about a group of friends that is anchored in reality. We want magic to be a catalyst, to be something that makes things have higher stakes, and it will be more and more present as the game advances to the end. But it’s more like the magic realism will bring more tension to the group, and to what’s happening around some antagonists we cannot talk about yet. If you watch a show like Twin Peaks, this is the kind of magical realism we are going for, rather than full magic. I wouldn’t expect some full sci-fi supernatural, high stakes power, or anything that’s too major.
So you’re not getting into the midichlorians of it all?
Koch: [Joking] Maybe we should change that… No, of course not. I think we never did in our previous games either. We are building this universe, so it doesn’t mean that we don’t know about it, what it is. It’s a brand new IP that we are working on, it’s the first game in that IP – and that’s a good thing, even if it’s both frightening and very liberating to be able to do that. But with the team, with the writers, we are also building this game knowing that we can come back to universe. We can come back to some characters, to some plot points, to some other threads within this world, and definitely the magic is part of that, as something we can revisit. So we know what it is about, but we don’t want to make it too central to the story itself, because it’s really the story of this group of four friends.
So the plan is that these characters can come back? Or… some of them can?
Koch: Yes, though the thing is we are still telling a full story with this game, we really want to make sure that the players have their whole character arc and journey, and that whatever blend of endings they get in the past and in the present is a full tale. But we are definitely starting to know how we could have the characters come back, what other stories we could tell, what side stories we could work around in this universe. It will also depend on the player reception, of course, and we love that we have the opportunity to also look at which characters players are loving the most. What can come back to and add to the world?
I love the work of Stephen King, and what he does in The Dark Tower, where he does feature characters from some of his other books. And I’m not saying that we are doing that, but it’s a major highlight that he did, and it’s some of the idea that we could try to be able to build our foundations and make sure that we can.
I look forward to your Stephen King self-insert. Or maybe leave that to David Cage.
Koch: [laughs] We are still making, again, a game about teenagers, but this time, we are really making a game about the adults remembering when they were teenagers. And we really wanted to push that. A lot of times the adults comment on what you’re doing, and it helped us to have that contrast between what the 90s were – the flaws of the time, where something that we said back then, we wouldn’t say today – and the adults are able to comment about that.
As with Life is Strange, I guess it’s again about balancing you making a game about teenagers as an adult, and also not feeling like you’re talking down to anyone.
Koch: It is a balance, and it’s something we’ve adjusted a lot. We have this younger designer who joined us who’s played the game and provided good feedback. She’s said ‘oh, this is very Boomer-like, maybe you should remove it’.
But maybe sometimes you want a bit of Boomer, to show these now-adults are from a different generation.
Koch: Yeah, it’s cool, it’s a challenge but it’s really interesting to try to blend both generations in, and make it interesting for both.
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