It’s hard not to see some of your teenage self in Swann Holloway, the young heroine of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 1. She’s kind and curious, but feels insecure about her worth and her weight. She’s a good friend, but doesn’t always say the right thing. She wants to express herself creatively, but is still figuring out how. She reminds me so much of myself at that age, but also of one of my young family members who I’m watching rapidly approach her teen years. There’s nothing you can do to make that awkward time in your life easier. You just hope you have good friends to share in the highs and lows.
Tape 1 — the first of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage’s two planned installments — is a reminder that some people don’t often get to be the heroes in video games. Young women used to be on that list, but Lost Records’ developer Don’t Nod helped shift that trend in the 2010s, with its breakout game, Life is Strange.
But it still isn’t common to see middle-aged women leading a game. So, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage’s decision to tell the story of women in their forties remembering the beautiful and brooding summer that defined their teen years sets it apart from anything I’ve played before.
A New Record
This game shows Don’t Nod taking a major step forward from its earlier narrative adventures, drawing on the experience its recent, genre-diverse games have provided to enrich the texture of its now-classic story-driven template.
Much of Lost Records will be recognizable for fans of Life is Strange. You poke around Swann’s room, picking out outfits, petting her cat, and reminiscing while interacting with her belongings scattered throughout the space. The art style is recognizable, too, with Don’t Nod proving its mastery of the classic LiS aesthetic that blends realistic details with painterly presentation. And you spend a good amount of time walking around its environments and talking to other characters.
Swann And Her Friends In Lost Records: Bloom & Rage
Autumn, Nora, and Kat are three friends Swann makes in the last months before her parents plan to move the family from northern Michigan to rural Canada. That impending move imbues Lost Records with a perpetual melancholy. Swann is a budding filmmaker and, as you film these friends with the camcorder she’s always carrying, you feel like you’re taking ownership over the time you do have, leaving a mark on these relationships in a way games seldom allow for. Especially since the game organizes all of your footage into labeled “Memoirs,” which each including a voice-over from Swann. You can edit the order the clips are in, making for a fascinating, player-driven reimagining of the journal we saw Max Caulfield carry in Life is Strange.
Life Is Strange, Life Finds A Way
Though Lost Records is a LiS descendant, Don’t Nod has spliced the DNA with so many new ideas that the family resemblance is starting to fade. The most foundational change is Lost Records’ use of dual perspectives. The game is split into two timelines, with one presented in third-person and the other in first. In the later narrative, which is set in late-pandemic 2022, Swann is returning to a bar in her old Upper Peninsula hometown to meet up with those friends for the first time in 27 years.
Autumn has reached out about a mysterious box she received in the mail that has the name of their old band, Bloom & Rage, scrawled on the packaging. As Tape 1 proceeds, we get hints of supernatural darkness that make the game feel a bit like a female-dominated take on It or an interactive descendant of Yellowjackets. Swann is in her early forties now, and we see everything in this timeline from her first-person perspective. But, when the old friends begin to retrace the summer they spent together in 1995, VCR rewind lines streak across the screen and we’re back in the ’90s. Here, we control Swann from third-person.
Games have played with perspective before. Last year’s Indika showed the present in third-person , but deploying a pixelated look — either top-down or side-scrolling— for the lead character’s childhood. That game was making a link between modern presentation as a stand-in for the now, and old-school presentation as a stand-in for the past. Lost Records is doing something a bit different, linking first-person to the immediacy of the present and third-person to the distance of memory. It’s smart and visceral, and the perspective switches, combined with the constant intercutting of videotape footage, feel effortlessly effective.
There are moments when Tape 1 stumbles. Performance issues crop up from time to time. I noticed pop-ins pretty consistently when the story switched from third-person to first-person. And the frame rate chugged for me in a climactic moment towards the end of the chapter. But the game’s bigger problem is that Lost Records continues Don’t Nod’s penchant for corny dialogue. Some of that stems from the game incorporating dated ’90s slang like “parental units” and “geez-o,” which works well enough as period language. But one big late-game moment, where a character attempts to make a serious point by reciting lyrics to a punk song, falls especially flat.
But the game’s utter sincerity is a major point in its favor, and these kinds of missteps are a side effect. If I have to put up with some deeply goofy choices in order to get a character as heartbreakingly earnest as Swann Holloway, I’ll accept the trade-off. We’ll see if Don’t Nod can continue to strike that balance when Tape 2 arrives on April 15th.
Reviewed on PS5.
Mystery
Adventure
Narrative
- Released
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February 18, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Nudity, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes. Use of Drugs and Alcohol, Violence
- Developer(s)
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DON’T NOD
- Publisher(s)
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DON’T NOD
- Wonderful, and unique, central characters.
- Effective perspective shifts sell the dual timeline story.
- Videography mechanics make the experience immersive.
- Some performance issues hamper the storytelling.
- Corny dialogue brings certain moments down.