Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is giving good vibes so far. Which is to say, it’s giving extremely bad ‘these girls are going to be bullied horribly and maybe one of them dies’ vibes, but I’m into it. Not because I like when teenagers are bullied to death, you understand, but because the world and characters being constructed before me are compelling.
It plays mostly in the style of 2015’s Life is Strange, the breakout title for developer Don’t Nod. You have some conversations and make choices that shape how people feel about you, albeit this time with some growth in the formula by making you find contextual prompts, and when you’re not doing that you’re wandering around and interacting with objects so our protagonist, Swann Holloway, can comment on them. This is where the game makes its cardinal sin.
Lost Records Doesn’t Let You Interact Enough
Swann is still growing on me. She’s awkward and annoying on purpose, but also incredibly endearing. Max was also very dorky, and the future-Swann’s self reflection, plus the variety of the other cast, should help. I don’t like the goofy voice she uses when talking to her cat, but the rest of the time she’s pretty likeable. So much so that, when the game needed me to have looked around for something, I’d already spent time wandering and found it. Except, I hadn’t.
At one point in the story, Swann and her friends are looking for some keys. Swann, using the light from her camera, finds them on the top of an old playground structure. This is where the game starts to annoy me. First off, the old metal rocket is clearly climbable, and two of the group are reckless souls. But they decide climbing is too dangerous, and so the smallest but most furious of the bunch simply punches and kicks the big metal structure.
Since it is quite dangerous to climb, it moves a lot when hit with force. Eventually, the keys fall from the ledge they’re stuck on… only to fall onto a second, slightly lower ledge. The answer here is simple – keep kicking and punching it until it falls again and eventually lands on the ground before us. This is a proven solution and no injuries are caused by doing it the first time. However, they instead decide you need to throw something at it, because this cutscene has been too long and thus Swann needs to do something. And so a search begins.
Maybe The Story Is Worth The Journey
This in and of itself is not a cardinal sin. There’s some minor suspension of disbelief, but while narrative is generally given more priority by Don’t Nod than some other gaming studios, this is still a game I bought to play. I have no objection to the game tossing me the football and telling me it’s time to play. The issue is, as with many games like this, it requires specific solutions that aren’t smart enough.
We’re told we need to find an object that is light enough to throw, solid enough to move the keys, and small enough that you can hold it in one hand. While wandering in the same area looking for the keys themselves, I found some old batteries that would be perfect. Nothing happened when I returned to them, because I’d already heard Swann’s soundbite. Likewise, there were suitable beer bottles that had no soundbite at all, so were ignored. And that’s overlooking the fact we’re in a wasteland field that would surely have dozens of rocks around.
Eventually, Autumn finds a clearing and we head inside where we grab a brick. Obviously, going back to narrative, the key part here is not getting the keys back but in bonding with friends. At some point, Swann chooses who to hang out with, like filming Nora smoking. At other times, it’s mandatory, as is this escapade getting to know Autumn. In that sense, it works, and this is not a major timesink that makes you resent not simply grabbing the batteries.
But the issue is we have RPGs that have trained us to expect any solution we think of could be viable. It’s unfair to expect a game like Lost Records to have the mechanical depth of Baldur’s Gate 3, but if it lets us interact with objects just for flavour, it feels frustrating when that interaction doesn’t connect to your goals the way it should. It would have been more time consuming to have the girls miss with and then lose the batteries, but it would have also been much more real.
Lost Records is doing a great job so far of establishing these characters, and feels more tactile than previous games of its ilk because of Swann’s camcorder obsession. But a world is either interactive or it’s not. Lost Records wants to be both, and so it feels neither.
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
76/100
- Released
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February 18, 2025
- Developer(s)
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DON’T NOD
- Publisher(s)
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DON’T NOD