This article contains spoilers for the first half of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 1.
In one of the best scenes between protagonist Swann Holloway and her friends in Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, you don’t actually see her friends at all.
The level Phone A Friend hits a few hours into Lost Records’ first episodic tape, as the relationship among the four girls is beginning to hit its stride. Swann, Autumn, Nora, and Kat have filmed a day-in-the-life camcorder movie together, found an abandoned cabin in the woods, turned it into a secret hideout, and gotten together to eat pizza while watching Swann’s roughly edited cut of their exploits.
When the level kicks off, two nights have passed since they claimed the (potentially haunted) cabin as their own, and their friendship is buzzing with the possibility of all the things they’ll do together for the rest of the summer.
Making The Call Right
You can feel that anticipation as Swann climbs onto her bed with her pink touch tone phone in hand. The names and numbers of Swann’s three new best friends are nearly written on a college-ruled piece of paper in a spiral bound notebook.
Plus the local veterinarian’s contact info, just to be safe.
The anticipation has time to build further because calling one of your friends requires dialing their number manually. If you’re using a controller, that means slowly moving the cursor across the screen with a thumb stick. Once that laborious process is over, you have to wait as the phone rings, wondering who (if anyone) will pick up.
This was an extremely nerve-wracking part of my childhood. By the time I was in high school, most of my friends and I had cell phones. But in elementary and middle school, if I wanted to talk to a pal outside of school, I had to risk an awkward conversation with a parent or an older sibling.
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Lost Records recreates this Russian roulette perfectly. Each time you make a call, you get a family member on the phone first, not your friend. Autumn’s mom is friendly and kind. Nora’s dad is formal, though not unpleasant.
The Mean Older Sibling
But when you call Kat, the bill comes due. Her older sister, Dylan, is an important supporting character in Tape 1, and an antagonist that looms large in the girls’ minds. A run-in with Dylan and her boyfriend Corey is what brings the gang together in the early game, and they frequently talk about the couple and even mock them with a filmed skit. Dylan being in charge of getting the phone to Kat is like having the Joker delivering Batman’s batarangs. Can we really trust this fiend with such a crucial service?
And yet, that’s what the world was like before widespread cell phone use. If you wanted to talk to your friend, you had to risk his dad saying something weird to you before he got handed the phone. If you liked a girl, you had to call her house and risk her brother picking up and giving you a hard time.
It was even worse in my parents’ generation. My dad remembers his family’s phone being in the kitchen and corded, so he had to walk down the street and use a pay phone for any real privacy.
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage understands the weird line we had to toe to talk to our friends before everyone had their own all-in-one comms device in their pocket. It wasn’t necessarily a better time, but seeing it represented so truthfully in game has me a bit nostalgic for an era when you couldn’t get exactly what you wanted as painlessly as possible. You had to put your best foot forward, and acknowledge that no one came from nowhere. Whatever you needed, there was always a person at the other end.
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