Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is a great game. Well, at least, the first tape was a great half of a game, that’s also the same length as many full games. And also only half of the story.
If that tortured first paragraph is any indication, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage has been occupying a strange, Schrödinger’s cat-like space on my running mental GOTY list ever since its first episode, Bloom, launched back in February. That’s mostly due to its strange release structure, which is unlike anything else I’ve seen in the episodic space.
The Five Episode Template
It was established early on in modern gaming culture that episodic games would have five episodes. Telltale’s The Walking Dead pioneered that structure, later games like Life is Strange and Hitman kept it going, and as recently as 2023, Telltale was still using the model for its latest release, The Expanse. Some have gone down to three (Tell Me Why) others have gone up to six (Game of Thrones) but five is the sweet spot.
I’m used to approaching these games like a TV show. I know that a good pilot doesn’t equal a good season of TV, and I’ve historically treated episodic games with the same caution. I like Life is Strange 2 as a whole, but nothing in episodes 2-5 touch the first episode, which might be the best thing Don’t Nod has ever done. You can’t assume that a quality bar will stay consistent across a season. An episodic story has peaks and valleys and you won’t respond to every chapter in the exact same way. Highs and lows are just part of a satisfying journey.
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But Lost Records has challenged my conception of episodic series. The first episode was significantly longer than your typical Don’t Nod/Telltale episode, clocking in at around seven hours. On its own, that’s longer than many games, so it’s kind of difficult to think of it as an episode. Episodic content (in games, film, and TV) is basically never seven hours long. The closest analogue to Lost Records’ release would be a Netflix show with two seven-episode seasons.
I loved the first episode, and have only grown more fond of it with a little distance. It doesn’t wrap up the story, but I still feel like I got a full meal — in the same way I felt satisfied by Across the Spider-Verse despite its cliffhanger ending. Should it only make my GOTY list if Don’t Nod sticks the landing? Or is the experience that I already had with the game valuable enough on its own to warrant consideration?
Lost Records Might Be Gaming’s The Brutalist
I don’t know, and that’s one reason I’m hoping Tape 2 knocks it out of the park. I love Swann as a character. I’m eager to see what, exactly, the central mystery that separated the girls is. I’m dreading finding out if Kat is alive or dead. I can’t wait to see how else Don’t Nod plays with structure. It could be the best game Don’t Nod has ever made.
It could be. But I thought the same thing heading into The Brutalist’s intermission. That nearly four-hour epic is a good movie, but the second half is stranger, messier, and less immediately enjoyable than its first. If I had evaluated it solely on the basis of its first half, my evaluation would have been wildly off from what the movie actually is. Given that Lost Records has left many of its darkest questions unanswered, it’s possible that we could be in for a similar experience later this month.
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