When the adventure game Life is Strange originally came out in 2015, it was lauded for its heartfelt depiction of teenage life and for being one of the best interactive stories of its generation. Moreover, the title’s commercial and critical success elevated the studio behind it, DON’T NOD, to new heights. With the reputation of Life is Strange preceding them, DON’T NOD would, in the years to come, release similar projects such as Life is Strange 2, Tell Me Why and Twin Mirror.
However, at the same time, the publisher behind the Life is Strange series, Square Enix, decided to have Deck Nine, a US-based developer who previously worked on PlayStation titles such as the Ratchet & Clank Collection and mobile games such as Phrazzle and Qube Kingdom, make a Life is Strange prequel. This prequel would become Life is Strange: Before the Storm. After the release of Life is Strange 2, where DON’T NOD expressed interest in the future of the Life is Strange franchise, following the announcement of a new Life is Strange game called Life is Strange: True Colors, it was reported that DON’T NOD’s time with the series was over and that it would be left with Deck Nine.
Earlier this year, Deck Nine announced their latest project, Life is Strange: Double Exposure — an all-new supernatural murder mystery which is set to continue the story of Max Caulfield, the protagonist behind the first Life is Strange game. Coincidentally, last December at The Game Awards, DON’T NOD announced their own supernatural story game named Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, which looks, for all intents and purposes, like a spiritual successor to the Life is Strange titles that the studio has developed. As perhaps an acknowledgement of how similar the two projects are, DON’T NOD even moved the release date of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage to early 2025 in order to give both the “adequate space to shine.”
During gamescom 2024, I got to meet some of the team working on the game, namely producer Cathy Vincelli, executive producer Luc Baghadoust and creative director Michel Koch. I asked them about Lost Records: Bloom & Rage being a spiritual successor to Life is Strange, going back to the 90s, the music and more:
Hello and thank you for having me today! Can you briefly introduce yourselves?
Cathy Vincelli: Hello, I’m Cathy Vincelli and I’m the producer on the Bloom & Rage.
Luc Baghadoust: Hi, I’m Luc Baghadoust. I’m the executive producer of Bloom & Rage. I’ve had the same role on Life is Strange and Life is Strange II.
Michel Koch: Hi, I’m Michel Koch, the creative director of Bloom & Rage. I’ve been working at DON’T NOD for a long time, and I was the creative director of Life is Strange and Life is Strange II. To introduce the game very quickly, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is a new narrative adventure game from DON’T NOD Montreal. It’s our first new game in this new IP that we are building over there. It’s a game where you’re playing as Swann, a 40-year-old woman who is coming back to her hometown to reunite with friends she has not seen for 27 years.
27 years ago, Swann and her friends made a promise to never see each other again and to never speak to each other again because something dark happened at the end of their last summer together. They are now breaking this promise because they received a package addressed to the name of their old band. So, they have to break their promise in order to discover what is really happening.
To start things off, I have an icebreaker question. I majored in literature, so I’m curious to know: is the name Swann a reference to Marcel Proust? And, if so, what’s the connection to the narrative of Bloom & Rage?
Michel Koch: We should ask Jean-Luc, but I’m pretty sure it’s kind of a coincidence…we had a few names for Swann at the beginning, but we really loved the name Swann.
[Ed. note: the day after this interview took place, I received an email with a quote from Jean-Luc Cano, the writer of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage and the DON’T NOD developed Life is Strange games, who said this: “The choice of the name Swann is definitely in reference to Proust’s character. When we learned it could be a female name as well, it was a done deal.”)
I’m a big fan of the original Life is Strange, maybe in part because I was 17 when the game came out. As such, having grown up with Life is Strange, to what extent should fans like myself expect Lost Records: Bloom & Rage to be a spiritual successor to those games?
Luc Baghadoust: Bloom & Rage is based on a lot of similar mechanics to Life is Strange: choices and consequences are a huge part of the game, the universe is realistic but with a sparkle of something else on top and the environments themselves tell a story…all these aspects, that are at the core of Life is Strange, are also in Bloom & Rage. But, also, we’re trying to improve the recipe with some new features like the camcorder. And, you know, just the fact that the core team behind Life is Strange ais working on the story and the characters in the same way…the same team will have the same vision and will, of course, continue on the path that they previously set.
Time, nostalgia and memory were important story themes in previous DON’T NOD games such as Remember Me. How is Lost Records: Bloom & Rage‘s approach in regard to these themes different from what we’ve seen from the studio in the past?
Michel Koch: Nostalgia is a theme that we really like, and, like you said, even in Remember Me, there was this notion of time and this idea of remixing memories. But, ever since Life is Strange, we realized that we love coming of age stories…maybe it’s because we are growing older, and, I don’t know, we love to look back at what we did before.
I think for Bloom & Rage, the difference is that we are not only playing as the characters when they’re teenagers, but we are also playing them as adults. We really wanted to tell a story about grown-up characters that are remembering their past and are reflecting on it…this creates this kind of real dialogue that the player has between the teenage version of themselves and the adult version of themselves.
Like, the players might reflect and ask themselves: “Am I still proud today of what I did before or should I have done things differently?” And, we think that this kind of nostalgia is different because it’s more real now and because you’re really playing the character that is remembering the past.
Would you say that players will spend more time in one timeline than the other? Or is there an even balance?
Michel Koch: Players will spend more time playing in the past. The ratio, I think, is something like three-fourths… three-fourths of the game is set in the past, with the remaining fourth set in the present. Something like that.
To what extent will there be interplay between the two timelines?
Michel Koch: We want to put the player in the position of rewriting the story of what happened in the past and what’s happening during the evening of the friends’ reunion. Until any given moment has happened, the player will still have ways to shape the story by making choices in both timelines.
Related to this, and I know it’s early, but will Lost Records: Bloom & Rage feature branching storylines and/or multiple endings?
Michel Koch: Something we love about our games is making sure that you have a lot of agency over the story. All of the choices will lead to, of course, different variations of who Swann is closest to at the end of the summer, which, in turn, will lead to variations in terms of endings. The player will have other important choices in the game that I won’t speak more about now, but that will make it so that what really happens at the end of the summer is different.
For example, the reason that the friends are making the promise at the end of the summer might be different from player to player. Also, we’ll have different endings in the past but also different endings in the present. So, there will be some combinations of those that will create variations for each playthrough. What’s in the mysterious package that the girls receive will also be different based on the choices that players make.
Why was it important for you to go back to the 90s with Lost Records: Bloom & Rage?
Michel Koch: The easy answer is that because a lot of us in the development team grew up in the 90s. So, I think we can draw from our own lives, our own experiences and memories of what it was like to be a teenager back then. We also think it’s an interesting time period because the 90s were really the last decade before the rise of social media. In the 90s, when we were outside, our parents had no way to know where we were, and we had no way of contacting them. The 90s really were the last decade of a different era.
Luc Baghadoust: I’m thinking that I only recently started realizing what the 90s were like, you know? Because, when you’re too close to a decade…like we have no idea how our current decade looks to us. But, when you are far from the time period, like we are with the 90s, you start to look and think about what the ‘colour’ of the decade is.
Michel Koch: Since the 80s became more popular about ten years ago, maybe it’s also the case that when creatives are in their 40s, they want to talk about their youth so, in 10 years’ time, we will maybe have a lot of games about the 2000s.
Cathy Vincelli: Also, the 90s are like the cool time period to be into nowadays. So, I feel like even the younger generations can relate to those times because it’s still a popular decade that people want to experience in some way. They want to go super analog with their things, which ties into us wanting to bring in the camcorder for what we are doing in Bloom & Rage.
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage will enable players to use a camcorder to record footage — some that is critical for the story and some that is optional. Will players be able to influence the story with some of the optional footage taken or does it serve more like a collectible?
Michel Koch: The optional footage is more like a collectible. But the idea is to still get some reward when you finish an optional collectible in the form of the film that you can continue to edit, plus some voiceover from Swann, which brings more insight to the story.
Cathy Vincelli: All of the footage is still part of getting to know Swann, not just the clips that are part of the main objective. Part of her character development involves using the camcorder to film all sorts of things, regardless of if it’s part of an objective or not.
A big part of what made Life is Strange special to me and to many others is the music. In the material you’ve put out so far, I was able to spot references to Madonna, Sleater-Kinney, The Cranberries, and more — can players expect any of these artists to feature on the Lost Records: Bloom & Rage licensed soundtrack? Also, what can you tell me about the original soundtrack?
Luc Baghadoust: Like with Life is Strange, we’re gonna have licensed tracks but also songs created for the games. Ruth Radelet, previously from the band Chromatics, created real songs with our band which we love. We also have the electro-pop duo Milk & Bone from Montreal: they created the score for us. There’s also “See You In Hell”, the track that was playing during the announcement trailer, which has a very special place within the game. Maybe some of the big names you brought up won’t be there, but we still have licensed tracks that I think are really cool.
Michel Koch: We can’t wait for you and the players to discover more of the music. We’re really, really happy with the artists we have, especially with the work they’ve done on the bespoke songs for the game.
Luc Baghadoust: There was a song we received that was so great that I think that, even if the game never came out and the game industry came to a complete halt, it would have all been worth it. You’ll know it when you hear it!
Why have you chosen to release Lost Records: Bloom & Rage in two parts? And why will there be a month in-between said two parts?
Luc Baghadoust: Well, we really enjoy working on episodic games. This being said, Bloom & Rage, at first, was supposed to come out as a whole, but the team likes to work in chronological order. Of course, we know the general story, but we are able to add small details when we work episode by episode. Plus, we think releasing the game in two separate parts will be good for the audience.
It depends on the people, since some love to binge TV shows whereas others love the experience of watching week on week, but if people don’t like episodic games, they can wait for the 18th of March for Bloom & Rage to be fully out. But, you know, just being able to play the first part and being able to stop after some hours of gameplay, take a break, and then start theorizing is going to be exciting for a lot of people. It’s funny, somehow, that we went back to episodic releases…maybe it’s in our nature.
Michel Koch: I just want to add that even though Bloom & Rage has only two parts, both of them are going to be longer than an episode from one of our previous games.
Looking ahead into the future, you’ve mentioned in an interview with GamesRadar+ that Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is being worked on as the foundation for a possibly larger Lost Records universe. Is there a rough plan for what is to come next?
Michel Koch: We have a lot of ideas, but what’s really cool is that we own the Lost Records IP. So, this means that with this first game, we can start to establish some elements we can revisit in the future: some urban legends, some locations and some characters. I would say that we don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves, but we also want to make sure that we tell the story of Bloom & Rage the right way. One of our references is Stephen King and his books: I love how his characters come back for new stories and how some books are linked together, even though you can enjoy each of them separately.
Luc Baghadoust: Michel and Jean-Luc shared a lot of the ideas they have for other things we could do in this universe, and a lot of them are really exciting! But what’s interesting is that we’re still leaving room for new ideas. And, you know, player reaction can influence the ideas we decide to tackle first. That was one of the benefits of the episodic nature of Life is Strange — we added some scenes because of fan reaction. So, we leave room for this. The magic of owning the IP is that we can choose what to do and look at what’s working or not.
The first part of Lost Records Bloom & Rage will be released on February 18, 2025. The second part will be released on March 18, 2025. The game will be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and Steam.
