I had been keeping my eye on Lost Records: Bloom & Rage ever since I saw the first trailer drop during the 2022 Game Awards. DON’T NOD has been pretty consistent with their games ever since the first Life Is Strange, and even though these kinds of episodic narrative games have fallen somewhat out of fashion as of late, you can always count on them to bring something weird and wonderful to the table.
At least, that was what I thought until I played through the entirety of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 1—a bizarrely structured and not entirely well-delivered first act that is meant to set the stage for something bigger, but draws the curtain before the band is even finished setting up.
Now, that isn’t to say Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape One is completely without merit. The bones are certainly here for a good story, and there are a lot of genuinely sweet and heartfelt moments throughout. However, even for a story split into two parts, it still needs to follow a proper narrative structure, and this absolutely does not.
The story puts players in the role of Swann Holloway, an awkward, film-obsessed teen experiencing her final summer in the sleepy town of Velvet Cove before she moves to Canada. During this time, Swann forms an unlikely friendship with three other misfit girls until a strange anomaly changes their lives forever…And that’s about it. If you want to know what it was or how it changed them, well, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until April for Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 2.
“…from an audio/visual perspective, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 1 is incredibly executed.”
Now, like I said, the story itself is fundamentally solid. There’s a really nice kind of coming-of-age story here with Swann and her friends finding each other and in some ways themselves and more than a few narrative moments are really well delivered—there’s a kind of “days of summer” slideshow they do that genuinely made me smile and really hit me in the feels. However, the telling of it is bafflingly bad, especially for the team that brought us Life is Strange.
Structurally, it’s a bit all over the place, beginning in 2022 and continuously flashing back between the present and the past of 1995. There’s a lot of talk about how Swann and her friends promised to never speak again and it’s a big deal that they’re meeting again for the first time. You’d assume at some point in the first part of this game, they would get to it, but they just don’t.
Not only that, but since it’s a DON’T NOD production, you’d expect a bit of paranormal weirdness to run underneath the entire affair and maybe influence the gameplay in some way and again, it just doesn’t. Nothing truly weird happens until the literal end of the game, and it goes nowhere. It’s a ton of buildup with absolutely no payoff.
Also, something else that genuinely bothered me about the story is its place in time, in that it doesn’t really seem to do anything with it. In the beginning, there’s kind of a deliberate pointing at the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s not really remarked upon in any meaningful way or even represented in the setting.
“…there’s a kind of ‘days of summer’ slideshow they do that genuinely made me smile and really hit me in the feels.”
If you’re a real sleuth like me, you’ll notice, too, that the present part of the game is set during November of 2022, which is around the time cases started going down and most major restrictions were lifted. Maybe it’s not that big a deal, but it just feels gauche to bring up something as world-changing as the pandemic, so close to when it happened and have virtually nothing to say about it.
This also extends to the past portion of the game. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 1 goes out of its way to tell you it’s set during the 90s. But at no point during the game does it ever really feel like a 90s experience. There are some references here and there to 90s movies and some 90s music, but from the game’s visual style, colour palette, music and general vibe—everything about it SCREAMS 80s.
The gameplay doesn’t fare any better. It suffers from some of that early TellTale Game issue where there’s very little in the way of interactivity in these interactive narratives and it ends up being mostly a collection of dialogue encounters where player choice affects the plot. And while I’m not totally against that, I was expecting more, especially after the Life is Strange series added so many unique gimmicks to add to the narrative experience.
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 1 tries to bridge this gap by leaning into Swann’s love of film. Throughout the game, players will have the ability to pull out Swann’s beloved camcorder and film her grand memoir. Certain things are labelled, and getting a specific number of varied shots will allow them to complete sections of the memoir. Players can then rearrange the footage or select new clips to replace old ones.
“Olivia Lepore, Amelia Sarigisson, Andrea Carter, and Natalie Liconti do an amazing job voicing Swann, Nora, Autumn and Kat, respectively, in Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 1.”
It’s not bad, but it kind of feels less like a unique mechanic and more like giving the player something to do between dialogue. But it also creates weird disconnects between the gameplay and the story when the dramatic weight of a scene is totally undercut by a character saying, “Hey, you should film this!” And then Swann has to go over and confirm she’s finished so the actual story can continue. Not to mention a truly bizarre scene where you’re prompted to film parts of a strange occurrence, and Swann’s present-day narration says, “Man, I wish I had filmed that…”
Lastly, in terms of gameplay, there is dialogue itself. It’s not that it’s truly bad, quite the opposite, in fact. Olivia Lepore, Amelia Sarigisson, Andrea Carter, and Natalie Liconti do an amazing job voicing Swann, Nora, Autumn and Kat, respectively, in Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 1. They manage to perfectly capture both the playful lightheartedness of teenage girls and the toned-down seriousness of their adult counterparts, now weighted by their lives and the untold events of the past.
But my problem with Lost Records: Bloom and Rage – Tape 1 is more my problem with a lot of these games—that after almost 13 years, none of these games have ever managed to believably capture how human beings talk or naturalistic dialogue. While it does an interesting thing by giving players limited options but adds others if they wait for certain cues, it still only ever gives players two options for the majority of dialogue, and sometimes both choices can just be so counter to what the situation needs players have no real way to respond.
It becomes an issue of real humans, even 16-year-old girls in the 90s wouldn’t talk like this. Not only that, so much of the “conversations” feel stilted—like actors reading their lines and nervously waiting for cues. The dialogue will abruptly end if players make a choice, characters will awkwardly talk over one another—I imagine this was meant to make it sound natural but it just comes off like bad mixing—and it always feels written and never truly spoken.
I will say, though, from an audio/visual perspective, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 1 is incredibly executed. There are a few hiccups here and there with texture load-in and some weird audio balancing, but throughout the majority of the experience, every scene is well-framed and executed with cinematic gravitas. The soundtrack is also very well suited to match the tone and feeling of each scene, and even though I said it feels way more like 80s music than 90s, it still does a great job capturing the moment.
Like I said at the top, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 1 is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s a bit disappointing because I really liked the story of Swann and her friends, and the foundation for something great is definitely there. It’s just a shame it takes way too long to kind of get nowhere—like I said, even if you split your story in two, it still needs to follow a proper story structure. I genuinely worry that this first Tape may put people off experiencing the second.
