Lost Records: Bloom and Rage Review
By now a committed Don’t Nod fanboy, I’ve been eagerly anticipating Lost Records: Bloom and Rage for a while now. The only reason it’s taken me until now to play this Life Is Strange spiritual successor is that I was waiting for both episodes to release so I could play through it all in one go.
By now, I think we pretty much know what to expect from Don’t Nod, and Lost Records fits that pattern to a T. It’s emotional, artsy, heavy on tragedy, a little messy, a little janky, occasionally self-indulgent, very queer, and anything but forgettable.
Lost Records splits itself between two timelines, with the story being framed by scenes in the present day but mostly taking place in flashbacks to twenty-seven years before. Our viewpoint character is Swann Holloway, a nerdy and awkward loner who stumbled her way into a close-knit friend circle of other misfit girls during one summer in her teen years.
The game is all about these four girls, the friendship (and potentially romance) that grew between them, and the dark secret they’ve been keeping for twenty-seven years. Between their heart to heart conversations and playing in their gods-awful garage band, the girls found something strange hidden in the forests outside their rural town, something that would shape their lives forever. Whether it was a blessing or a curse is a question this game will have you asking long after the credits roll.
I’ve said many times that I believe the mark of true greatness in media is not a lack of flaws, but when the highs are high enough to make you forgive the lows. Lost Records is a perfect example of that, as there is plenty about I didn’t like.
The dialogue is occasionally clunky. The pacing is glacial. The story is excessively tropey (the jock bully’s name is Corey, for Pete’s sake). The plot can feel forced or contrived at times. There’s probably one too many lengthy, emotional musical montages. There’s a lot of story choices that feel like they should be very impactful but aren’t.
My biggest complaint is that the split timeline thing feels like it was mostly just there as a marketing gimmick. I was hoping it would be an opportunity for some very experimental meta game mechanics with both timelines influencing each other, but that mostly didn’t pan out. It actually detracts from the story, because the most head-scratching plot points have to do with justifying why it took twenty-seven years for all this to come to a head.
In hindsight, I think the game would have worked better if it had abandoned the future timeline altogether and just focused on the story of the girls as teenagers. The important bits from the future largely could have happened in the past, and felt more natural for doing so.
In general it’s probably better just to not overthink the game’s plot, because I don’t think it holds up very well if you do, but a game like this is less about the Point A to Point B and more about the emotions it’s trying to evoke. On that measure, Lost Records nails it. This game perfectly weaves a tapestry of friendship, young love, bittersweet nostalgia, and the harsh reality that you can’t go home again.
A game like this lives or dies by the strength of its characters, and that’s another place where Lost Records sticks the landing. I can’t give enough praise to Swann especially. Normally in games like these, I find the protagonist can be a bit forgettable as they’re clearly meant to be a blank slate for the player, but Swann has a very well-realized personality all her own, and I found her both very relatable and almost overwhelmingly lovable.
Few other characters in fiction have made me want to cheer for them so strongly. The other girls are by no means forgettable, but Swann steals the show.
Add to that gorgeous graphics and a lovely soundtrack, and you have a game that feels like crawling under a warm and comforting blanket, even when it’s doing everything it can to shatter your heart into a thousand pieces.
Overall rating: 8/10
One final aside: I do find it a little strange that so much of Lost Records’ story is about punk music and the culture around it, but the soundtrack is almost nothing but soft, gentle synth music — almost as far from punk as you can get. Doesn’t really bother me — as I said above, I enjoyed the soundtrack a lot — but it is a bit of a weird choice thematically when you think about it.
