Lost Records: Bloom & Rage

Went in expecting something else completely. Glad I played through it all.

SHUT UP! I'm not crying you're crying! This was so fun and good, it ended with me totally not in tears in any way. COMPLETELY DRY EYES! *Sniffle*

Great Game!

muy entretenido

Loved playing. Beautiful graphics and a wonderful story. The video camera is an amazing feature.

Enfin un jeu de Don't Nod dans le style de LiS, ça faisait longtemps que j'attendais ça ! Le début prend quand même son temps, même quand on a l'habitude des jeux lents du genre. Il faut un peu s'accrocher car on ne sait pas trop où l'on va, mais malgré tout, l'ambiance est hyper plaisante avec ces personnages hauts en couleur et cette vibe de l'été 95... Petit à petit, plus ça tourne dans l'étrange, plus le jeu se dévoile de manière grandiose. J'ai enfin retrouvé ce titillement que m'avait provoqué LiS à l'époque : une vibe précise, portée par une cinématographie et un travail sur les lumières et les décors vraiment incroyables. Mais ce qui touche le plus, c’est l’attachement aux personnages et à leurs relations ; on sent un vrai truc se créer au fil du développement, on est à fond dans leur évolution. Le choix des musiques, toujours aussi exceptionnel, vient parfaire le tout. Mes premières heures m'ont fait un peu peur, je ne savais pas à quoi m'attendre et je craignais d'être déçu. Mais une fois dedans, je n'ai plus pu m'arrêter, j'attendais ma prochaine session de jeu avec impatience pour en découvrir plus. Un jeu marquant, merci ! [spoiler] J'ai vraiment hâte de voir la suite ! [/spoiler]

Wikipedia says this did not meet sales expectations, which sucks, because like Tell Me Why it's an improvement over Life is Strange, and all three play in what remains a very solitary sandbox. In a broad sense, Lost Records plays like an interactive coming-of-age movie or TV show, or video game version of a YA novel. Centred around the intense friendship between four teenage girls that grows and, a frame story following their adult selves implies, implodes over the summer of 1995, some of its elements are well-trod territory in other media, but take advantage of its medium's visual capabilities and luxury of time to deliver an impactful tale like few others I've read, watched, or played. Our protagonist is Swann, a chubby redhead and budding filmmaker who's always filming everything she can with her camcorder - including Autumn, the aspiring musician and amateur skateboarder who works at the ice cream stand near her favourite video store, and Autumn's friend Nora, an aspiring punk rocker with a matching fashion sense. Swann is filming both one day when the trio is harassed by Corey, the older, motorcycle-riding boyfriend of a rich, vapid blonde named Dylan, before being saved, sort of, by Dylan's younger sister, Kat. Though neither Swann nor Kat have spoken with Autumn or Nora to that point, the girls very credibly become fast friends. Aside from the Longest Journey's April Ryan, and only then in the first game, I've never played or met video game characters who looked or felt like Swann, Autumn, Nora, or Kat, in both a visual and writing sense. While I found the game's character animation a bit stiff, its core foursome (and everyone else in its small cast, to be fair) LOOK like real people, as both girls and women, in a way video game characters rarely do. They're not ugly, but they're not conventionally attractive either, with realistic blemishes and body types and an awkwardness usually reserved for side characters the rest of a YA cast ridicules. (The developers cite Freaks and Geeks and My So-Called Life as inspirations in-game, and it shows.) Stellar writing and voice acting, meanwhile, brings their believable personalities to life, the game's four-person writing/directing team (including, blessedly, two women) capturing all of the intense, uncertain, grandiose emotions behind the type of teenage interactions that leave so many of us grateful to grow out of high school. They're wild and passionate but still forming their identities, their tentative opinions subject to change based on what their new friends say at a moment's notice. And you spend much of the first of Lost Records' two "tapes" (appropriately called "Bloom", while the second is called "Rage") just... hanging out with them. It's an adventure game, so there's puzzles of a kind (Swann's moving to Canada at the end of summer, so she needs to do some packing before leaving her room; Corey throws the keys to Autumn's ice cream stand into an FFVII-evoking park when first bullying the girls and they bond while looking for them), and you can use Swann's camera to film just about anything in a minigame I personally loved, but mostly you're just watching the girls banter back and forth, more often than not choosing what Swann says and when. Swann herself can be played as sassy or sincere, but feels relatively consistent either way, the former coming off as the type of laboured attempts to be cool that too many of us projected as teenagers, while the latter feels like her genuine self. Meanwhile, my impression of the other three - and I might be wrong about this, but I played it that way and it fit the narrative very well - is that the flirtatious, irreverent, frequently playful Nora is meant to accommodate Swann's sassy side, while quiet, geeky, serious Autumn is meant to accommodate her sincere side, with Kat somewhere in between. The other reason for my impression is that in Lost Records' frame story, set during the COVID pandemic, it quickly becomes apparent that something happened to Kat in the past. Swann (whom as an adult you play in first-person), Autumn, and Nora haven't seen each other since and are only now meeting to open a mysterious package addressed to their teenage band, Bloom & Rage (hence the tapes and title). While it's a fraction of the experience, the frame story packs an emotional wallop and is a big reason for my enthusiastic recommendation. Unlike nearly every game of its type that I've played which makes a similar claim, Lost Records makes your actions in both the past and present genuinely matter to an extent they rarely do. Without revealing too much else about its creators' tale, there are four endings depending on whether adult Swann, Autumn, and Nora open the package together, whether Swann opens it alone after an overwhelmed Autumn and Nora leave, or whether Swann opens the package with only Autumn or Nora by her side. According to the game's own stats, only about 20 percent of players have finished the game with both, and a whopping 42 percent have finished the game alone. My own experience was in the middle - I played Swann as serious and fell harder for Autumn, who seemed at odds with Nora as an adult. And while it sucked to see Nora leave, it was clear Dontnod's team had planned for the possibility and done all it could to make sure her absence (or the potential absence of both, for that matter) wouldn't make the conclusion feel like a "bad" ending. Like Life is Strange and Tell Me Why, there's a supernatural element to Lost Records, but it's minimal and beside the point. In fact, the game's most overt supernatural moment comes in its epilogue, when it teases a sequel I hope we get to see someday, though even if we don't what exists is pretty special. I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of why I fell in love with this game, but half the appeal is its sense of discovery, which isn't something I'd want to take away from future players. Swann is instantly one of my favourite video game protagonists, and like Tell Me Why and Life is Strange, I expect her and her friends' story to stick with me for a long, long time.