Lost Records: Bloom & Rage

I went into Lost Records: Bloom & Rage carrying the weight of every Don't Nod game I've loved since the original Life is Strange, which means I arrived with high expectations and a readiness to be wrecked. The studio's Montreal team delivers something genuinely distinct here: a dual-timeline narrative adventure that splits its roughly eight hours between the summer of 1995 in the fictional small town of Velvet Cove, Michigan, and a 2022 reunion framed around a mysterious package addressed to a forgotten punk band called Bloom & Rage. You play as Swann Holloway, an awkward, quietly tender teenager who processes the world through the lens of her camcorder. That camcorder is not just a theme prop. It is the game's mechanical heartbeat. The filming system is where Lost Records earns its identity. You roam third-person through sunlit environments pointing the camera at birds, graffiti, your friends' faces, half-eaten snacks on a cabin porch, and then edit your captured clips into thematic memoir reels that double as collectibles and windows into Swann's inner life. It sounds gentle and unhurried, because it is. But there is real craft in how Don't Nod has structured these moments: the camcorder's zoom and flashlight functions unlock hidden details, certain footage triggers entire new scenes, and the editing process gives you a quiet sense of authorship that most walking sims never bother to offer. The present-day sequences shift to first-person, a subtle but pointed artistic choice that closes the distance between player and protagonist in a way that lands. Dialogue carries the same layered attention. Choices feed a visible relationship tracker for Swann's three friends, Nora, Autumn, and Kat, but the game wisely hides whether a given line will help or hurt a bond. You can also stay silent, and sometimes that is the correct move. The characters themselves are the genuine achievement here. Nora's punk armor concealing real fear, Autumn's simmering grief, and Kat, charismatic and self-destructive in equal measure, all feel like people, not archetypes. The voice cast and the soundtrack do enormous work: the dreamy ambient score from Ruth Radelet and Milk & Bone sits alongside actual riot grrrl energy, and the 90s detail work, Tamagotchis, band posters, module consoles scattered through Swann's bedroom, is obsessive and loving rather than cynical nostalgia-bait. The honest warnings are worth naming. The pacing in the first tape, subtitled Bloom, is glacial by design, and not everyone will have the patience to sit with it. The second tape, Rage, lands its emotional gut-punches but rushes the resolution in a way that left a genuine hollow feeling. The dual-timeline structure, which promises to let the past and present shape each other in complex ways, mostly delivers that promise in emotional texture rather than interlocking mechanics, which is a missed opportunity for players hoping the two timelines would speak to each other more actively. Facial animation occasionally drops behind the quality of the voice work, creating small moments of visual disconnect. These are real friction points, not minor nitpicks, and anyone who needs a tightly paced plot will bounced hard off the first three hours. For players who find meaning in slow observation, in the specific texture of a summer friendship that burns too bright and too brief, this game is its own category. It is the kind of narrative adventure that trusts you to be moved by a teenager filming a deer in the woods. If that sentence makes you roll your eyes, look elsewhere. If it makes you feel something already, clear an evening.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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