Don’t Nod has become known for its story-driven explorative adventure titles, and for good reason. Grab any one of its titles and however you feel about the execution overall, you’ll always have a unique and interesting experience that’ll leave you thinking about what happened long after the credits have rolled.
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage isn’t just the developer's latest, but might also be its best effort yet.
It takes the best of childhood stories like Stand by Me, It (the first part), and The Goonies to create a punk-edged coming-of-age tale, with enough supernatural weirdness sprinkled in for an engaging tale that’ll keep you holding down the play button until its gut-wrenching conclusion.
You play as Swann, a socially awkward teen with a fascination for cinema. She's a character who many millennials will feel more than a little seen by – her bedroom, for example, is a shrine to lost '90s culture like Blockbuster and Tamagotchis.
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For the main bulk of the game, you’ll document her last summer before moving country, as she makes new friends, deals with challenging townsfolk and that awkward period of shifting into adulthood and finding your place, among other mysteries.
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Always with a camcorder in hand, you can wander the world around you as normal or through the lo-fi lens of your camera to capture events as they unfold.
While some of what you film is mandatory to keep the story moving, you can always capture extra footage and hit the cutting room to re-edit your masterpiece and enjoy that grungy DVI camera aesthetic. There’s also plenty of challenges littered in each chapter of the story that’ll help you create more memories just for the fun of it.
As you’d expect, all your choices have consequences on you and those around you. From the most seemingly-innocuous conversation choices – silence being an option if you so wish – to things you spot or capture on tape, everything has the ability to alter your story.
The camcorder mechanic may seem simple enough, but something about the perfectly crafted playlist of music in the background, your friends' relatable idle conversations, and that warm nostalgia from the tape effect makes for a calming experience that left us happy to wander and film for far longer than needed – just soaking in the atmosphere of it all (and wishing it was summer).
As someone who remembers growing up playing in bands and dreaming of ‘making it’, I found that the excitement pouring out of the characters around all of their creative endeavours was captured so genuinely.
That’s not to say there isn't the occasional slightly-off line of dialogue. There are some moments that feel more awkward than others, where the script feels like it was written by adults approximating the thoughts of teens or perhaps trying to re-capture parts of their own younger days to fit in here.
But these little blips never derail the experience or feel like corporate additions, and thankfully are pretty few and far between.
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Moments like these are probably more noticeable given that Lost Records has a rather unique pace to its story, focusing on building out the characters and their relationships more than pushing the plot along to its conclusion.
The story kicks off with an adult Swann meeting up with her friends after over 20 years apart. The reason for this is a mysterious package addressed to ‘Bloom & Rage’ delivered to one of the gang, which they believe is linked to a secret they promised to keep hidden.
That leads to lots of conversations hinting at something ‘bad’ that happened that summer, forgotten awful memories and a promise made – but Tape 1 takes a long time unravelling these question marks and instead builds on why the girls' bonds were so strong in the first place.
You’ll cut from the present day to that summer, each conversation bleeding into and affecting the other in real time. It’s handled really well and avoids ever edging into confusing territory, with the present-day sections always interesting enough to keep the chatter alive but mysterious enough that the tension is held steady.
This made the fun, romantic moments of the gang's childhood bittersweet. We enjoyed going along for the ride that summer had to offer, but in the back of our minds were waiting for that twist to rear its head.
It may be a divisive approach, but if you allow yourself to take in the vibes and slowly meander to the conclusion then Lost Records will reward you with character development, laughs and a satisfying experience. If not, you may get a bit frustrated waiting to find out what happened 27 years ago.
The first half of Lost Records rewards you for your patience and delivers a pretty devastating cliffhanger ending. We can’t wait to see how Tape 2 plays out, and it’s hard not to urge anyone with an interest to give this one some time. You might just be surprised what you find.
Platform reviewed on: Xbox Series X
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Tape 1 is out now on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5. Tape 2 is out on April 15, 2025.
