Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Tape 1 review

More than any other follow up from Don't Nod or another studio, Lost Records: Bloom and Rage feels like a spiritual successor to Life is Strange. It's a supernatural, coming-of-age rebellion told through a camera. It's about girls and the narrative choices that shape their relationships. It's about how those relationships in turn shape each other's lives.

Lost Records' Velvet Cove isn't quite the now-iconic locale of Arcadia Bay. Set in a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (on that smaller, northernmost peninsula of Keweenaw County) it is essentially nowhere. And that is what that part of the world feels like, sure, but Velvet Cove needs to exist in this anywhere-and-nowhere state to emphasize the game's relationship to time.

At the end of the game's first part (Part 2 releases April 15), there's no time travel in Lost Records. There's no telepathy either; just some magic, as of now still largely undefined. Rather, the past is a constructed narration from the women in the present day of 2022, remembering their 16th summer in '95. The one before they graduated. Before Swann moved away. Before they promised to never speak of it. Before…

At home I pick up the objects and rotate them, but there's something different about these. Trolls, PEZ, VHS Rentals in chunky plastic boxes, Pogs, serial paperbacks, diaries, marbles, pads, pin screens, bubbly plastic pencil cases, Newton's Pendulums, a CD binder, sci-fi show magazines, a sticker covered alarm clock, and a Tamagotchi I can feed, play, and clean with each button. Also: That story you wrote, ripped out of a journal hidden with the romance novel you kept under the bed. These aren't clues. There are no puzzles to solve. Each is a rendered artifact—no, a relic—of girlhood.

Swann, an outcast who at this point prefers to go unnoticed, takes her camcorder out to the trail and records the animals. The ruins. Comes home and films her cat around the bedroom. The game splices the tape together, lets me edit the footage. I make a film, a moving diary that looks like the grainy spool that spun in Swann's hands a few seconds at a time. And when I watch it all back through the grain it feels like I held that tape in my own hands, not something rendered on my computer. Then one day she's noticed, befriended by three girls who also don't fit in for reasons they never really understood.

There are moments where time jumps 27 years between the bar and Velvet Cove within a single scene, others when days play out with commentary echoing from above. Through this ongoing conversation, choices are made. Swann remembers who it was she called on the phone 27 years ago, what they all named that hideout you found and decorated down by the lake. And if these nostalgic memories of such an idealized moment are wrong, well there's those tapes Swann has, the ones you have been recording this whole time. Right?

Lost Records is nostalgic, but it is also concerned with nostalgia and the fuzzy, lossy memory making of queer childhood—at least at this halfway point in its narrative. The past is certainly romanticized, but it feels eerie. The light is too pretty, the adventures too tropey. They even say as much, referencing Blair Witch as Swann helplessly films while lost in the woods one night. But maybe I just desire a critique of '90s nostalgia right now.

Lost Records is releasing under similar circumstances to Life is Strange in 2015. I know screenshots of this review might circulate on X like other recent writing on games that simply contain queer people. And I know a lot of those people are nostalgic for the games they played in their romanticized '90s childhood they feel were taken away from them.

In her essay "Let's Play Life," Liz Ryerson observes the role of '90s gaming nostalgia in the contemporary conservative backlash, retvrn rhetoric capitalizing on an idealized past that looks "a lot like those kitschy Thomas Kinkade style tableaus of consumer childhood nostalgia done by artist Rachid Lotf." These men were surrounded by mirrors their whole lives—childhood stories and a mediasphere growing up around them constantly reflecting back their own stories. They never had to look through a window at a story that might offer something unfamiliar, unknowable to them,, and now AI images can endlessly regurgitate rose colored vomit back to them. Those boys probably broke a few of those windows with baseballs, like what happens in the movies back then, when kids could wander the neighborhood and play pick up games. Not like today, on Xbox Live or Battle Net.

But Lost Records is for the girls who know what finding Bikini Kill or Team Dresch or Siouxsie and the Banshees after all those years feels like. Who made a religion of Rocky Horror and found out there's other people that don't fit in like them. It's also an interactive game with clumsy dialogue mechanics that we've seen done better in the decade since.

While it's easy to say Lost Records is a Stand By Me for girls, it is not creating quite the same fantasy. It is not a purely affirming mirror. Romanticized, but not idealized. Swann's called a lesbo, fatso, freak. She makes all these tapes of her cats and her toys because she's alone, and when she has friends she makes videos of them because she never found those mirrors to her girlhood at the Movie Palace.

But then, Keweenaw County. Velvet Cove. It's cool that this is a game about 40 year old women talking over drinks as much as it is cool that this is a game about teenage dykes discovering riot grrrl and each other and themselves all at once. But Velvet Cove is a movie rental store with an ice cream stand, a dilapidated playground under a conspicuously large underpass, Nora's garage, a trail through the woods near the lake, your bedroom, and this bar we're sitting in today remembering it all. All connected by roads and woods that you never see, just the water tower on the horizon.

Perhaps that is also a consequence of memory, though, these isolated moments and spaces, but I don't totally buy that we're in some definitive version of the past yet. There are no other kids. Hardly a mention of school. I can't for the life of me figure out why they would put on a show in a parking lot with no other kids their age around. Where are all the tapes Swann and I have been recording this whole time?

Maybe that's just been lost to memory. Maybe Part 2 will answer questions I don't even have yet. What Lost Records: Bloom and Rage has set up is deeply compelling, though flawed. PC Gamer's original review of Life is Strange strikes a similar chord: "unfocused but earnest." With such earnestness comes some amount of vulnerability—seeing beneath the armor of goth makeup, piercings, and loud music. Lost Records knows the armor we wore. Might still wear, too. That girlhood is a thing we all failed in our own way. And that the perfect needle drop can make up for a clumsy confession.