Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Tape 1) Review

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage: Tape 1 opens in 2022, introducing you to its protagonist, Swann Halloway. Swann has returned to Velvet Cove, a small town in Wisconsin, for the first time since her family moved away from the town in 1995 while she was a teenager. She’s there for a reunion with the close friends she made during the summer her family moved, but it’s not a joyful occasion. We soon learn that Swann and her friends, Autumn, Kat, and Nora, experienced some sort of traumatic event at the end of that summer and made a pact to never make contact with each other again. They managed to keep that pact for 27 years until Autumn received a mysterious package wrapped in newspaper addressed to “Lost Records: Bloom & Rage” and covered with “I know what you did last summer” style handwritten notes. Now they are coming together as virtual strangers to piece together the memories of that summer and see if they can determine who is threatening to reveal the secret that tore them apart.

The game’s story unfolds in two timelines. As the former friends work to piece together the events of the past, the game will switch back to 1995 and put you into the shoes of teenaged Swann. The game is primarily conversation-driven, with the response you choose while interacting with other characters affecting both your relationships with those characters and elements of how the story will unfold. While the occasional choice in 2022 will affect how the memories of 1995 play out, most of the game and its consequential choices occur in 1995.

While the game sometimes telegraphs a consequential conversational decision by requiring you to respond within a short time limit, for the most part you’ll have to rely on your instincts as to which choices will carry larger consequences when selecting a response. In addition to story-branching decisions there are choices that you’ll make that will have an impact on your relationships with the other characters – some will even affect your relationship with multiple characters, and in different directions. The relationships all have a floor that is basically indifference, so you can’t make anyone hate you – the goal is really just to get closer to the characters that you find the most interesting. If you’re close with a character you’ll have additional interactions with them and learn more about them, but gameplay-wise it feels a little strange building relationships when you know everything will come to a hard break at the end.

While there is a lot of dialog-driven interaction in the game, it’s not all talk. There are adventure game style interactions in which you are free to roam about a small area and interact with some of the objects. Most of the time these objects are there to help add a little more breadth and color to the girls’ world, but there are a few times in which you will need to use them to solve a puzzle or problem in order for the story to progress. None of these are particularly difficult to solve, so if puzzles aren’t your forte you don’t need to worry about reaching a roadblock to finishing the game.

The final aspect of gameplay involves Swann’s hobby/obsession of filming everything around her with her camcorder. For the most part, this is in the game for completionists. Capture eight shots of birds or things that are in motion but don’t move anywhere – that sort of thing. There are moments in the game in which filming something is necessary to move the story forward, but for the most part the filming is just there to give you something more to do between conversations. When you complete the necessary captures of a subject, you’ll be able to reorder the film clips into “memories”. There’s not really any motivation for doing so, though, at least in Tape 1. Maybe this aspect of the game will come into play after Tape 2 is released.

If you’ve played DONTNOD games in the past, you may be wondering if Lost Records: Bloom & Rage has a supernatural aspect as in their games of this type in the past. The answer is ‘yes’, but I will leave it at that because it doesn’t appear until late in the game and is a major plot point when it does. This is also part one of a two-part game, so don’t expect to understand the significance of it when you complete Tape 1. And that’s not even the major cliffhanger you’ll be left with at the end. Once you complete the game and are waiting for Tape 2, you can view a summary of the statuses of your relationships with the past and present characters, or give the game a second playthrough to experiment with different choices or to try to collect any trophies you missed the first time through.

The fact that the summer doesn’t take a dark and unexpected turn for the girls until almost the very end of Tape 1 means that the story moves slowly and takes a while to develop. As a result, you’ll be spending a lot of time with teenaged girls talking about their dreams for the future and telling each how awesome each of their silly ideas is. If this seems like it may be a bit much for you, well, I can’t tell you at this point whether or not it will be worth the journey for you because I don’t know how it ends. Tape 1 is mostly build-up, and I’m left wondering how significant its more mundane events will be when the story concludes in Tape 2.

Final Rating: 75%

Note: A review code for this game was provided by the publisher. It was reviewed on PlayStation 5.