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
Read more on pcgamer.com
