Review | Lost Records: Bloom - Girlhood Is A Spectrum
Entering the bar feels impossible, despite it not having changed in the many years that have passed. Maybe that’s the problem, actually, that nothing has changed in this backwoods hamlet except me. My burdens jingle in my pocket as I exit my car and walk toward the bar, inside of which two of my childhood friends wait for my arrival, or — judging from the name they call me, or the name of my contact in their phones — the arrival of someone they used to know. Swann, seemingly, thinks something similar at the beginning of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, letting her mom chat away to delay a reunion 27 years in the making. One everyone promised would never happen.
In this place — for me, rural New Jersey; for Swann, Velvet Cove on the northmost tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula — memories exist on two planes. The first, the long twilight of adolescence, complete with the ruffle of leaves, the sound of bats diving into the pool for a drink, the sprint across a busy intersection for a slice of pizza. The second, the present, which is weighed down by all the regrets of adulthood, the sacrifices made in the name of survival, the heartbreaks accumulated, the friendships lost along the long, winding road to now. Lost Records: Bloom and Rage thrives on this bifurcation, hopping back and forth between a post-pandemic 2021 and a rose-tinted 1995.
As Don’t Nod’s successor to Life is Strange, Lost Records builds upon that series’ melodramatic tone, supernatural intrigue, and decision trees to chronicle the aftermath of one perfect summer four girls spent together before tragedy struck and they agreed to never speak again. The narrative generally succeeds in braiding the two timelines together, sometimes even placing them in conversation with one another through prompts to Reminisce, which allows audio of the past to leak into the present and dialogue from the present to comment on the past. The commentary between Swann and her former friends feels natural, as if they were simply reconnecting over a pint and not trying to stitch together their memories to understand why a malevolent package about their old band, Bloom & Rage, was sent their way.
When I enter the bar and sit with my friends, we circle the past, roam among its forests for anecdotes and references to events long gone; the present is paid lip service and the future is merely hinted at. In those moments, we do not exist as twenty-somethings: we are mischievous teenagers again, children who play at adulthood while breaking into school buses and smoking weed out of a hollowed out apple. We pull out our phones and flip through camera rolls and Instagram feeds as if to prove that our memories actually happened. As if to prove that the people we are now stem from the people we once were.
In a time long before the forever archives of social media, Swann documents her summer in the UP through the viewfinder of her camcorder, capturing her budding friendships with Autumn, Nora, and Kat in a fuzzy, warm, lossy video. They’re a charming and motley collection of misfits whose ambitions and musical taste far exceed the farmers and hunters and deadenders of Velvet Cove. With Swann moving to Vancouver at the end of the summer, these languid days are all they have to spend together, and the months shamble forward almost unwillingly. They see one another daily, either bumming around abandoned playgrounds or renovating an abandoned cabin in the woods. It’s the last summer of their girlhood — the only one they have together to make memories that will last a lifetime.
I wanted a girlhood more than I wanted almost anything else as a child, but I didn’t have the language or understanding to express that. I felt compelled to frequently look at a female puberty book we kept in the bathroom, presumably as a guide for my older sister. I would study the diagrams that explained what was going to happen to a girl’s body and willed them to happen to my own. As I entered middle school, I actively tried to avoid the trappings of teenage boyhood and grew extremely close with a handful of girls. I loved them in all-consuming ways — I wanted to be accepted by them, trusted by them, glimpse their inner lives, know their problems with boys and school and puberty, so that I could live vicariously through them. I wanted to hold them close and never let go; I wanted to eat them alive and take their place.
As their friendship deepens, the girls of Bloom & Rage become more vulnerable with one another, and boundaries start to blur. There are levels of closeness that Swann can achieve with each character, ranging from “We’re cool” to “BFFs” and, most tantalizing, “Something more…”, a nebulous space that exists between best friends and romantic partners that’s a staple of queer adolescence. The bonding is both idealised and realistic, slithering through coming-of-age clichés to bite upon a nugget of truth: the shared realization that a patriarchal society wants to diminish their spirit, the growing awareness of their nascent queerness, the pain and promise of leaving childhood behind. It becomes difficult to tell if Swann wants to simply grow closer to her friends or become them entirely. It’s an intense, unflinching look at queer girlhood, one that I recognised despite being raised as a boy.
Swann’s relationship with each girl is based on the choices that you make throughout the story. Unlike the binary extremes of previous Don’t Nod games, many of the choices throughout the eight-hour runtime of the game’s first part — the currently released portion is Tape 1, with Tape 2 releasing as a free update on April 15th — are granular, building upon one another like braids in a friendship bracelet to tell a cohesive and unique story crafted by the player. Some decisions affect Swann’s relationship with the three girls, which are denoted by a growing or shrinking heart, while others define Swann’s own traits, which are portrayed as a sproutling emerging from black UI dirt.
While exploring scenes, players can pull out Swann’s camera and record footage for her “memoirs,” the game’s version of collectibles that are generally voluntary but sometimes mandatory for story progression. Taping Velvet Cove’s graffiti and birds and picturesque vistas is a brilliant marriage of mechanics and narrative, fulfilling both the player’s curiosity and Swann’s desire to extensively capture her hometown before moving. The most charming of these memoirs are interviews between Swann and individual girls, as it’s in isolation that their personalities and insecurities shine brightest. There’s even a primitive editing system to order the clips in different ways which affects Swann’s commentary that accompanies the videos, although I hardly ever touched it.
Here is where I have to be brutally honest with you: I do not play these games — which, I suppose, can be clunkily named choice-based adventure narratives — for their gameplay. Walking around exquisitely rendered environments picking up faithfully recreated objects grows stale quickly. There is certainly joy to be found in Lost Records’ adoration of American pop culture in the ‘90s, complete with legally-distinct Tamagatchi’s to play with and feed, Pez dispensers to comment on, and Pogs to ogle. And as someone who spent years in Michigan, Don’t Nod’s dedication to the state’s culture and quirks is both commendable and deeply appreciated (especially the multiple references to Dogman, a lesser-known cryptid that is as ridiculous as it sounds).
But all these details are merely set dressing for the characters, who bond over Bikini Kill, discuss popular TV shows, and make Digital Video music videos in the woods as if they will air on MTV (which, oddly enough, is actually never brought up). Their conversations and exploits are the reason to “play” Lost Records. I use quotes since many of the cutscenes proceed with little to no player interaction; only one montage actively brings the player in on the fun of blowing dandelions and lighting sparklers and drinking pop on the shores of Lake Superior. The player may control Swann at times, but they never become her, watching instead the events unfold in a close third-person instead, a witness to the love between the four girls rather than a participant.
With incisive writing and good performances, it’s incredibly easy to fall in love with the girls of Bloom & Rage. After disappointing one of the girls, I would save scum to salvage Swann’s relationship with them; I guided Swann into an adorable almost-romance with Kat, who wears her heart on her sleeve but protects it with an iron cage; I took a photo of an in-game mixtape so I could explore riot grrl music on my own after playing. Even as it was clear that I was racing toward Tape 1’s conclusion, I, like Swann, didn’t want to say goodbye to them.
This adoration isn’t always positive, however; Don’t Nod itself sometimes gets so caught up in the band’s misadventures that the actual stakes and supernatural elements — a prerequisite for a Life is Strange–like — remain unsatisfyingly ambiguous. The girls experience ghostly interference on multiple occasions and never once comment on it. There’s no fear stirred by causing a power outage or meeting the spirit of Bloody Mary: everything freaky is simply glossed over and forgotten about by both the characters and the narrative itself. The narrative even sets up a literal mystery box and a paranormal power that exists underneath Velvet Cove, but provides no answers for either.
When the credits roll, it’s clear that everything in Tape 1 was merely an elongated set-up, narrative dominoes put in place and waiting to be toppled in a bombastic, hopefully satisfying conclusion. As a clearly incomplete title, anyone looking to play Lost Records: Bloom & Rage should come in looking not for answers or mystery, but to hang out with Swann, Kat, Autumn, and Nora. If only for a few moments, I was given a glimpse both into the girlhood I never got and the one that I can now create for myself.
