Latest news with #LostRecords:BloomandRage
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lost Records explores the joys and dangers of our cultural obsession with nostalgia
I finished Lost Records: Bloom and Rage several days ago, but I'm still thinking about it. Developed by Don't Nod, the creator of the successful Life Is Strange series, it's a narrative adventure about four girls in a town in Wyoming, who meet one summer, form a band, discover a strange supernatural force in the woods and then meet up 30 years later to dissect what exactly happened to them. It is about growing up, growing apart and processing trauma, seen through a nostalgic lens. We meet the lead characters as adults, and join them as they scour their shared past, revisiting old places – a shack in the woods, their teenage bedrooms, the local bar – and exhuming old feelings. Lost Records has an excellent feel for the mid-90s when the girls were 16: you can explore rooms and pick up artefacts such as game carts, diaries and mixtapes and, if you were around at the time, you absorb the nostalgia as keenly as the characters themselves. While playing I was struck at what a vital role nostalgia plays in video game design. I don't mean in the extrinsic sense of playing and remembering old video games, and I don't mean games that call back to old titles. I mean nostalgia as a central theme and a motivational force for characters. So many role-playing adventures are about unlocking the past through narrative archeology. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn, Avowed, Journey, Outer Wilds and Heaven's Vault are all games in which your primary aim is to discover what happened to some ancient civilisation and, through it, your character's own legacy and identity. It's nostalgia that infects the landscape of The Last of Us as much as the deadly fungus – Ellie's love of old comics, songs and joke books; the repeated use of ruined museums, theatres and playgrounds as key locations – that Naughty Dog wanted to tap in to by repurposing our own nostalgia for lost childhood pleasures. I'm reading Agnes Arnold-Forster's excellent book Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, which looks at the origins of the concept and how it was first considered a fatal disease of the mind, a sort of mortal home sickness. In Death Stranding, this idea is made physical in the shape of the Beached Things, the smoky tar-like spirits that haunt the game's ruined landscapes. Nostalgia is the perfect theme for video games, because we have the freedom to explore and discover in them. They immerse us in landscapes and provide countless objects for us to observe and interact with. They also allow us to collect our own mementoes – most major titles now have photo modes where we can capture specific scenes, composing and editing the footage to our specific emotional requirements. In Lost Records, you can record video footage on lead character Swann's camcorder; you do this throughout the game and then there's a lovely payoff, which reminded me a little of the unforgettable climax to Cinema Paradiso. What is particularly absorbing about Lost Records, however – and it has been one of the game's most controversial aspects – is that it deals in the inconsistencies of nostalgia as much as the comforts. It is unapologetically ambiguous, with its central mysteries remaining largely unresolved. There is no comfortable catharsis, no shock reveal – what the lead characters learn when they reunite is that memory is unreliable, perhaps even duplicitous. In this way, it reminded me a lot of independent genre cinema – We're All Going to the World's Fair, Skinamarink, It Follows. It is elusive and non-compliant. We often think about games as power fantasies, but they are equally fantasies of reconstruction and remembrance. Games make us yearn for worlds that were never there. Perhaps one day, some sort of brain-computer interface will allow role-playing adventures to be set in our own memories, our own nostalgic kingdoms. It sounds idyllic, but what video games have been trying to warn us is that our brains are unreliable narrators. Nostalgia is a door, but it's also a trap. If you were playing PC games in the mid-1990s, the chances are you were a fan of the real-time strategy genre. Dune II, Command & Conquer, Total Annihilation … how the hours flew by as we harvested resources, built war machines and set out to destroy the other side's bases. Tempest Rising is a shameless paean to that era, set on an alternate 1990s Earth ruined by nuclear war and now housing two battling factions. The core loop of exploring, gathering, building and fighting is tight and compulsive, and the detailed visuals lend a modern sheen. Now let's have a new Advance Wars title for the Nintendo Switch 2. Available on: PCPlaytime: 20+ hours I love that Polygon has written a guide on how to take physical notes of the hit puzzle game Blue Prince. As someone who spent his childhood making maps of Commodore 64 adventures, I approve of this most tactile way to navigate games. Last year, I used multiple sheets of graph paper (complete with little flaps for hidden areas) to map Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and it was so fun to be back. The games industry can breathe a sigh of relief – it turns out Assassin's Creed Shadows has performed well, despite manufactured outrage over its use of a black samurai in the leading role. has a good opinion piece on the subject. Amid endless layoffs and studio closures, here's a piece from Eurogamer about how institutional memory helped make Indiana Jones and the Great Circle such an assured and entertaining game. It turns out that experienced teams who have worked together for years make good games together. Who'd have thought? Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Tape Two) – love, grief and self-recrimination as the girls reunite | ★★★★☆ Now Play This 2025 – the end of an era of experimental game design | Simon Parkin 'It's allowed me to see through his eyes': Super Mario, my dad and me Piece of the action: entering the British puzzle championship Super spicy! Jack Black's Minecraft song Steve's Lava Chicken becomes shortest ever UK Top 40 hit Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion This week's question comes from Andrew Wilcox, head judge and founder of the Cuprinol shed of the year competition, who asked via Bluesky: 'Why are there lots of sheds in games but no games about shed-building?' Considering how big the cosy games market is, you'd think some clever indie studio would have attempted a shed sim by now. Imagine pottering about in your own virtual wooden den, perhaps doing a spot of carpentry or sorting seeds to plant. You can build sheds in The Sims 4: Cottage Living and Farming Simulator, but these tend to have very specific utilitarian uses, such as grain storage. Anyway, I put the question to game designer and keen shed botherer, Will Luton, who has worked at Sega and Rovio and now runs the consultancy Department of Play. He said: 'There are two problems to consider here: what is the main action (AKA the core loop), and what are the ways you move through the game (AKA the progression vectors)? 'There are multiple ways you could address these. Is the main game more about designing the shed? Or are you making it to a specific design? This defines if it's more open-ended and creative (like Townscaper) or more systematic (like Car Mechanic Simulator). This decision also likely defines the type of interaction: isometric drag and drop v first-person traversal. 'Once you've made one shed, why do you want to make more? There must be some kind of 'unfolding' where new mechanics or possibilities unlock. So, for example, when you complete your first shed, you unlock a nail gun, which means you can assemble much quicker and more sturdily. Maybe now you can make sheds over 10sqm. Or perhaps you install electricity, which unlocks lighting and power tools. Maybe you have a shed yourself that you can constantly upgrade and add new tools to, which allows you to then make bigger and better sheds for clients. 'So to answer the question: there is no reason why someone hasn't made this game. Indeed, if the reader happens to have £500k, I'd help them to bring it to market.' If you've got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Life is Strange director says Don't Nod returned to its episodic roots in Lost Records because he's not "invested" in Netflix's binge model
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Don't Nod's decision to split Lost Records: Bloom and Rage into two parts was inspired by its success with episodic hit Life is Strange and the game director's thoughts on Netflix's controversial binge model. After dabbling in a few different genres - serene climbing sims, vampire RPGs, and tragic romantasy action games - Don't Nod has finally returned to the choice-based adventure games that made it a household name with Lost Records: Bloom and Rage - Tape 1 out now and Tape 2 coming in April. But it's also returned to its episodic strategy, too. "I noticed that I'm not invested as much in Netflix shows, I binge them and then forget them very quickly sometimes," Life is Strange and now Lost Records director Michel Koch said about the new game's staggered release in an interview with Eurogamer. "And then I was watching some TV shows on Apple TV and HBO, where they are sticking to weekly releases, and I found that I was investing way more. And we were thinking, we made some good episodic games, why not still go for at least a part of that?" In the years since Life is Strange's coming-of-age melodrama and TellTale's fallout, other similar games have chosen to opt out of an episodic release, with both Life is Strange: True Colors and Double Exposure, notably, releasing all chapters at once. Koch explained that Lost Records almost went in the same direction, but the studio "decided around two years" ago to split the game in half "so it makes sense for the story, for editing, pacing." For anyone out of the loop, Lost Records: Bloom and Rage follows four friends and jumps between their teenage years in the summer of 1995 and their distinctly more dour adult lives 27 years later. The tapes are then split intentionally: Tape 1 is for Bloom and Tape 2 is for Rage. A major moment in between the tapes also meant it made sense for the team to press pause and "let the player take their time, to maybe play something else, wait a bit, think about what happened." That's definitely a feeling TV can capture when it's appointment viewing - look no further than Severance Season 2 - but, honestly, I don't remember the last time I properly debriefed with my friends about a single Netflix show, aside from conversations that go, "have you seen X? It's good!" GamesRadar+'s Lost Records: Bloom and Rage review was convinced by the decision, calling it "a wonderfully sincere portrait of teenage girlhood." Check out what other exciting releases we have to look forward to in our roundup of new games for 2025 and beyond.
New York Times
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Riot Grrrl Rebellion With Supernatural Cues
The narratively profuse mystery game Lost Records: Bloom and Rage is like living in a Bikini Kill song followed by a Phoebe Bridgers ballad. The four main characters who form the title band, Bloom and Rage, are strong together — even as teenagers, even when one describes herself as meek. Through the highs of anger and the depths of sadness, they search for deeper meaning through self-discovery as they come of age. It's freeing. It's feminist. It's powerful. But the rebellious grit, augmented by the game's mature themes, does more than amplify an energetic liberalism during this 1995 period of revelation. Everywhere the girls go in tiny Velvet Cove, Mich., they rock. Autumn, a spirited young woman of color, sings duets loudly with Nora, a gothy Joan Jett type who likes to push friends' buttons. Music plays an important part throughout Bloom, the first of the game's two episodes. (Rage is scheduled to be released in April.) The D.I.Y. riot grrrl essence here is inspiring, especially for those who lived through the time. And yet, there's a serene, attractive innocence when suburban boredom turns to goblincore-inspired escape. After Swann, the red-haired central character, is called 'fat' by bullies, she turns to filming everything with a video camera. (There's no idealized perfection here, a good, honest thing; every teen has zits, even Swann.) She explores a lurid forest. She sits at the water's muddy edge among the mushrooms, frogs and dragonflies, the height of Zen peacefulness. You can't help but appreciate her outsider essence. Even Thoreau would be jealous. Swann and her friends yearn for more than hanging at the local ice cream stand or watching movies at the multiplex. You can hear it in their words. All they care about is one another, their fleeting summer together, holding hands and making their art. They make fun of condom wrappers and heavy flow days because speaking truth is freeing. Just as in the Life Is Strange series, also by the French studio Don't Nod, the gameplay elements are light and not necessarily new. There's the convention of placing fuses correctly in a breaker box to get power running. But the play isn't the point, not really. It is in service of the story, which feels dramatic when it should be and, at the end, surprisingly melancholy. The game makes mistakes regarding pop culture history. Characters cite the found-footage horror film 'The Blair Witch Project,' though that movie wasn't released until 1999. They repeatedly use the anachronistic term 'bounce' (meaning 'leave'). The Furbys and Tamagotchis seen in Swann's room weren't sold until the late '90s. When the details are right, though, the game approaches perfection. Troll toys sit cute and big-eyed, a Newton's cradle clacks appealingly, and nods are made to films like 'Pulp Fiction.' At the practice garage, there are homemade mix cassettes featuring groups like Hole and Belly. It's here that Kat, an overall-wearing, occasionally furious writer, introduces 'See You in Hell,' the raucous tune that will be the group's anthem. (Unfortunately, you can't access the song to play it again when the episode is complete.) A mix of horror and science fiction becomes revealed when three of the band members reunite at a local dive bar 27 years after their brilliant but tragic summer together. Through snippets of reminiscences, you see that Swann leaves a cabin at midnight to videotape bizarre moths. They're suddenly, supernaturally colorful, surrounded by a fog of luminescent hues. They lead Swann to a seemingly bottomless sinkhole that radiates a purple glow. Then, back in the present day, a shoebox-size package addressed eerily to Bloom and Rage is brought to the bar. A 'Grey's Anatomy'-style cliffhanger is moving because it isn't just the girls who are friends. Invested in their stories and emotions, you've become close to them as well. The game's final episode promises to reveal all mysteries, perhaps violently and supernaturally. True to form, Bloom and Rage sings, 'I can tell I'll mess you up — when I see you in hell.' In riot grrrl fashion, they may indeed live their music.
