I have, for 10 years now, ardently argued in defense of DON’T NOD, the studio behind one of my all time favorites Life is Strange. The French Canadian studio has pumped out eight more games over the past decade; nearly all of them are of middling to outright bad quality, but I’ve consistently said that they can do better. They will eventually do better. However, my defense of the studio has today come to an end after finishing Tape 1 of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, which is so far looking to be the worst game they have ever produced.
DON’T NOD is no stranger to tackling different kinds of games. You’d likely be surprised to find that a single studio is behind Tell Me Why, Harmony: The Fall of Reverie, Twin Mirror, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, Remember Me, Vampyr, Jusant, and the Life is Strange games. Lost Records seemed in its marketing to be a return to the massive early days success of the studio with the first Life is Strange. If this was the intent, the developers have missed massively. Lost Records retains none of the emotion, interesting mechanics, relatable characters, compelling mystery, or writing competence of its spiritual predecessor.
In a setup that is scarily reminiscent of Stephen King’s It, 43-year-old Swann returns to her sleepy hometown in rural Canada to meet with three childhood friends for the first time in 27 years. She awkwardly enters a friendly run-down bar and sits down with Autumn to reminisce about their wonderful summer together, the summer of ’95. Something dark is vaguely hinted at here, some larger forces in play, as the two contemplate what used to be. Most of the game takes place in these flashbacks, as Swann and Autumn recount the adventure that you are playing through to each other, narrating and reminiscing about their adventures.
Here the trouble begins, because the game is designed such that Autumn and Swann will continue narrating and commenting on the scene, as well as individual items you inspect, while characters in the scene are still talking. This happens constantly. To make it worse, the characters are also constantly talking over each other, with sometimes up to three separate sentences being spoken at once, making it impossible to retain any of it. The entire experience with constant overlapping voices talking over each other is so overstimulating and confusing I may as well have been playing Hellblade. All this is not to mention that it has incredibly poor voice performances all around, from every one of the main characters. In trying to sound like teenagers again, these adult voice actors jut sound like they’ve got a cold.
The actual gameplay is largely what you’d expected from a spiritual successor to Life is Strange. Walk around, talk, move through dialogue trees, explore, vibe. However, the weight and presence of actual choices has been either drastically reduced or removed entirely. There are no points in which you make a big decision, altering the story. There are also no apparent points when your small decisions even change the dialogue, although sometimes a dialogue choice shows an animation of a heart breaking or blooming. I know this means something, but I don’t know what, and it’s not information that is given anywhere.
Swann is largely useless as a protagonist; somehow boring, annoying, creepy, socially inept, and clingy all at once, she is someone I would never choose to spend time with, even at the most awkward stages of my time as a teenager. She thinks that people, especially boys, don’t like her because she is “overweight and ugly” – the truth is that her personality is simply off-putting in every way, and she gives off the vibes of someone who is going to one day cut off a friend’s face and wear it to convince herself she’s pretty.
In fact, Swann has no skills to speak of: she seems to be pleased her with abilities to capture and record videos, but even the canon videos we’re seen that she produces are of the poorest possible quality. She’s unable to understand social cues, cloyingly dependent on her new friends, and unable to offer anything to the adventuring party except the camcorder she got for her birthday. I was very put off with everyone’s dialogue – even as cringy teenagers, we never sounded this weird and invasive. Everything is cranked up to 11 when it should be at a 1, such as characters reacting to having a picture taken as if they’d been shot in the face. All of the writing is bad.
There are also no superpowers, whether time travel or telekinesis, available to the player. The only mechanic in Lost Records is holding up your camcorder and recording, then being able to watch those videos later. There’s no evidence to review in them, because there is no mystery that needs to be solved. You simply record these things by holding down RB because you are meant to enjoy the moment. This mechanic could have worked, if the story itself was closer to the quality of Life is Strange. Instead, it’s the most boring one I’ve been forced to endure in years. You’ll need to simply video record everything highlighted in an area before you’re allowed to move the story forward.
I love slice of life anime, and am an eternal fan of games like Animal Crossing that have you move slowly and live in the moment. I qualify this to communicate just how unbearably boring Lost Records is during the entire runtime of Tape 1. Imagine if Stephen King’s Stand By Me did not feature a dead body, or even the promise of finding a dead body. Just four boys doing summer things for hours in the woods in the last time before innocence is lost. Or perhaps, if Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro did not have Totoro, or any magical elements at all – just two sisters playing in the woods. This is what Lost Records brings to the table.
You may say “whatever, I’m just here for vibes.” If that’s your prerogative, sure, you may get something out of this, but the vibes are also just so boring. The only way I was able to keep my attention on this mess of a narrative, if you can call it that, was by making up jokes about the characters in the game with my friend who I was playing with. I genuinely would have nodded off to sleep with a controller in my hands without her. None of these characters have anything interesting to present, and none of them compel me to care about them in any way.
So without interesting characters, a story might still work if the plot is intriguing enough. However, Lost Records has no plot. There is an allusion to some horrible thing that happened that summer over and over again, but no light is shed on what it is over the nearly five hours we spent with Tape 1. No one is ever in any danger, no one finds anything interesting in the woods, all the movies you make are, frankly, stupid. It’s building suspense for an event that never occurs. The one time you find a cool spot, you’re forced into a puzzle that I’m convinced has no presented solution. We spent 40 minutes looking and ended up having to brute force the lock open by trying every permutation.
There’s also a weird lack of music in Lost Records, despite its name. Life is Strange gained popularity partially because of its excellent and directed use of licensed music, but DON’T NOD’s newest title featured only three songs over a five hour span and does not have a score playing for most of the game. To mark a positive, Lost Records features gorgeous art and runs like butter on PC, not skipping a single frame on ultra settings on 1440p 144 FPS. The faces are amazingly well done, and they look real without sacrificing an ounce of artistry for “immersion.” There’s a perfect meeting of artistic intent and graphical fidelity here, and I wish it wasn’t wasted on this game.
I am so, so devastated at how bad Lost Records has turned out so far. Life is Strange is such a special game to me, and I recently completed my 7th playthrough of it with a friend just a few months ago. I had hoped for a return to what worked for DON’T NOD a decade ago would work again, but I may have to finally chalk that game up to beginner’s luck. Even with Life is Strange 2, which I found to be a complete mess, there was a push and pull to the narrative, choices and consequences, goals, wants, needs for these characters. Lost Records Tape 1 can’t manage to produce a single character moment over its runtime.
Perhaps Tape 2 will be awesome when it releases in April, but it will not be worth trudging through this embarrassing slog to get to it, I can guarantee you that. I do not recommend Lost Records: Bloom & Rage to anyone. Your time is worth more than this.
Nirav reviewed Lost Records: Bloom and Rage on PC with a provided review copy.
