Swann sits in her car begrudgingly listening to her mother drone on about how she never comes to visit. It’s unlikely anything is getting through, Swann has something a little more pressing on her mind. As she hangs up frustrated with her mother, a feeling I can relate to all too well, she looks around at the scenery around her. Velvet Cove, Michigan hasn’t changed much since 1995, that summer when she met her best friends. You remember those days, I hope. Long summer nights just hanging out at the lake and in the woods, making blood pacts with your best friends, and staring into the abyss.
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Tape 1
Developer: Don’t Nod
Price: TBA
Platform: PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PS5 code for review.
Aside from being a mouthful, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Tape 1 is Don’t Nod’s latest offering in their narrative-driven adventure games. I’ve been following Don’t Nod since the original Life is Strange and while their games haven’t all been hits, they’ve remained relatively consistent in quality. Which is an absolute shame because the story in Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Tape 1 is stellar and the technical side of things really holds it back. Technical can have a few meanings and I’m not talking about things like graphical fidelity or ray tracing, etc… Bloom & Rage LOOKS fantastic. But for a game that has you take the role of a character in this type of story told primarily through talking, I was hoping maybe even the lip syncing was decent.
Meet the Girls of Bloom & Rage
Bloom & Rage tells the story of four friends who spend a summer together, a tragedy between them, and a cryptic box received in the mail. Swann and her friends haven’t talked since she moved away in the summer of 1995, and this ends up being a really cool storytelling device. You flip back and forth between 1995 and 2022, the only times these girls/women have seen each other. In 1995, you meet all four girls almost immediately and they’re all really incredible characters.
Swann is a short, nerdy redhead with a passion for nature, reading, and movies. She carries her camcorder with her everywhere and you’ll be directing her character throughout the game. Milling about the Movie Palace, a video rental store, she runs into Nora and Autumn. Autumn works at a little ice cream shack in the parking lot of the Movie Palace, goading passersby to purchase some of her frozen treats. Hanging out at one of two picnic tables next to the shack is Autumn’s bestie, Nora. Dyed red and black hair, a face full of ‘warpaint,’ and enough attitude for all four girls, Nora’s a 90’s punk rock all-star. And as Swann gets in trouble with a local bully for using her camcorder, out of nowhere comes Kat. Kat’s short, dry, and angry. A writer at heart, Kat is full of words and knows how to use them. These four girls make up Bloom & Rage.
As the story flips back and forth, the story begins to unravel and Don’t Nod begins to do what they do best. Things aren’t all smiles and sunshine but the coziness provided by a story told through scenes of friendship, indie/alt music, and jaw dropping cinematography is unmatched. The latter was amplified by Swann’s love for film and her camcorder. Every scene where the player is given freedom to move around can be looked at through Swann’s eyes, or the camcorder.
The camcorder is designed brilliantly with a timed recording feature, a zoom, and a flashlight. Likewise, players will see an outline around specific things to add to Swann’s memoirs, a collection of things to record. Memoirs are a numbered requirement to complete and act as a collectible but even if you’re not into collecting, it categorizes your shots and allows you to mix-match your recordings. Getting to choose what shots go into your memoirs is a little treat and something I enjoyed maybe a little too much. As I played, it felt incredibly natural to look through the camcorder at your friends and just nailed the 90s aesthetic.
A Beautifully Crafted Coming-of-Age Mystery
Swann works really well as a protagonist. I fell in love with her almost immediately. She’s shy, a little awkward, but so clearly passionate about what she loves. I think I would have hated her as an insecure teen but as an adult, her passion radiates and she made me smile all game. The way the girls treated each other was so endearing. What Desiree Cifre and Nina Freeman have done here is remarkable. Kat, Nora, Autumn, and Swann are likely going to be some of my absolute favorite characters coming out of this year, I can guarantee it. And all four of them, together, are a large reason why I liked this game so much.
What irked me a lot was the technical issues I ran into while playing the game. For posterity, I played Bloom & Rage on a PlayStation 5 Pro. Bloom & Rage is specifically NOT releasing on PlayStation 4 and there must be a reason for that. As I played, the first thing that jumped out at me was the lip syncing. Lips either aren’t moving or are moving in a way that is incomprehensible with the words coming out of the character’s mouth. Most of the time it works, the camera is moving in such a way you don’t see it or what the character says isn’t enunciated in a way that makes the lip syncing look bad. There are some scenes though, hard hitters, that have the wind taken out of their sails by this issue.
And I wish that was the only technical issue for Bloom & Rage. The game struggles to run at 30fps on my PS5 Pro. I wouldn’t say it was a devastating issue and certainly didn’t persist throughout the entire game, but when it happened, it was noticeable. I managed to soft-lock the game in two different locations because the game hadn’t registered that I had completed an event. At one point, Autumn held her phone out to me and unnaturally tapped it with her other hand while explaining to me she had to text her boss. Likewise, there’s some weird eye-twitching going on and the character models will sometimes reset their positions after they finish a line.
It really sucks because, without these technical issues, Bloom & Rage is Don’t Nod at the top of their game. Bloom & Rage, to me, easily eclipses Life is Strange. I’m ready to have my heart broken again but, when the core of your game is discussion, emoting, and people talking, it should work and look good. I hate framing my review this way too because damn it all, Bloom & Rage is a great story. But I can’t overlook the bizarre eye-twitching, the models resetting, the lip synching. It’s all part of the package.
The Final Word
Despite the technical issues I had, I still love Bloom & Rage and greatly anticipate Tape 2. The bombs dropped in Tape 1 make my heart ache. I love this broody high-school drama, brilliantly shown through the eyes of Swann Holloway. If you have any love for Life is Strange or adventure games, you need to play Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Tape 1. Remember 1995!
MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
