Lost Records Bloom and Rage

Fortified by the success of the saga begun with the iconic Max and Chloe and with a solid wealth of experience, the French development house Don’t Nod is preparing to stir the stagnant waters of today’s video game world with a new work that promises sparks: Lost Record – Bloom and Rage will be released in 2025 for Xbox and Ps5 and even if speculative dates and various predictions are being bandied about, what we really want to emphasize is how this project was conceived in the wake of a nostalgia effect ridden without any filters whatsoever, outlining with the unmistakable style of the Don’t Nod boys and girls a very particular period and an even more particular age, lived by all of us with bated breath.

Lost Records takes us back to many, many summers ago, to be precise in 1995, a year that was not only a crossroads of destinies for the protagonists involved, but also a watershed between the remnants of the Eighties and the now looming future, between the technological leviathan called the Internet, the end of the glorious walkman, and the nebulous, but terribly near, future of social media that would soon arrive. In the middle of all this is Swann, the protagonist who together with her friends Autumn, Kat and Nora will allow us to relive the unforgettable summer of their twelve years old, captured through the filter of a camcorder and the feelings they experienced when the world was a continuous conquest. Almost thirty years later, the four sisters for life reunite to recall and perhaps resolve once and for all the event, or perhaps we should say the secret, that they have carried with them ever since as a heavy burden that has never left them throughout all these years.

Two timelines that are precise and clear, one set in 1995 and the other in the present day: two versions of the four friends, as teenagers and adults, in a chase of memories, joys, pains, and small and large traumas that have defined the people they have become, all told with sweetness and delicacy alternating with precise and painful scalpel blows into the abyss of memories.

Even the visual impact is designed to take us back in time, thanks to the use of filters and graphic touches that, together with an evocative soundtrack and a rather apt choice of indie tracks (as had also happened in Life is Strange) allows the player to fully immerse themselves in the game’s nostalgic atmospheres.

This, however, is only the tip of an iceberg that pierces the ocean and points very high: being a narrative adventure with puzzle elements, the investigative aspects that Don’t Nod promises seem truly intriguing, and it goes without saying that it will be essential to analyze every clue, experience every event carefully, and pay very close attention to the dialogues in both timelines. Timelines that will be interwoven like the red threads of fate that bind people’s wrists, and never as in Lost Records will the interpretive key be centered on choices and their consequences, as has been tradition since the dawn of genre adventures, starting from the legendary Maniac Mansion all the way to masterpieces of the twenty-first century like Detroit Become Human, just to name a couple.

Al di là dell’estetica suggestiva of this title, Lost Records Bloom and Rage is one of those titles that we can hardly wait to play: it tells us about a difficult age and how teenage dreams are truly flowers ready to bloom, which unfortunately we do not always manage to grasp as we grow up.

But hey, not all is lost, it never is.