The studio behind the original Don't Nod Life is Strange and his (star) numbered sequelIt has a heartfelt quality to its writing that still moves me, even almost 10 years after Max Caulfield first walked the halls of Blackwell Academy. Lost Records: Bloom & RageThe studio's next game, scheduled for release next year, features some of the cringiest, most saccharine dialogue I've ever heard, and it's that sincerity that keeps me invested. I recently played it for about two hours Lost Recordsand even though the structure I was dealing with was a bit wonky, especially since it alternated between 90s flashbacks and modern-day framing, I was left even more intrigued than I had been before We spoke to the developers at Don't Nod About the project earlier this year.
Lost Records It focuses on a group of four friends who met as teenagers in the '90s and bonded over their love of rock music and lead actor Swann's camera. But what is clear is that when they reunite two decades later, Something The incident happened to them while they were filming music videos in their childhood hometown. Lost Records It moves back and forth between Swann's past and present, playing with the player's uncertainty about why this group of girls haven't spoken in years, creating a constant sense of unease. Casual conversations in the present tense with Swann's friend Autumn at the dinner table felt tense, even as we reminisced about the great times we had together as teenagers.
In my demo, I intentionally cut sections that could have relieved some of that tension, and the carefully orchestrated mystery of the moments Don't Nod presented to me kept me excited and eager to discover what supernatural events awaited me during the fade-to-black moments.
But the parts of Swann’s story that I was able to play were compelling in their own way, tapping into parts of my ‘90s nostalgia that I think I’ve begun to forget as I’ve gotten older and more engaged with the present. The demo begins with him looking through his childhood room, trying to find a movie he’d rented from the local movie store but had stashed away in a box somewhere else. As I scanned all the trinkets scattered throughout his room, decorated with period-appropriate homages to properties like Trolls and Stephen King novels, I could feel the plastic of the VHS boxes in my hands, even though I hadn’t thought about them in decades.
Between throwing away my belongings throughout my childhood and moving across the country as an adult, I lost the physical objects and memories of things that were once so important to my life. Not every piece of '90s media conjures up those buried memories for me, but wandering around Swann's room Lost Records It tapped into my nostalgia. But I didn't enjoy it. It wasn't a joyful dopamine hit of a reference to something fondly remembered. It was more of a somber sentiment, an acknowledgement that time had passed and things had changed.
Many of the tactile experiences I had as a child have been replaced by scrolling and comfort. I think the contrast between Swann’s adolescent interactions with technology and today’s more modern world is designed to create a contrast between two separate moments in her life, but it also serves as a reminder of how ephemeral and disposable almost everything we interact with is. I think of the box of VHS tapes that sat in our family’s storage building for decades, replaced by DVDs and Blu-rays, then by streaming services that would pull a movie out of their lists without warning. I don’t even feel sad, I just feel fear.
Lost Records It’s about capturing these moments through technology that Swann could never have imagined would be outdated and likely forgotten years from now. Aside from walking, talking, and examining objects, I spent most of my time in Swann’s shoes, recording footage of his room and his friend’s band rehearsals with his camera. My most treasured teenage memories are of him using his handheld camera to shoot 4:3 music videos for the friends he was dying to impress. Lost Records' The dialogues capture the struggles of a clumsy teenager trying to fit in so well that I couldn't help but empathize with him, even as I cringed at his shameless, unironic sincerity when speaking to potential friends.
His anxiety lingered into adulthood, but the raw, unpolished image of him and his friends filming a music video in the woods outside their hometown is now only a distant memory. I don’t know if the shaky, clumsy shots I took with Swann’s camera hold up to the gameplay today, but it felt fitting to watch the end result of our time together, and to see how many clips emerged from my still-getting-to-know-what-button-does-it-in-the-game-photo-mode immersion. Swann was still learning to be a director at that age, just as I was learning how to use the game’s controls. So yes, the end result isn’t a professional, perfectly framed music video, but it’s the best I could do at the time.
I've been waiting for Lost Records This was a chance for the team to rekindle their '90s nostalgia, as Don't Nod told me. As adults, they think back to their youth. But I don’t think I was prepared for how this would impact my own concerns about the world losing records of its past. The way we once kept images, photographs, letters, is disappearing. Technology has improved our lives, but it has also made us careless about how easily something historically or personally important can be thrown away at the touch of a button. Where once you had to tear up and burn a photo to destroy it, now you just have to delete it from your photo app or your hard drive. I’m only in my 30s, so I’m not as far removed from my adolescence as Swann and his friends Lost Recordsbut many of the videos and photos from those years have gradually faded away as social media accounts are deleted and old photo albums are moved between homes. Perhaps this is what happens to nostalgia as the world becomes more dystopian, as it ceases to look back on the good old days through rose-colored glasses and becomes a reminder that history can feel impossible to preserve.
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Coming to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S in 2025.