After two months, the conclusion to Don’t Nod’s spiritual successor to Life is Strange is finally here, and it’s a rough misstep for players who think they have a full understanding of the “choose your own adventure” style.
When the first Lost Records tape came out, it didn’t really start to show its teeth until the very end of the experience. It was a downright mean cliffhanger, but it did enough to have me interested in what happens next, and now that I know, I feel like I wasted time.
As with most coming-of-age, slice-of-life tropes, one of the key themes in Lost Records is friendship. After finishing the first tape, you’ll come to know that Swann Holloway (the protagonist) didn’t have the best time making friends, so when she finally makes friends in Kat, Nora, and Autumn, they inject excitement into her otherwise barren lifestyle that she loves to capture on her camcorder.
Central to Lost Records, as with most of Don’t Nod’s games, are the choices you make that affect the story and overall outcome of various situations. One of the main differences is that the game rarely forces you to make dialog choices. You can remain silent, which is also a choice. You can also look at things in the environment while talking to unlock additional dialog choices. More dialog choices can even appear just by waiting. As interesting as this was, while I didn’t necessarily find any of these choices overwhelming, I did have trouble making decisions that would lead to results when I wanted. When I finished the last tape, none of the three girls Swann got to know considered her to be a good friend.
I mentioned in the last review that I didn’t really resonate with Swann, and that partly led to me struggling with how to shape her mannerisms. This continued in Tape 2 in the worst possible ways.
You do some stupid stuff in this story because of your friend’s sister’s deadbeat boyfriend.
In Tape 2, you’re closer to uncovering the mysteries of the box delivered to the girls, and with that, you also getting to know the adult versions of Swann’s friends and how the years have treated them since that summer. My conversations with each of these women, even as an adult, never went the right way. As a result, they all left me alone at the diner to open the box for myself, and that was the ending. It just felt like I failed the whole way through, and the ending more or less confirmed it.
So basically, I used a character I didn’t care for but did my best to make her thrive in her current situation as a young teenager. As both young and older Swann, none of the choices I made were good, my supposed best (and only) friends hated me enough to leave me at a bar as an adult, and I was the only person in the group to get closure on a situation that nobody else cared to sit through.
That’s beyond rough.
My version of the story aside, strictly speaking of Tape 2 as a game, I actually found it to be much more engaging than the first tape. It’s also not nearly as long as the first one was, which I felt fortunate for because I couldn’t wait to be done with it. Tape 2 threw in some interesting stealth-style gameplay that gave the overall experience a funny fail state while the recordable collectables remain something out of the ordinary to do. It was also interesting seeing how some of the other girls acted knowing what they’ve learned from the previous tape.
One of the most exciting parts of this game was using a phone in the 90’s to call 9-1-1.
This said, I still had questions. The biggest of which concerned “the void.” I still don’t know what that is or what it represents, and after going through some YouTube videos of routes different from my own, I’m pretty sure a lot of people that played through this game have no idea. It feels like it’s just there to make the game weird, which just feels lazy.
At the end of the day, as a straight, red-blooded Asian-American male, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage just might be one of the worst games I’ve ever finished in a long time, but that might be due to the kind of person that I am. I love most of the Life is Strange games and a majority of games in the same vain that Don’t Nod is responsible for, but this was not one of them. I personally think women or just people who might relate more to Swann’s character will have a greater appreciation for what this game represents, but considering my struggles with how to shape the character, I feel like a lot of other people will have the same issues.
After two months, the conclusion to Don’t Nod’s spiritual successor to Life is Strange is finally here, and it’s a rough misstep for players who think they have a full understanding of the “choose your own adventure” style. When the…
After two months, the conclusion to Don’t Nod’s spiritual successor to Life is Strange is finally here, and it’s a rough misstep for players who think they have a full understanding of the “choose your own adventure” style.
When the first Lost Records tape came out, it didn’t really start to show its teeth until the very end of the experience. It was a downright mean cliffhanger, but it did enough to have me interested in what happens next, and now that I know, I feel like I wasted time.
As with most coming-of-age, slice-of-life tropes, one of the key themes in Lost Records is friendship. After finishing the first tape, you’ll come to know that Swann Holloway (the protagonist) didn’t have the best time making friends, so when she finally makes friends in Kat, Nora, and Autumn, they inject excitement into her otherwise barren lifestyle that she loves to capture on her camcorder.
Central to Lost Records, as with most of Don’t Nod’s games, are the choices you make that affect the story and overall outcome of various situations. One of the main differences is that the game rarely forces you to make dialog choices. You can remain silent, which is also a choice. You can also look at things in the environment while talking to unlock additional dialog choices. More dialog choices can even appear just by waiting. As interesting as this was, while I didn’t necessarily find any of these choices overwhelming, I did have trouble making decisions that would lead to results when I wanted. When I finished the last tape, none of the three girls Swann got to know considered her to be a good friend.
I mentioned in the last review that I didn’t really resonate with Swann, and that partly led to me struggling with how to shape her mannerisms. This continued in Tape 2 in the worst possible ways.
You do some stupid stuff in this story because of your friend’s sister’s deadbeat boyfriend.
In Tape 2, you’re closer to uncovering the mysteries of the box delivered to the girls, and with that, you also getting to know the adult versions of Swann’s friends and how the years have treated them since that summer. My conversations with each of these women, even as an adult, never went the right way. As a result, they all left me alone at the diner to open the box for myself, and that was the ending. It just felt like I failed the whole way through, and the ending more or less confirmed it.
So basically, I used a character I didn’t care for but did my best to make her thrive in her current situation as a young teenager. As both young and older Swann, none of the choices I made were good, my supposed best (and only) friends hated me enough to leave me at a bar as an adult, and I was the only person in the group to get closure on a situation that nobody else cared to sit through.
That’s beyond rough.
My version of the story aside, strictly speaking of Tape 2 as a game, I actually found it to be much more engaging than the first tape. It’s also not nearly as long as the first one was, which I felt fortunate for because I couldn’t wait to be done with it. Tape 2 threw in some interesting stealth-style gameplay that gave the overall experience a funny fail state while the recordable collectables remain something out of the ordinary to do. It was also interesting seeing how some of the other girls acted knowing what they’ve learned from the previous tape.
One of the most exciting parts of this game was using a phone in the 90’s to call 9-1-1.
This said, I still had questions. The biggest of which concerned “the void.” I still don’t know what that is or what it represents, and after going through some YouTube videos of routes different from my own, I’m pretty sure a lot of people that played through this game have no idea. It feels like it’s just there to make the game weird, which just feels lazy.
At the end of the day, as a straight, red-blooded Asian-American male, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage just might be one of the worst games I’ve ever finished in a long time, but that might be due to the kind of person that I am. I love most of the Life is Strange games and a majority of games in the same vain that Don’t Nod is responsible for, but this was not one of them. I personally think women or just people who might relate more to Swann’s character will have a greater appreciation for what this game represents, but considering my struggles with how to shape the character, I feel like a lot of other people will have the same issues.
by Danreb Victorio
