Stronger emotional stakes and faster-paced drama promise an explosive climax that ultimately pulls its biggest punch.
The following article contains spoilers for Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Tape 1).
Last time on Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, developer Don’t Nod left us all on a huge cliffhanger. The first half of this engrossing adventure began slowly, taking time to introduce its core quartet of main characters as teenagers in the 1990s, to ensure players felt they’d played a part in kindling their friendships. Still, this was peppered by ominous flashforwards to the present day, as the majority of the group reconvened 27 years later to process something Very Bad that had subsequently occurred.
Events in that past timeline eventually reached a crescendo – a vitriolic punk performance demonstrating the friends’ new-found confidence together as well as their shared frustrations at their teenage lives – until it all came crashing down. Kat, the group’s fiercest member, is revealed to have terminal cancer. The game’s apparent antagonists Dylan and Corey, already aware of her condition, rush in to help, adding welcome nuance to their roles. The Abyss, Lost Records’ gaping maw of magical realism out in the woods, is seen glowing once more, reminding players it has a part to play (can Kat still be saved?). And in the present, protagonist Swann and her friends again contemplate the game’s mystery box, which has turned up addressed to the group almost three decades later.
Suffice to say, Bloom & Rage’s concluding portion has plenty of ground to cover in its relatively short runtime (at around five hours, Tape 2 is paced quicker and feels briefer than Tape 1), and it does so right up until the end, when it reaches another big climax, followed by yet another – and this time wholly more frustrating – cliffhanger finale.
But let’s rewind.
Tape 2 begins with quick answers to several of the game’s lingering questions. In the present, we learn who the mystery package has come from, and get a pretty definitive answer about Kat’s fate. (But surely, you think, there’s more to it than that…?) Back in the 1990s, the aftermath of the group’s disastrous concert has had a believably catastrophic impact on their blossoming friendships, and as concerns linger over Kat, the narrative keeps its tension as Swann checks in with her other pals. Having spent time to build these relationships in Tape 1, there’s an urgency here as you seek to claw back what has been lost, even as the end of the summer nears, and the group’s decision to cease contact looms.
Throughout Tape 2, there’s a sense this is very much a concluding act rather than a new fully-fledged episode in the style of Don’t Nod’s original Life is Strange games. That’s fine – I’m happy to skip the build up to see this tale resolved – but it makes for a noticeably different feeling for this final section. Gone are the after-school hangouts, the garage jam sessions, the idle chitchat about the girls’ band making it big – moments which made the narrative feel more grounded, the characters more real. The game’s clever camcorder gameplay is also largely sidelined. Instead, Tape 2 is frequently more focused on action or lengthy sequences of dialogue, rather than the more relaxed exploration and puzzles found in Tape 1, and is noticeably darker in tone as the friends must grapple with how to handle Kat’s illness. (One exception to all this is a packing mini-game that feels like a reverse-Unpacking, or a 3D version of Tetris, which my brain found lots of fun, and a welcome respite.)
Bloom & Rage keeps to its same small cast and setting in Tape 2, choosing not to introduce many new areas or characters. Instead, the focus here is on further deepening your relationships with existing allies, including burgeoning romances, and seeing the – admittedly small – ripples of your choices take effect. As for the game’s antagonists, there’s continued development for Kat’s sister Dylan, but her arsehole boyfriend Corey is shortchanged – his more nuanced portrayal in Act 1’s finale is abruptly abandoned, and he reverts into a one-dimensional cartoon villain once again.
In a narrative game like Bloom & Rage, so much of how it will sit in the memory rests on how it ultimately ties everything together – and regardless of who your version of Swann ends up closest to, this really does hinge on how Tape 2 handles Kat. My version of Swann began Tape 2 ready to throw the whole town into the Abyss if necessary, should I get some kind of opportunity to magically bargain for her survival. But as much as I’d grown to love the character, I had mixed feelings whether this was a route I really wanted the game to take. Kat’s condition is, obviously, a difficult subject to navigate, yet to fans of Tape 1, the setup for the conclusion seemed relatively well sign-posted: here was a girl with an incurable condition, but also a magical portal that can seemingly change reality – at a cost. Life is Strange 1 fans, eat your heart out.
It’s here I have to discuss the game’s handling of this in more detail, and where I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t yet played Tape 2 for themselves to skip forward to the next paragraph. In short, though, my feelings on it all are decidedly mixed. Ahead of time, I had made peace with the game likely offering one of two routes forward, for better or worse, and perhaps offering a choice between them. Most likely, I thought, you would be able to save Kat from her cancer, although not without some kind of magical sacrifice – perhaps the reason why the group broke off their friendships and disbanded for several decades. Alternatively, I saw the game taking perhaps the braver option – to accept Kat’s fate as a tragic ending that was simply truer to real-life – that her condition was something not even magic could alter, regardless of how much you might wish for it. Either would have been satisfying for different reasons – a fan-service-y twist of fate with a bittersweet cost, or a proper tearjerker for a brilliant character that I was getting ready to grieve. Frustratingly, though, Tape 2 picks a road without any such finality, nor the emotional catharsis such an ending provides. It repeatedly tugs on the heartstrings through the use of familiar post-death storytelling staples – newly-found footage, ghostly appearances and more – while simultaneously still suggesting Kat can be saved, maybe, in a future game, via an extraordinary post-credits scene that robs her death of its impact and feels like an advert for a sequel that – for now, who knows – may never come.
To sum up, then – and welcome back if you skipped the above – Tape 2 is let down by its decision to leave such a key thread deliberately dangling, not out of a desire to preserve a mystery, but seemingly to get you to come back next time. Looking at this as positively as possible, I’d say my reaction to Bloom & Rage’s ending is a testament to the strong characters and relationships built over the bulk of its runtime. Like its opening half, Tape 2 has some wonderful moments, and its main quartet of misfits are earnestly portrayed. But narrative games that promise a complete story simply have to deliver – and it’s maddening to see its tale end as it does here.
A copy of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage was provided for review by developer Don’t Nod.
