It’s very weird that we’ve had a decade of mediocre Life is Strange follow-ups, and in the space of a few months we suddenly have two brilliant ones. The first was Life is Strange: Double Exposure, which I reviewed back in October. That was a straight sequel from the first game done by developer Deck Nine, who appears to have taken over the franchise since original developer, Don’t Nod, dropped the ball badly on Life is Strange 2.
Maybe that’s the best thing that could have happened to Don’t Nod because Lost Records: Rage & Bloom is the Life is Strange sequel we should have gotten and it’s absolutely astounding. Free from the pressure of living up to one of the greatest adventure game debuts of all time as well as the financial expectations of publisher Square Enix (Lost Records is self-published), Don’t Nod has once again redefined the adventure genre in a variety of innovative ways while also telling a heck of story.
This time around, we follow Swann Holloway, a 43-year-old woman who returns to the small town of Velvet Cove, Michigan at the requests of a high school friend who she hasn’t spoken to in 27-years. Once there, Swann reminisces about the summer of 1995, when she met three friends and encounters a dark mystery in the woods. The majority of the game is told in flashbacks.
It’s worth mentioning this is only Part 1. Part 2 comes out in April this year.
The premise is cliche. Don’t Nod has never bothered hiding the fact they they lift their ideas wholesale from their favorite films and shows. With the first Life is Strange, that was Donnie Darko and Twin Peaks. Here, Swann just outright tells the player at one point “it started as Stand by Me and end up the Blair Witch Project.” The fact that this game wouldn’t exist without Stranger Things is so obvious it feels almost mean to point it out.
That’s where the normalcy ends, though. Don’t Nod has opened up an incredible new toolbox in gaming using tricks so simple and brilliant it’s baffling they’ve never been done before. For instance, the present day segments are in first person while the 1995 parts are in third person. Switching character POVs is something novels have been doing for decades, but this is the first time I can remember a video game doing so even though it’s the perfect medium for that trick.
This subtle, but genius gimmick reframes everything in a variety of ways. Swann in 2022 feels trapped in by her perspective. The game literally opens with her in her car talking to her mom, whose chastises her for doing what we all do in adventure games: look around and futz with stuff. Present Swann is small and constrained, an unseen figure we pilot through awkward moments based around memories neither the player nor she yet recalls.
But in the past, Swann is dynamic and part of something bigger. We see her character model, daringly chubby and freckle-faced in what I’m sure the reasonable men’s gaming council will declare an assault on beauty by DEI or some other nonsense. She moves through the woods, her town, and her friend’s lives as a bright, colorful presence that radiates the joy and nostalgia of freedom and youth, even as she stumbles through clumsy adolescence.
The primary game mechanic is her camcorder, and the game hypes this aesthetic to the nines. Even the intro graphics have VHS scanlines, which makes the Unreal logo look, well, unreal. Swann records everything that summer, and the game treats her camera the way first-person shooters treat guns.
When you record as Swann, you are constantly hunting through the game world for various points of interest like birds, graffiti, or your friends. The game tracks these with on-screen tallies (2/14 birds, 1/10 moving objects, etc.), using classic camcorder fonts and interfaces. Even though this is essentially just classic highlighting of points of interest that every game does, it is so dedicated to the conceit of the camcorder that it feels new and exciting. I can’t remember the last time a game put so much effort into making a user interface be 100 percent part of the setting.
As you record, the game automatically edits your recordings in real time, crafting the memoir you use to both solve the mystery and explore the game world. It’s not a perfect trick. Audio from when your recording bleeds over into Swann’s added narration, and the first time you catch a graphical glitch on film and it’s played back later it totally breaks the immersion.
When it does work, though, it is magical. Lots of game shave played with camera gimmicks. Life is Strange itself did it, and Fatal Frame has made a whole franchise out of them. Lost Records just does it so much better. I felt like Swann, compulsively capturing these moments because they were important as much as to tick off the dopamine box for collectibles. Even things that the game didn’t think mattered like a turning ceiling fan or rain out the window, I hoarded and kept in my dwindling camera storage space because I thought they were neat shots.
Don’t Nod makes a habit of doing these neat mechanical meta-commentaries on video games as a medium. Life is Strange was, at the end of the day, was an exploration of save scumming, using time travel to in-world simulate the practice of creating multiple save files to never have to deal with the consequences of your mistakes. Lost Records does something similar with photo modes, turning our love of staging scenes into something that has in-world consequences.
All this mechanical innovation turns what could have been another poignant, but pedestrian narrative game into something revolutionary and brilliant. Sure, I am always down for another touching queer coming of age story or a creepfest with weird visual gimmicks, but those are a dime a dozen and often have better budgets than this. Lost Records brings Don’t Nod back to its punk rock roots of trying new things, breaking all the rules, and daring a player to keep up. It’s refreshing, invigorating, and already my pick for the best indie game of 2025.
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is available Tuesday, February 18 on PlayStation 5, XBox S/X, and PC. $39.99
