Preview: Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Seeks to Create a Version of the 90s That Never Existed

Memories are weird: we think of them as very stable things, these absolute truths of what we experienced in the past, but even a cursory glance at research on the topic will let you know that memories are malleable and often incorrect, exaggerated by emotions or warped by time. DON’T NOD’s newest game, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage plays with this idea in several ways.

Like its two previous Life is Strange titles, Lost Records uses teenage lives as a way to examine societal ills and societal politics, this time taking us back to the heady days of 1995 as protagonist Swann befriends the cool outcast weirdos in town. The framing device surrounding the demo we played is that after almost 30 years of no contact, Swann, Nora, Autumn, and Kat have agreed to meet in a bar, worried about how a mysterious package may upend their adult lives as they try to figure out just why they promised to all go their separate ways almost 30 years ago.

The most interesting thing about Lost Records is the killer Richard Linklater-esque capturing of the vibe of an era. The team at DON’T NOD has played with what our memories of childhood actually hold on to work around a lot of rights and IP issues and create something that feels like a distant foggy memory as much as it does a recreation of a time and place. At Gamescom, creative director Michael Koch told us how the team was working around legal issues, explaining that: “The game is really anchored in the 90s, so we really wanted it to feel authentic. That’s why we can mention real names, real movies, real bands, but when it comes to visuals [and] branding, of course, we have to create our own branding.” The way this manifests in the game is fascinating. Characters like the film-obsessed Swann will mention The Rocky Horror Picture Show or will ask her friends if they have seen Interview with the Vampire, but the posters on her walls will be for faux-films like “Reservoir Cats” or “Primal Preserve” — all with just legally distinct enough artwork riffing off their inspirations.

The opening vertical slice of Lost Records we played ended up feeling like a melancholic misremembered dream as we listened to our friends' jam on tune guitars and wandered through the local woods shooting a music video just for us. Music obviously plays a huge role in a game about a childhood band and the team at DON’T NOD refers to it as “Dream Pop”. Koch celebrated that: “We try to have this feeling it is both nostalgic and modern at the same time, [and] that it kind of bridges the gap between the 90s and present timeline."

This original score is being headlined with vocals by Ruth Radelet, ex-lead singer for Chromatics, and the original score is being composed by Nora Kelly. However, there will also be plenty of much less polished diegetic music created by the teens and Koch described to us how "you can influence the lyrics of the song and you’ll see... the [band members] in the game come up with the song little by little". This could be seen in our demo, where shortly after Swann called over to Nora’s garage to hang out, the girls convinced her to give them a beat on their electronic drum. In this sequence, we were given control of Swann as she added different elements to the beat. It obviously came out a little ramshackle sounding by the time Autumn and Nora started playing and singing but it was also meant to and it was pretty endearing to watch these amateur artists messily throw music together.

Something that this scene also highlighted was Bloom and Rage’s near-obsessive recreation of tactile objects. VHS cases can be opened and are usually storing guitar picks or weed instead of tapes. A Moo Box is tossed aside in the garage but obviously has too much sentimental value to throw out. And of course, Swann’s beloved camcorder feels like a chunky relic with its sticky buttons. All these objects rattle, click, and strain when interacted with (or even moo when rotated upside down).

This is something Koch mentions as key for both evoking nostalgia for players who lived through the 90s and potentially hooking in younger players who might find themselves wondering just what the hell a digital dial-up floppy disk is. DON’T NOD’s studio executive producer, Luc Baghadoust, explained some of the work that went into making these objects satisfying, including slightly fudging proportions of things like buttons on Swann’s camcorder to really accentuate the feedback you get when inspecting them. Baghadoust also told us that the team took the time to record countless real objects: “Our audio team, for the VHS tapes... went to the store next to us [in Montreal] and we bought old VHS tapes.” Baghadoust explained: “The pills [in Swann’s room], it’s a real sound. The Moo Box is a real Moo Box. We captured all these real sounds to give the authenticity [that] I think is needed for this kind of stuff."

It was at this point I explained to the developers in the room that I was born in the year 2000. This made the game’s producer, Cathay Vincelli, feel so old she let out a little audible “oof”, but it raised a valid question. When writing a game starring young people that will inevitably be played by young people, and your team is no longer 15 years old, how do you go about creating authentic teens and not just embarrassing stereotypes and cliches? What’s more, how do you strike the balance of recreating teenagers from 1995, with characters that can still be relatable to teenagers in 2024?

Koch explained that he, Baghadoust, and Vincelli all would have been teenagers in this era, which is why they brought on a younger writer, Nina Freeman (Tacoma and Cibele), and a New Jersey local, Desiree Cifre (Wylde Flowers) to — in Koch’s words — ”bring their own experiences... to the characters that will feel real for the 90s but also will resonate with younger players".

Between this year’s release of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and the upcoming release of Kyle Mooney’s Y2K, we decided to end the interview by getting the team’s impression of being part of what feels like the first wave of 90s nostalgia media and comparisons to similar things nostalgic for the 80s, like Stranger Things.

Baghadoust told us that the lack of comparable 90s throwbacks was actually a boon for the team. “I think that’s more exciting [for us] to have the freedom to make it like like [we] want”, he explained, how Stranger Things isn’t a 100 per cent accurate recreation of the 80s but is more about capturing how that generation and how society remembers that era being. Koch added to this by saying: “I think that’s what we’re trying to do. We don’t want to be a documentary about the 90s. It’s more about getting the vibe of it [right]. Especially since we’re playing in memories of the characters, so we don’t have to [be 100 per cent accurate]. The players that experienced the 90s should feel at home, and the players that never experienced it should find it interesting.”

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage launches for PS5 across two releases: Tape 1 on 18th February 2025 and Tape 2 a month later on 18th March. Are you looking forward to the narrative-focused adventure? Let us know in the comments below.