Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Review

Developer Don’t Nod has always had a curious relationship with nostalgia. Its flagship franchise, the narrative adventure series Life is Strange, landed at a time when the sincere deployment of ‘hella’ and budding queerness in the mid-west felt surreal and essential. There’s a reason the studio’s foundational work is still being built upon today. In manufacturing nostalgia for a time that maybe didn’t ever truly exist, it allowed its idealised, yet grimdark, fantasy to birth a new, collectively agreed upon reality. Life is Strange remains a seminal text for the genre and a bone-deep classic for fans, and now some ten years on, it’s begun to sing its own nostalgic siren song.

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage then is an abject lesson in the dangers of heeding such a call. Following the uneven (though compelling) action diversion of Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden and the experimental minimalism of the excellent Jusant, Don’t Nod’s return to formula feels like something of a retreat. Draping itself in the specifics of nostalgia, both for its own properties and the 90s, rather than the essence of it found in the studio’s previous works, Bloom & Rage is a heavily artefacted VHS copy of ideas and systems worn out by a decade of use.

Bloom & Rage’s central cast should be more compelling than they are

Galvanised around portentous events in the Summer of 1995, Bloom & Rage picks up with Swann and her high school friend group in 2022, the women are called back to their mid-west shithole by an ominous package addressed to their short-lived band, the titular Bloom & Rage. Sat in a dive bar sharing memories over rounds of pool and drinks, Swann unpacks what she can recall of 95’, a hazy and loosely defined series of events that led to a small group of outcasts finding kinship amidst a maelstrom of teenage angst and societal pressures culminating in a night in the woods none of the women seem comfortable remembering.

Mechanically differentiating its two timelines, Swann’s perspective is locked to first-person in 2022 and more traditionally third-person in the 90s. While initially promising (the game’s opening scene is its most coherent), Don’t Nod is unable to conjure new verbs for players, both perspectives eventually submitting to formula as Swann ambles through environments, picking up objects and putting them down again. We need to get that gate open, best spend a few minutes poking around a contained space for a linear solution, firing off quirky one-liners about Blockbuster and cats. It is aggressively uninterested in innovation or even iteration, compliance to the known born from either audience expectations or developer inertia, it’s impossible to tell.

Bloom & Rage’s central framing device, Swann’s VHS camcorder, is also largely aesthetics over function. This isn’t inherently an issue, some of the game’s later areas in particular look striking when observed through its lens, but its rigid implementation slams up against its thematic intent. Throughout the game you’ll need to film a variety of scenes to progress the story, something that can’t happen until you’ve effectively filled a quota of predetermined shots, lingering on a literal box outline to trigger the count. It’s an overt system trying to capture the ambiguous joy of creation, one that leaves the countless references to Swann’s eye for imagery feeling mute as you could only ever capture that which the game expressly wants you to.

Perspective is used to mark different timelines

One of the greatest open-world games you’ve likely never played, Eastshade, features a similar system in which you travel around an island with easel and canvas searching for your next great painting. These paintings are also clearly mechanical, often feeding directly into plot progression, but the content of each is entirely player-driven; frame up whatever calls to you, it will move the world state forward regardless. Bloom & Rage gamifies its camcorder within an inch of its life, replete with endless collectables and only a limited editing suite available to give the finished videos a sense of personalisation.

There are flashes of this framing device working as intended, though these are distinctly not player-driven. The camcorder is an effective shorthand for Swann’s abstracted, and distanced, view of the world, her awkward and subdued nature keeping her as strictly an observer rather than a participant. A beautiful bit of synergy between the emotional truth of being a fat, nerdy kid and narrative device, when the camera eventually begins to capture images of Swann too, you know instinctively what’s happening without a single line of dialogue needed.

This is also, sharply, not indicative of the storytelling in Bloom & Rage. Where Life is Strange took time and space to develop Arcadia Bay and its townsfolk, Velvet Cove is wan and suffocating. A series of meandering hangouts, Swann and her friends often feel like the only people in the world, interrupted by two supporting characters as bookends and the occasional off-screen parent. That these girls occupy a space so focused should feel like a deliberate choice, a chance for the game to ruminate on the singularity of memory, but Bloom & Rage instead simply feels hollow. Much of the emotional thrust of the game is dedicated to the youthful fury the group feels toward the town, distilled entirely into one character’s cartoonishly cruel treatment of them, but without a realised external world, the anger expressed lands with juvenile blinders rather than empathetic accessibility. 

Camcorder footage always looks cool

There’s perhaps, at least, an intentionality to that as the closing moments of Tape 1 begin to let the rest of the world in, its contrast to the girl’s adventures to that point introducing some much-needed tension. But the journey to that moment is plagued by uncertainty of tone or even the basic principles of pacing. The flashbacks are occasionally framed with a giggle and disparaging comment from their future selves, but Bloom & Rage writes these women as still entirely locked into the seriousness of their youthful adventures, the supernatural shenanigans shifting from potentially moving metaphor to shackling literalism. This uneven character and plot work sits alongside the game’s scattershot pacing, any oxygen a room begins to muster almost always immediately sucked back out by a poorly timed cutaway or tonal shift.  

This is compounded by the rest of the crew operating as mirrors rather than characters, allowing the player to bounce light off their reflective surfaces but rarely seeing more in them than Swann’s interpretation. There are flashes of the old juice here; Natalie Liconti’s Kat is the standout vocal performance and, arguably, character, allowed to rise above the base core traits assigned to her while the others are lost to a tidal wave of unexamined tropes and poorly directed line reads. When you can hear them at least; Bloom & Rage attempts a Spielberg-esque layering of dialogue in pursuit of organic interactions, but it is frequently poorly mixed and lacking the energy of having actors in a shared space. Save me, indie-pop needle drop. 

Final Thoughts

There’s a possibility that Tape 2 will swing much harder than 1, but it’s hard to imagine a satisfying continuation based on the established story so far. A languid character drama without characters, Don’t Nod can’t articulate or realise a take on its new world and systems. Despite moving its release date to avoid an uncomfortable collision with the latest Life is Strange, both Bloom & Rage and Double Exposure have ended up occupying the same space. Fumbling efforts to return to a time that perhaps never existed by capitulating to inelegant nostalgia and the numbing comfort of the known. Two games stuck on the wrong side of the camera lens.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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