Lost Records: Bloom and Rage - Unlucky Masterpiece
It's been a second since I wrote anything on here, because life is more important, and also because very little that's happening nowadays feels like it's worth talking about here. That is my attempt at sounding neutral when I say politics and culture in America, and all the emotions around them, are very boring to me. I wouldn't even mention this normally, except it's partially why I'm writing this review.
Before I get started, I just want you to see the actual trailer for the game I'm going to be talking about, Lost Records: Bloom and Rage, which seems to have been lost to time for some reason:
This is what made me think (after being told the game is woke failing garbage) that it deserved a deeper look. I don't really do reviews, and maybe this won't be one. I really just want to talk about the game - I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about it and no obvious order for the them. I'm going to break this out into sections because that makes the most sense to my brain. Apologies if this comes across a little schizo, but I'm not being paid to write this so as usual, my brain is going to be throwing shit at the wall and you can tell me if it sticks. Anyway, enough preamble, let's talk about the game.
Part 1: Taking Off A Warm Blanket
Jay Bauman once described the music at the end of the first two-part episode of Twin Peaks: The Return as feeling like a warm blanket.
I can't think of a better way to describe how I felt playing this game. The visuals are gorgeous. I found myself playing through the game a second time just taking screenshot after screenshot for wallpapers because the town of Velvet Cove is stunning.
Virtually every scene of this game is crafted with this eye - this heightened reality. Every hour is a golden hour of some kind. This aesthetic choice feels deliberate for reasons beyond that it simply looks good on screen. The vast majority of Tape 1 (this game is split into two parts) feels weaponized in its nostalgia. This isn't just the best summer of your life, it's the best summer that ever happened. It is how I imagine most people in their late 30s/early 40s view the last days of their childhood; with this impossible sheen of perfection. Time has a funny way of dulling the pain of bad memories, and heightening the positive ones. Compare that to the vibe of present day in the narrative:
Though the bar itself doesn't feel threatening, it doesn't feel inviting either. It's a reminder that the magic ended, as you are forced to visually detox from the nostalgia. The shadows make it feel smaller, more confined. It's also an effective visual metaphor for how different the women are now that they've grown up. This is a good setting in my opinion because bars have always felt like places that are both fun and also where dreams go to die. Interestingly enough, in the 'best' ending of the game, the bar's vibe totally changes:
But I'll talk more about the endings later.
Speaking of Twin Peaks, the music likewise adds a dreamlike quality to the past:
Experiencing these two elements simultaneously is, well, like Jay said, it's like being wrapped in a warm blanket. But it's also like being stabbed in the heart. For me, it evokes an overwhelming sense of the other side of nostalgia, which is the sad part of knowing that these experiences, these dreams you had of spending time with your friends and growing up and becoming a person, are over.
I could talk about a thousand memories I have from my time of growing up in this same era. They all just exist in my imperfect memory now. There's no more meetups in the park planned with my friends. There's no more Block Punches or Happy Pills. There is no more getting on the bus to buy an album from the music store on the other side of town, then walking home listening to it on my Walkman. There's no waking up late and playing through StarCraft again while chewing on Lemon Heads during summer break. There's no going over to my buddy's house to download tittyish wallpapers onto a floppy disc for my iMac so I don't get in trouble. There's no staying up late printing out sketches and then going over them with a pen to trick my friends into thinking I know how to draw. There's no getting jebaited by the convenience store owner into buying more candy because I can't do quick math in my head. Fuck, half the main characters in my life story are either literally or figuratively dead to me now.
None of these sentences mean anything to you if you weren't there. But to me, they meant everything for this time in my life. I'm the only one who can even hang onto them from my perspective, and time keeps slapping my hands. I'm sure you have your own versions. And the more you sit and think about them, the more they come out, like they were all stuffed into a box a long time ago. Where does that box go in the end?
I haven't even seen my hometown in almost ten years, as of writing this sentence. And I don't have any plans to change that any time soon. I think that's another aspect that hits so hard for my age group with this game - it's not just the people that are gone, it's the town too.
My hometown is not the hometown of my youth. I couldn't return to it if I even wanted to, because I didn't just grow up - those places also died. I spent the entirety of this game being reminded that my child can't grow up like me no matter how hard I try. Do kids even form bands anymore? Do they work part time jobs in the summer to pay for equipment to make music together? Do they run around and try to make movies for something other than social media? Do they want to be anything besides an influencer online?
I know I sound like a boomer, but trust me when I say this to the generations that follow mine - you will never intrinsically understand what they took from you the way we do. You can see pictures of Blockbuster, but you can't smell them, and you can't feel the rituals around them. You'll never understand what a mono-culture felt like, to have everyone you know caring and fixated on the exact same things for the exact same reasons. That's probably not entirely a bad thing, but fuck man, it hurts to watch it go. Lost Records feels simultaneously like a celebration of this era, and its funeral.
Part 2: Children Turning Into People
I really want to talk most of all about the characters in this game, because they are without a doubt the most important element, the rug that ties the whole room together. The vibe can't land if the characters don't draw me into their stories. This is something Dontnod historically has done a bad job of for me - I think this end part of my Life is Strange video (from 9 fucking years ago) should sum up how their attempts to make me feel emotions have worked in the past:
This game had reasonably good visuals and a great soundtrack to back it, and none of that counted for shit, because I did not care at all about the main characters. They were annoying, narcissistic, self-obsessed, whiny bitches. I couldn't wait to stop spending time with them.
Thankfully, Life is Strange rolled a blow wheelchair off a cliff so that Lost Records could fly.
All of these characters remind me both of people I knew, and of elements within myself - most especially the latter. It accomplishes this connection to you, the player, through the magic of something I like to call "likeability." This is a concept that we used to understand intrinsically as creatives, but my generation deconstructed it for awhile because millennials like to break things to see how they work.
At this point if you haven't played the game, I'm going to discuss spoilers, so play the game or be like me and don't care about spoilers.
Let's start with the hardest character to talk about without getting lost in what she does rather than who she is.
As a child, Kat is a weirdly intense home school kid carrying the weight of the entire world on her shoulders. She's angry, way angrier than she wants to be, which makes it worse, but this friend group pulls out another side of her, a side she desperately wants to embrace. This girl of all the girls in the group is the one most likely to be an actual troublemaker, because her experience with authority is primarily through the lens of it being abused. She was brought up in a clearly conservative Christian household, the "I don't trust public schools" kind, and you know that even before being diagnosed with leukemia turned her life upside down, she was already trending in a rebellious direction. Once her parents realized she was dying, her parenting took a 180 degree turn, and they started treating her like a fabergé egg - to be rarely seen and never touched. Like most adults in this game, Kat's parents are so far into the sidelines that you don't feel their presence almost at all - I doubt this was true during most of her upbringing. They're frequently invoked but never actually visible (a common element amongst the main characters), leading to the conclusion that they have no idea what to do with her. Unfortunately the same can't be said of her sister and her sister's boyfriend, but more on them later.
She's far more interested in the riot part of riot grrrl. Kat is easily the most punk of all the girls, by every definition of that word. It's mostly a fun aesthetic for Autumn and Nora, and literally tourism for Swann, but Kat is raging against the dying of the light. If Kat had a button that could blow up the whole town of Velvet Cove, I don't think she'd press it, but she would definitely think about it.
Of all the characters in the game, Kat is the one I felt the most sympathy for, because she's been dealt an impossible hand in life, and is just so alone with what is left of it. Her cancer turns her into a situation rather than a person, even for the people who love her. She has to anticipate and manage the feelings of everyone, on top of everything else in her life. This stokes her anger at the world, which is simultaneously her source of strength but also the thing that keeps her as alone as she is. Every significant act of friendship is weaponized. The source of every major controversy or struggle in this game begins with Kat's desperate quest for justice and ends with everyone else picking up the pieces. She wants to be with her friends, but she also uses her friends to make a statement. It's the only part of her life that she has any sense of control of. This doesn't mean she doesn't love her friends - she very obviously does, which makes her entire story that much more tragic.
Kat doesn't get an adulthood, at least not in this game, which I don't think they went far enough with, but that is better discussed later.
As a child, Autumn is the girl I was probably the most like behaviorally, and as a result my least favorite in the group, which is not her fault. Calling her a goody two-shoes isn't being fair, because she is in a punk band with Nora and gets into a fair amount of illegal shenanigans by the end, which is more than I can say for my childhood. I think it is more accurate to say that Autumn hates being in trouble; if Kat resents authority, Autumn respects it and takes steps to appease it when under pressure. I think it's even more accurate to say she's afraid of being a disappointment. Though you never really see Autumn's parents, the structure they've brought to Autumn's personality is very evident. It's not a surprise to find out she comes from a military family.
Autumn wants everyone to be okay, even if that means they're mad at her. Of all the characters, she is the one with the most clearly defined and enforced boundaries; you see this both with Dean, the boy she previously dated but broke up with, and also with the friend group. She confronts Nora for being lazy, and gets really mad at Kat for not being upfront about her illness - she clearly feels betrayed. Autumn has no problem telling you when and how you've crossed a line, even if you're just trying to make her feel better. She also tries to manage everyone's expectations, most especially Nora's. If Nora is the dreamer, Autumn is the gravity to bring everyone back to reality - if only to keep them from being hurt and disappointed later.
Later on, when the story starts to take a darker turn and the characters start getting introduced to more intense levels of stress, Autumn's ability to hide or suppress her anxiety deteriorates massively. Autumn's ordered thinking and personality just can't adapt to chaos and the unknown. Of all the girls, she struggles the most by far with the anarchic lifestyle that Kat tries to get everyone to embrace. She is ready for every step of Kat's schemes to be the last step. Let me tell you, this aspect of her personality rings especially real for me - I was literally this kid. I didn't care about danger, I didn't care about trouble, I just wanted more than anything to not disappoint my mom.
This actually leads to one of my few complaints about mechanics in this game interfering with character moments - no matter how much Autumn likes you over the course of the game, if you don't successfully navigate her panic attack near the end of Tape 2, then at the very end she gets overwhelmed and leaves before you open the mystery box. This doesn't jive with me for a couple reasons. One, the panic attack is a little bit too tricky to navigate successfully (I failed on the first try), and this feels like a punishment rather than a conscious decision on my part as the player. Two, the entire present day storyline is driven by her receiving the box and reaching out to everyone to open it. Her chickening out at the very end just doesn't feel genuine.
If we want to talk mechanics, it would have made much more sense for her to have an argument with Nora in the bar, and let the outcome of that argument and past choices determine who stays and who goes (or if anyone goes at all.) Cleaner, easier, more logical. Just my two cents.
As an adult, aside from Swann, Autumn also has the most narrative intrusion - she is constantly explaining why she was a wet blanket. She didn't do the blood ritual because her uncle died of AIDS, she didn't like breaking the rules because she was one of the only minority families in town. These are rational adult explanations for what is more likely just her childhood fear of crossing the line.
Nora, to put it simply, is a hot mess. Nora is the polar opposite of Autumn in just about every way. They met four years prior in detention (why Autumn was there is its own interesting story that we are never privy to), and Nora's magnetic goofball personality instantly stuck them together. Nora is everything Autumn isn't - she's not afraid to push boundaries, she's brash, confident, and goofy as hell, especially when Autumn is trying to be serious. She drinks, smokes (cigarettes and pot), she steals her dad's porn, she stays out late and virtually never has to be accountable for any of this. Nora couldn't contain an emotion to save her life - they all explode out of her the instant they appear. Her parents (divorced of course) come across as both absentee and loaded - Nora has the money of a rich kid. However, she's none of the things I associate with a rich kid - she's kind, she's always trying to get a laugh, she has no shame whatsoever if it will get a response. Her parents give her the money for nice things (likely out of guilt or the misplaced belief that buying stuff is a replacement for being present), but she displays no sense of entitlement. Nora never treats anyone like she is better than them. On the contrary, she is everyone's biggest cheerleader without fail. If Autumn wants everyone to be okay, Nora wants everyone to be happy. While Autumn respects authority and Kat resents it, Nora just wants its attention. She's a like a puppy that never misses the opportunity to tell a dirty joke.
Nora is exactly the kind of girl I would have been absolutely entranced by as a teenager (ironically, considering it's very obvious even in 1995 that Nora is only into girls.) I would have died trying to summon the courage to flirt with her in high school, both because of her dynamic personality, and also because at that age I was totally transfixed by chaotic, carefree people from my own growing up baggage. Nora would have gotten me in trouble.
Of all the characters, Nora is the one I keep finding more and more layers in. Her part to play in the tragedy of teenagers becoming adults is that the ying/yang nature of her friendship with Autumn as a child is probably what originally bonded them so strongly, but as they are starting to mature into adults, it's now what is slowly pushing them away from each other. You see this in little moments, like when Nora gives Swann and Kat a homemade gift but "totally spaced" one for Autumn. Nora never does anything out of malice, most especially to her friends, so this moment reads as genuinely unintentional, not selfish or punitive. One of the worst parts of growing up as a kid is growing out of your best friend.
Nora is easily the most tragic of all the adults. All of the main characters visibly suffer to some extent from the dimming of the spark that comes with adulthood; you can hear it in both Swann and Autumn's voice that their joie de vivre is noticeably diminished. Autumn is now a divorced single mom, browsing dating apps with no luck, and who knows what is going on with Swann, whether she's voluntarily celibate or what. The most charitable interpretation is that she was holding out for Nora to come back one day.
But with no other character is it more obvious than with Nora. Kat may have *literally* died, but Nora is a close second. Maybe because Nora's spark was the brightest of all of them in 1995. As a child, the underlying nature of Nora I think was a desire to be noticed - she didn't want to be famous to be or feel elite, she just wanted to be seen and appreciated. This has translated into a woman that is financially successful but spiritually threadbare. She tells you about her accomplishments, but they come out like items on a checklist that didn't bring the joy and sense of completeness she expected. She's married but she doesn't wear a ring, and it is hinted through a peek at her phone that she might not be in a good place in her relationship (although to be fair that is hopium on Swann's part if she's on her romance path).
While adult Autumn is constantly explaining her childhood, Nora seems mostly embarrassed by hers. She makes fun of her old hair, and frequently puts herself down. She calls younger self stupid. She internalizes her wife's accusation of talking too much, a comment her younger self would laugh at and take as a challenge to talk more. She gave up on music to make a career in fashion, because that made her mother actually engage with her. Unlike young Nora, who is totally unafraid to make and/or be a mess, adult Nora doesn't want to do anything unless she can do it perfectly. At the outset, getting her to even commit to remembering the past is the biggest narrative hurdle.
Tape 2 does a really good job of showing how poorly 1995 Nora handles the group falling apart, and there's this vivid sense that Swann could have kept her from falling into the future she ended up in, but it didn't happen that way. Thankfully there is a glimmer of hope in the end of the game when you revisit Nora's old garage, but holy shit, talk about visual metaphors that crush you. It's easy to forget how removing the childhood items from a room is like a death in itself.
You can see how small Nora's life and personality has become by how this one room has changed over time:
One last tragic detail before I move on. In 1995, you find this picture in the garage just stuffed into a corner like trash:
Last but not least, we have Swann, who I've saved for last because so much of her character can be variable. So I will mostly be referring the choices I made that most resonated with me. Mostly that means the self-hating dialogue options were a no go, because I don't really want to play a character that feels bad about herself and constantly apologizes for existing.
You can tell right from the start that Swann is the kind of kid whose parents only ever had her, and kind of structured her life around theirs to make her less inconvenient for them. When we meet Swann, she's literally about to move to another country for her dad's job, and one thing you pick up from almost the first minute of the game is that Swann's mom talks more at Swann than to her. The only time she sounds motherly is when she's disapproving of Swann's choices. That said, something interesting happens (or rather doesn't happen) when Swann first meets the girls - she's actually supposed to go home to be part of her dad's party. Obviously she misses it, as she ends up spending several hours well into nightfall helping Autumn look for her keys, but this never comes up later with either of her parents (as far as I know, you never hear or see her dad.)
She reminds me of friends I had growing up that had older parents that weren't absent in the way Nora's parents are, but they probably treated Swann from the start like a tiny adult rather than a child. She ended up having a little too much sovereignty in her formative years as a result. In a way, this has made Swann into someone even more sheltered than Kat. One of the primary things that speaks to me in this game the most is how much Swann is comfortably alone in her own world. Her room is full of things that would be more interesting to an adult than a child - perhaps a consequence of being a 'smart kid.' While Nora has fashion magazines and music equipment and Autumn has got video games and her little skater toys, Swann has a crystal growing kit, and a terrarium, and a video camera (which back then would be absolutely insane to have - hundreds of dollars when dollars still had value).
I got the very distinct feeling that if Swann ever hung out with anyone as a kid, it was probably with her dad - in fact these may just be his interests that he's transferred onto Swann. Swann's mother treats her, to paraphrase Pearl Jam, as "something mommy wouldn't wear." She seems to be mostly annoyed at how unfeminine and not skinny Swann is, and most interactions take a lecturing tone. I do think Swann's mother loves her, but she doesn't ever seem to think about how her words affect her daughter, even in the present narrative thirty years later.
My guess based on Swann's comfort and knowledge of animals and plants is that this was an activity she did with her dad until she was old enough to do it alone. Or maybe it was the way to spend time with her dad, and as a teenager it's kind of become her mental safe space, especially once her mom starts passive aggressively hounding her about her weight. Interestingly, we never see Swann's dad. She describes how important he was in her life a couple times after he dies at some point between 1995 and the present, but we don't ever experience him or his effect on Swan directly. This is something you see with all the main characters - whether this was a stylistic decision to exclude them as a way of showing these kids' lives outside of their family, or whether all their families are absentee, I don't know. I think it's the former, but it gives off the latter, especially later.
Swann's internal life is arguably larger than Nora's external one: every part of her room has some kind of solo project or focused activity going on. Let me tell you, as an adult that has been typing this alone in my room for several hours days now on and off, I understand this person. I am this person. I played with action figures alone in my room until I was a teenager. I played through games like Max Payne 2 and thought "I should turn that into a book" for some reason, and then would actually try to write each level as a chapter, playing each one over and over and writing down every single detail I could to make it as accurate as possible. Who was this for? Who is this for? Swann seems to intrinsically understand that there's pleasure in the act of creation, even if the creation will never be complete, or even if it's devoid of specific purpose entirely. It is the act of making something and then imagining what could be done with it, what it could grow into, what it could inspire. In a very real way, doing something is being for Swann.
Something that I find very interesting about 1995 Swann is that you're likely experiencing the first time she's ever been challenged socially to conform to a peer's standards or ways of being right along with her. She made it all the way to being a teenager in her little bubble without ever really having a friend group to shape her attitudes and perspectives and how she comports herself. When Swann is asked what kind of music she's into, it's how she answers that is most interesting to me. If she lies, it comes across like it's the first lie she's ever told someone before in this way, a true kind of micro growing up moment. Likewise, if she answers the question directly and truthfully, it's an unpretentious response that doesn't even seem to consider being judged as a possible outcome.
Modern day Swann is by far the most intact spiritually of the three girls in my opinion. She's made absolutely no concessions in her life - she still chases everything she was passionate about as a kid. She travels, she posts her goblincore photos on Instagram, she works at a bookstore, she loves her cat, she's functionally just an older version of the same old Swann. This is one of the positive tradeoffs to growing up with such an internalized life. The only bit that is missing is the youthful exuberance, but that's real. Of all the girls in Bloom and Rage, Swann is the one who was probably mostly okay after everything was said and done. You can tell by her necklace though that she still keeps her friends close to her heart - the necklace changes based on who Swann was closest to over the course of the game and what sign their portion of the mystical lock was - Sun for Nora, Moon for Autumn, and Raven for Kat. This game is absolutely loaded with small details like this, and I am confident even looking out for them on two playthroughs, I still missed a bunch.
Ironically, she's also the one who has grown the least in a literal sense:
Swann is also forever alone. The saddest part of Swann's transition into adulthood is that she stayed that girl that was comfortably alone in her own head. You get a sense in 1995 that like with Nora, Swann's path in life would have been totally different if it had been allowed to play out normally. Autumn is a single mom, Nora's unhappy and in maybe a sham marriage, and Swann is basically a cat lady. This may just be observer's bias, but while I feel that Swann as an adult is content with her life choices, I never felt like she was actually happy. When on the romance path with Nora, the only time you hear any light at all in her voice is when she's speaking to Nora again. She almost sounds like she used to as a kid. Of course in real life these relationships don't work in adulthood more often than they do, but hey, you never know.
I can tell you from having a similar personality that one of the
biggest challenges in getting older is letting people in and not just becoming an island, something Swann does
seem to struggle with. The problem with being comfortably alone is like
it or not, humans are social creatures and not meant to stay in the
cave forever. I really can't put it more succinctly than this scene from True Detective. This really hit me like a train the first time I saw it.
Let me tell you, as someone that has now started my entire life over twice, and spent a lot of time in between those lives moving in one direction all by myself (not unlike Swann) - if you don't find a way to make yourself part of something, you will start to fade away. Sometimes comfort is actually the worst thing for you, and as you get older you get more risk averse, which means if you aren't careful you can comfortably fall off the face of the earth. Take it from someone who's half vanished from it myself even now. The difference between someone who is alive and totally isolated and someone who is dead is not nearly as much as you might think, and one can become the other really, really fast.
Speaking of belonging to something, this is where I have to point out a significant detour in tone
from Life is Strange - the characters aren't assholes. There is no
point in Lost Records where I feel like the girls try to 'put Swann in her
place' or have any kind of social hierarchy. This is exactly why Life is Strange fell flat for me, with every single significant plot beat feeling at best tedious and at worst laughable. Swann's friends like her, and she likes them. They all want each other to be part of their group. It seems simple when you say it out loud, but when your narrative focuses on how cruel and factional cliques in high school can be, it is easy to completely lose interest in the plot.
There are several moments in Lost Records where I found myself actually rooting for the characters, and I couldn't stop thinking about how these moments in Life is Strange would not be fun or triumphant, but cringe-inducing.
When Kat convinces the band to put on a show in front of a random bar, and they spend hours getting ready to get in front of a bunch of strangers in a small conservative town and steal the bar's electricity and block the entrance to play vulgar punk music, it works.
When Kat has an emotional breakdown, screaming at the audience in a blind rage until a physical breakdown follows and everyone starts freaking out, it works.
When Kat (it's always Kat) convinces everyone to vandalize the deer ranch and set all the animals free, it works. And it works for a very specific reason - because the story wants you to understand that this is not about the politics of hunting or raising animals in captivity for slaughter or environmentalism or any of that; it is about Kat coming to terms with her own mortality. It's Kat having the luxury of youthful stupid bravery to go out with a metaphorical bang, on her terms. If she can't live, she wants to at least feel like her life was for something.
Before I move on, I want to talk briefly about Dylan and Corey, because while they have their own story going, I think their place in the narrative is more interesting than they are. Dylan is a good example of a Life is Strange character - she's unnecessarily abrasive at first, but later on gets a bit of depth that smooths her out (ironically, Corey has exactly the opposite). Luckily for her, the game leans very heavily on the main four and is able to give Dylan grace in the form of a redemption arc of sorts in the end. The same can't quite be said for Corey, but that may be better left for the section on the gay magic aspect of this game.
Dylan is a classic case of empathy fatigue. It's not fair to say she doesn't love her sister, but human beings can only deal with the stress of a loved one's illness for so long before they start being affected negatively. Don't take my word for it, look at James Sunderland.
I get a strong impression that Dylan is the odd woman out in her family, maybe even before Kat was diagnosed. You get the very real sense that the only one who makes her feel seen is Corey, which is really unfortunate given his personality. You can see how someone like that can end up craving validation from an abuser just because otherwise she'd be totally invisible.
And Corey is very much an abuser. Though you get several indicators narratively that there is another side to Corey, it's clear that side is fading as you very rarely actually see it. He primarily alternates between being smug, hateful and cruel. He emotionally manipulates Dylan with increasing force as the story continues, as his sense of control starts to waver. I think Corey is an angry guy with a chip on his shoulder who could have gone down a better path, but bad luck and a worse attitude kept making him turn the wrong way. He certainly has a persecution complex of his own, but his energy is mostly spent on attack rather than defense. Corey is the kind of guy who thinks other people's suffering is justified because he has suffered. He thinks his cruelty is not only justified by the cruelty of the world, but it's what makes him strong, and being strong is what makes him able to create safety. Despite evidence to the contrary, I don't think Corey wants to have the relationship dynamic he has with Dylan. I just don't think he knows how not to be that way. My biggest problem with Corey is not with him per se, but rather how I think his arc is directly influenced by the Abyss, but more on that later.
All of this makes Dylan into a tragic figure in a totally different way. Kat wants her to be the person she was before she got sick, and Corey wants her to make him feel like the person he thinks he is, and both love her in a way that is toxic both for her and them. You can tell this game takes place in the 90s because if it took place a decade later, none of it would happen and all of them would be in therapy. But let's talk about what actually cures them.
Part 3: Gay Magic
This one is going to be hard to keep structured, because I'm referring to it not just as part of the plot, but magic as a plot device in and of itself. This is by far the most esoteric plot element of the game and the most challenging one for me to grapple with, because there are aspects of it that I think worked well, and there are aspects of it that I think actually harmed the impact of the narrative, to a severe degree in some cases.
In Velvet Cove, there is a magic force in the woods that is later referred to as the Abyss. You never really get an explanation for what this force is or how it actually works. Having now played through the game twice, my theory is this: the magical entity (or a gestalt of entities) exists more as a force without its own will - when it does communicate, it communicates with feelings rather than sentences. It responds to the people who make contact with it, but those people also channel it into the world through themselves as conduits. The Abyss feeds on and amplifies the energy of the people it touches.
Another interesting aspect of the Abyss is that it seems to respond to what people think it is. Like Jim Norton, it is shaped like whatever container you pour it into. The girls can view it as requiring a sacrifice, offering a trade, or something to give gifts to and receive gifts in return, and these are all very different variations of the same idea, with the narrative then responding in kind.
I think as the Abyss gets fed, its reach and effect gets stronger and more unstable, until it reaches a cascade point where it literally eats someone. Historically, it eats men, but we don't know if that is meaningful because it's not a high number of known casualties. Whether that person dies, is transformed or assimilated, or transported somewhere else, you don't know, but the Abyss seems to go dormant after that for a time.
I want to talk now about how I think the Abyss as a narrative device is useful to a point, and detrimental beyond that point. The core of this story in my opinion is kids growing up. It's that last gasp of ignorant freedom that children take for granted. For most of your life, growing up means trading the known for the unknown in little pieces, here and there. You don't feel the transition as it's happening, but you know you aren't the same at 15 years old as you were at 9. One of the only times this isn't true is the 'last summer' - it is quite literally the last time you have the absolute freedom of a child untethered to school, and this ritual feels very formal. Kids feel it, and this game does a really good job of making you relive that too through their journey.
Magic can be great in storytelling when it serves as a sort of fuel for the narrative fire. It allows you to introduce or heighten elements that force certain narrative pathways to more naturally reveal themselves. But this is a double edged sword because the reality of growing up will always be more engaging than the non-reality of magic. That is to say, moments that can be attributed to magic cheapen what works better as kismet.
Take for example how Swann meets the other girls - is this a better story if I believe a magic purple hole in the ground called to them and drew them together, or if it reminds me of the friends I just happened to meet that changed my life in that time period? I think my phrasing makes my feelings on this obvious.
On the flip side, the magic purple hole guiding them to the abandoned cabin works great for the story. It gives the narrative an anchor point, one that feels directly connected to the unknown. It allows the characters to not just grow together, but also show off their individual personalities. Nora's garage is technically a superior location in a lot of ways, but's also her location - the cabin doesn't belong to any one girl. To the contrary, it becomes something that belongs to all of them, equally. It fits the witchy vibe that magic amongst an all-female group naturally invites. Speaking of inviting and nature, it also helps establish the tone of the unknown in the narrative as more protective than threatening - in that way it mirrors the friendship of the girls, and how they look out for one another. It also gives us a tangible connection to the Abyss' mysterious history via artifacts left over from the previous inhabitant. Thanks, magic!
Corey's arc is good example of what happens when magic goes a little too far in the narrative. I actually need to separate him into two Coreys; Tape 1 Corey, and Tape 2 Corey.
Tape 1 Corey has far more depth, and more unspoken nuance than he does later on. He's a dick throughout, but environmental storytelling combined with a few subtle physical cues at the very end of Tape 1 hint that we may just be getting the worst version of this guy, because of his trauma. First of all, there is a whole untold story rolling around with him on his dirt bike - a signed will from his mother and a goodbye letter from her. Why is this in a bag attached to a dirt bike? A cynic would say as a game mechanic to give the player access to more backstory and lore, but as someone who has been a young man before, it felt genuine to me, like it's something he just doesn't know what to do with but doesn't want to throw away. Since you never see him more than thirty feet away from his bike, it also stands to reason it's another thing he feels protective of, aside from his girlfriend. In this sense, the letter as a representative of his mother is also protected by this behavior.
Along with the will and a nice photo of Corey and Dylan when they first got together, we find his Dungeons and Dragons character sheet. Now, call me a novice nerd, but I have never met an evil piece of shit in my life that liked playing lawful good in DnD.
I suppose you could argue that his character name is "Silly Ass" and maybe he's doing it to make fun of whoever he's playing with, but that is at odds with how much work has gone into every other aspect of this sheet. His character portrait certainly doesn't look like a joke at someone else's expense.
There's a moment during the punk show where he smirks, and it's the first time we ever see him look like maybe he kind of admires the girls for making a stand.
He even starts to subtly bob his head as the song continues for awhile. It only lasts a moment though, and once someone pulls the plug (I sincerely don't think it's him) he's right back to being a dick. But this part has more nuance than it appears as well - while some part of him clearly admires the girls (or Kat at least) for standing up for themselves, you can also hear him being angry at them for potentially getting Dylan in trouble at her job, since she works there. Then someone makes the mistake of saying something mean to Dylan and this happens:
When things start to go over the rails and Kat collapses from exhaustion, we get this shot:
This is not the face of some relishing in another's pain. And he jumps immediately into action even before she fully hits the ground. This is Silias Stormwind behavior.
Unfortunately, Tape 2 Corey is literally a different human being. I guess at this point the writers felt the story needed a less esoteric villain than cancer and growing up to move the girls along their narrative path. But as the story progresses he just continually devolves, until by the end he's practically one of the psycho characters from Dead Rising, wearing a wolf mask, howling and chasing them into the woods on his dirt bike.
This is the same person who carries Kat like a child to safety in Tape 1, and now he's trying to burn her and all her friends to death by setting the cabin on fire, screaming at Kat that he can't wait for her to die, and full force beating her face in with his fist. Then he falls (or is pushed) into the big gay magic hole, never to be seen again.
Now I know what you're going to say: one, this is partially Kat's fault for attacking Corey's future by destroying the deer farm, but more importantly, the gay magic hole clearly drove Corey crazy. As he continued to victimize the girls, its hold on him became stronger, until all vestiges of him were replaced by his worst version.
Or perhaps the effects of the Abyss are a metaphor for addiction/alcoholism. One thing I've always personally felt about alcohol is it amplifies what is already there, so say for example, you're slow dancing with someone you're infatuated with, those feelings become overwhelmingly romantic. Likewise, when you're angry, alcohol can make you extremely angry, very quickly.
That's all fine and good, but here's my problem: did magic make this story arc better or worse? Is chewing the scenery more compelling than actually having nuance as a character? It doesn't feel like it to me. I didn't start finding Corey interesting at all until they showed another side of him in the tail end of Tape 1. All of that completely vanished in Tape 2. Is taking all of the complexity out of a character in service of
creating an ending that justifies the premise retroactively the best way to do this? We don't spend enough time with Corey's better angels for this complete deterioration to feel like a cautionary tale. When I played through this game the first time, I was trying to stab him before I even got a prompt for it. So his downfall doesn't play emotionally for me at all.
I'll be honest, from the second I saw that fucking glowing pink hole, I knew someone was going into it, and that someone was probably Corey, or one of the girls, or both. I knew this, you knew this, the writers probably knew you knew this. Is this a good thing? I don't think so. Before this story had magic in it, it felt like it could go anywhere. Then, much like the Golden Path in Dune, magic forced the narrative to go down one very specific road, nuance be damned. But don't blame magic. Blame the hook that started this whole story - why do these girls not remember the most important summer of their childhood, and maybe lives? That sounds really interesting on a bar napkin, but it doesn't really jive in real life except under extremely specific, traumatic circumstances for one character at the most. That's what really makes the magic feel like flex seal in the 11th hour, it's covering a hole that has been present from the start. I have a much cleaner solution to this problem, but before that, an aside.
Another devil's bargain with magic in storytelling is the lack of full complete understanding of it, from all sides of the equation. What I mean by this is for example, you can say that Kat doesn't understand the magic of the hole, so if she says the Abyss is doing this or the Abyss wants that, that may not be what is actually happening, it's just her understanding of it. It is also true that I don't know how this magic entity actually functions, so I am forced to take whatever the characters are telling me at face value. I have to take on faith that if Kat tells me "the Abyss is telling me it wants a Sourdough Jack." I can either believe that Kat is correctly interpreting that or disagree and wait for some evidence that I'm right, which may never come, or may come later via retcon in a sequel.
Now a counter to my aside - how something works doesn't actually matter if it makes you feel something. House of Leaves is a prime example of this, and and it also does a great job of boiling over-analysis and intellectualization of all things magic and mysterious to the point of being farcical. Logic, structure and language will always be imperfect and unreliable narrators for vibe, emotion, and the unknown.
Look at basically everything David Lynch has ever done. Watch Twin Peaks and tell me you perfectly understand everything that is happening. When I watched the third season I was awestruck at how much it hit me, against my own will, having to give up on perfect understanding in service of just riding the wave. When the vibe is powerful enough, logic and reason and understanding can all take a backseat. You intuit only what is important in the moment and the rest comes to your brain later, sometimes much, much later. This is an extremely risky writing technique, and if you don't do it well, then you definitely do it poorly.
To me, this is not a wise writing technique to utilize for exactly this reason. With that in mind, let's get back to this part of the ending and my specific gripe. Corey is in the hole, dead, transubstantiated or otherwise, and Kat tells the girls that the Abyss says it needs to take her too, and that it wants to keep the girls safe but the only way to do that is to make them bind themselves to a magical promise to never see each other again. Don't take my word for it, I made a collage:
...what?
This is like building an exquisite house with a strong foundation and frame, and then making the roof out of Jello. This is extremely clumsy, whether this game stands alone or gets a sequel. The jewel in the narrative crown that is "growing up is hard to do" is that kids naturally drift away from each other with or without trauma. I have never known a person who stayed great friends with every single person in their friend group as they got older. That's not even accounting for the friends that die.
At the start of the narrative, it's clear that these girls literally do not remember the summer of 1995 until coming together magically unlocks their memory - likely because the Abyss is reawakening. This is fine if the magic is ultimately going to be the antagonist (as it is in House of Leaves), but doesn't really work for how it is used here. The more you involve magic to hold the mundane world (that is non-magic, not boring) together, the less effective the mundane is emotionally. Human beings don't need magic to conclude their story arcs in a dramatic way. In this case, the magic actually bails them out of their predicament and puts them in a cleaner one for the flow of the story, and that is a massive mistake. Everyone that plays Lost Records will have had a childhood, many I'm sure in the 90s like the characters, but not a single one of them grew up with their friend erasing their memory with a magic spell so that they don't go to jail for feeding the town bully into a magic gay hole in the ground. Magic should support the human drama, not co-opt it. Danielewski never lets you forget that despite everything weird happening in "the house on Ash Tree Lane" being fascinating, investigating it comes at the very real expense of the children and eventually, all of the investigators as well.
Consider my proposed alternative: the Abyss seals up after Corey falls in. Kat and Dylan have a bittersweet moment of reconciliation before Kat passes out from the exertion of everything that happened in the last two hours. We cut to Kat in the hospital. Maybe the magic hole gave her the gift of enough time to have the girls get to say their goodbyes to her. Dylan doesn't forgive them and leaves in anger. This allows us to see that the trauma of this final experience and the timing in their lives has lead these girls away from each other, and they drift away naturally because they don't want to remember, or because they feel guilty, not because of a magic spell. Maybe instead of agreeing to be bound by a mystical contract, they fight with each other and say some things that they will regret.
Now everything that happens in the present is part of healing past traumas, instead of breaking a curse. The girls reconnect with each other and you maybe get a hint that the spark they've let dim over the years as they became adults is not totally gone, but just made small by time and how they've handled this experience. And instead of Swann walking off into the woods to try and rescue a 16 year old girl from a magic portal who may or may not still have cancer, we see older Dylan, who has some kids of her own, and that has changed her perspective on Kat's friends, which is why she finally sent the box to Autumn.
It's not perfect, and maybe that's not your cup of tea, but this scene would have hit 1000 times harder for me if Kat was dead rather than magically gone in the void. Don't ask why Autumn is also a ghost, I'm getting there.
Let me get more personal for a bit and tell you why, generally speaking, magic becoming the focal point narratively doesn't work for me in particular. When you have a child, something happens that you can imagine if I describe it to you, but you can't feel in the same way until you experience it for yourself. You look at this little baby, and you see every single possible future your brain can imagine. You see the worst case scenarios, where you die young or work too much or you quit on them and you miss every moment of their childhood. You let them down, or you make them a smaller version of themselves than they could have been. You also see the best case scenarios, where they make it way past what you ever could, but you still end up lying in a hospital bed with them absolutely crushed that you're on your way out the door. You see that no matter how much you're carrying this baby now, one day you won't be able to, either because they grew too big or because you grew too weak. And how no matter how hard you love them, you don't have forever with them. You can't love them enough to keep you both around for good. Even the luckiest version of you one day says goodbye. You look at yourself right now and think, one day I'm going to barely be able to keep myself on my feet, but right now I'm a thousand times stronger than my baby. You look at your childhood, how it felt, how you thought it was gonna turn out at the time, and what you became. And you know that all the pain, sorrow and joy you felt, is going to happen to your child too. All of this only if you win the lottery and they get an entire life of healthy living. It's the only time in your adult life you will ever feel like you can see all of time at once, and it is insanely overwhelming.
Magic can't compete with this. For me, no storytelling device will ever trump the human experience, because the human experience is overwhelming beyond what words can describe. I've been writing this piece for a week now and it feels like I've been falling off a cliff the entire time. What hope does magic have against that?
Part 4: Oops, You Almost Ended It Perfectly
This is the first game I think I've ever played where the 'best' ending is actually the worst version.
I suggest watching this video after I talk about it, if you want to follow my train of thought here. So obviously, this game has a few variations depending on who actually stays to see what is in the box. Your variation options are Swann only, Swann and Nora, Swann and Autumn, or all three. You would think all three would be the best ending; that's certainly what I assumed. For clarity here, the first time I played this game, I wasn't able to calm Autumn down in the past, so she dipped out at the very end, leaving me with just Nora. This led to one of the most emotionally complex scenes I have played in a very long time.
After reminiscing about the contents of the box, Nora and Swann go to Nora's old garage. The garage has returned to being a storage space, utterly devoid of the magic of youth it once contained. Nora and Swann bring it back to life, just for a bittersweet moment in time, Nora plays their old song while Swann records. A ghost of Kat appears to sit and watch. It is literally perfect.
That is, until Autumn (who isn't dead) also appears as a ghost. Is this a ghost or a memory? Kat is clearly a ghost, and Autumn is clearly not a ghost. Okay, it's almost perfect, but let's be honest, this was my fault for failing a mechanic earlier in the game. Let me just replay the last bit of the game, we'll get Autumn to stay, then the living adult three of them can sit in Nora's garage and Kat's ghost will appear, I will kiss my monitor on the forehead and say, incredible job Dontnod, this is one of the best games I've ever played.
This is not what happens.
In the 'best' ending, Autumn, Nora and Swann instead go the stage in the bar. Autumn plays the guitar, Nora sings, and Swann records with her camera. Nat shows up as a ghost to touch people's shoulders. They finish their song and then hug in the parking lot while Nat looks on.
It's fine. It's not awful. It's just not nearly as impactful. It's not gut-wrenching at all. I really can't overstate this. I was feeling a surge of emotion coming up just seeing Nora's garage (well before even seeing Kat's ghost listening) when Autumn's fake news ghost ripped me out of the scene. And this didn't even bother me, because I was actually excited to replay the entire fucking game just to get this scene to be right. And then it just doesn't happen that way.
Every other ending variation is way more poignant than the 'best' one, including the 'worst' one where Swann is alone.
In Autumn's ending, they sit outside the now-abandoned Movie Castle on the bench where they first met and stare at the stars, a visual callback to earlier in the game when they watched shooting stars together as kids and were arguably the tightest they'd ever be with each other.
It feels like Dontnod wanted to pull the very last punch. And look, I get it, you want the player who has gone on a journey with these characters to be rewarded with the knowledge that they're going to be okay in the end. But here's the thing - we weren't okay in the end. If you're going to rip my heart out by making me go back in time and remember what we used to have, you'd better stomp on it too. Refer back to the first section of this whole piece - the real world version of growing up in the 90s, that this narrative summons back to life, fucking died. The real magic in this narrative is not the big gay magic hole, it's resurrecting an era that ended, even if only for a little while. That's what makes the impact of this story so powerful. Don't try to turn away from that in the 11th hour. Lean in. The 'lesser' endings understand this, and are almost perfect as a result.
As for Swann wandering into the woods to find Kat after, that part is most perfectly emblematic of everything I just said, both in this section and in the gay magic section. It's just sequel bait, it's mysterious for the sake of mystery, and it added absolutely nothing for me. But it also didn't bother me, because it's so brief it's easy to hand-wave away as a dream. This is the real conclusion:
Finale: Political Horseshit
If you actually read all this and are still here, please allow me to squander any good will I possibly engendered towards myself by wandering into the political for a moment. I want to talk more about why this game didn't blow up the market in my opinion. And I don't just mean because the title of the game is clunky, although that certainly doesn't help.
I first heard about Lost Records: Bloom and Rage from a Youtube video by Asmongold accusing it of being woke. And as far as I can tell, that's pretty much the gist of the discourse around this game if anyone is talking about it at all.
I like Asmongold. He makes me laugh, and I tend to agree with him more than I don't, generally speaking. I also don't believe that people like him have any duty to their audience whatsoever in terms of what they talk about or how they talk about them. People should be free to say what they think, even if they don't think about it at all before saying it, even when it is objectionable, even if it makes me think they're being intellectually lazy. The idea that you should be held responsible for the behavior of someone else just because they like you or agree with something you said is totally insane to me. So to be clear, I don't think it's Asmongold's job to 'correct the record' on this, although I really, really would have liked him to.
I also think what he's saying about game developers making their games more 'woke' to appease an imaginary audience is demonstrably true in the case of some games, depending on how you define woke. Woke is one of those slang terms that have been diluted by mass adoption, and now everyone has their own interpretation of it, which renders it virtually useless beyond it meaning 'this thing sucks.' Honestly, I don't really give a shit about the etymology or evolution of woke as a concept or a term. Woke has become so completely intertwined with the failures of millennial writing in general that it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins based on how people use it. Lots of things that are called woke are just regular trash written in millennial-speak.
Back to woke as a loaded term: rather than continuing to water it down or tempt you to see my perspective through a certain culture war framing, I will use a different method to describe as clearly as I can what I personally find shitty about this trend in art made nowadays, regardless of the personal politics in question of the creator.
The best phrase I can think of off the top of my head is self-sabotage. I consider it self-sabotage when a creator (or more likely, a pool of executives) does the following to a game (or really any form of creative media): they put a message, political or otherwise, so far above any other content in the body of the work that ONLY that literal message and the things reinforcing actually matter, to the detriment of the rest of the content. This can be as a whole, but it's usually moments in a larger piece. For example: practically every scene with Taash in Dragon Age.
This is not how you write dialogue, especially in a Dragon Age game. This is taking an argument you wanted to have with your parents and having it with me, the player, instead. Even Ayn Rand had better flow between her cardboard cutouts than this. Speaking of cutouts, the narrative kills her mom later for this transgression, but not before she admits the errors of her ways. In politics, this is referred to as a "struggle session."
Sometimes it's not a exactly a conversation/speech, but how something is said and/or framed, in modern parlance in a non-modern setting:
This is not at all how the characters in the previous three Dragon Age games speak. Here is a great example of how Dragon Age: Inquisition handled identity politics in a way that actually fits the universe:
Structurally this conversation is hardly different from Taash arguing with her mom, but in terms of how it fits the universe, it couldn't be more different. It plays into the history and politics of the Tevinter, in a way that stays truthful to the universe while also exploring this real-world issue that we understand even if it isn't identically applied. Obviously being gay is not the same thing as being transgender or non-binary, but am I supposed to believe in a world of magic you can't do a better job of exploring those concepts?
This is not to be confused with millennial-speak, which has a similar jarring effect, but is not explicitly political, just cringe-inducing:
Again, making every conversation in Dragon Age or Saints Row sound like it's happening in a Starbucks is not good writing. This is how the characters in Dragon Age speak:
A fictional universe is not a checklist for you to blast through all your social opinions in - it is a living, breathing place where people go to explore new ideas (even your shitty ones) and have new experiences. A shared universe built by many writers is not for you to fill up with your own grievances like human shit on the ISS. A fictional world is a curse, the Silent Hill part of your brain where all of your nightmares and dreams turn into a million different versions of you and the people you know or think about. You're not telling these stories, you are seeing these stories in your head and telling me what you see. Art is an old lady painting a picture of her favorite cat and hanging it up in her kitchen, but it's also Goya painting a nightmare of a man eating his son and turning that into part of his kitchen. A real artist is an unwitting conduit to these other worlds.
Using the politics (and parlance) of today to completely terraform that fiction into a propaganda poster for your pet issues in the never-ending culture war we find ourselves in is lazy, narcissistic, and in my mind, obscene. Believing that you shouldn't be allowed to escape the real world in fiction, because the real world is more important than fiction, and fiction's only real purpose is to remind you of what work you need to do in the real world, is not persuasive or effective on any fucking level. It's just propaganda.
When I listen to Taash speak, what I hear is a writer who doesn't care about the universe, how the other writers who made it felt about it, or how you as the audience feel about it. What I hear is "because I am unhappy with the real world, I'm going to confiscate your pretend world and make you unhappy too." This is throwing orange paint on the Mona Lisa because people still own cars. It's cultural imperialism, and it's fucking boring. Nobody actually wants this. The proof is in the sales numbers. And that's exactly the problem Lost Records has to deal with now.
None of the characters in Lost Records speak like this, at any point in the game. They speak like teenage girls in the 90s, because that is what they are. But your eyeballs can't hear this, you have to actually play the game to know it. 99% of the punk element (which you could make an argument for punk being a kind of proto-woke) in Lost Records is aesthetic only - it is very soft suburban rebellion from kids trying to find their identity, have fun, exploring both in the fashion and attitudes of riot grrrls. It's Rorschach before he set the first fire - just a costume.
There are no speeches, there's no moment where the writer pauses the fiction to lecture you about something political, there is no hamfisted Trump stand-in. Even at its most political, it remains a personal story told in personal language. With great mixtapes.
Unfortunately, 'woke' writing has bombed so many franchises that were previously winners, seemingly on purpose, that it has made the label dangerous to acquire. It's so goddamn radioactive at this point that you don't even need to directly accuse a game of it. We have so many Dragon Ages and Saints Rows and Suicide Squads that if your game on the surface level looks like it could be woke, well fuck it, I'm not gonna even waste my time, it's probably another woke piece of shit. And that's not even taking direct accusations into account.
And that is exactly what happened to Lost Records in my opinion. It lost in the court of public opinion before it even got a chance. Asmongold didn't decide this game is woke - someone else did, and he took their word for it based on a cursory glance. 'Awkward tomboy, fat girl, black girl and angry girl? Probably woke, I'm glad it's failing.'
I think if this game came out ten years ago, or more specifically, if Dontnod made this instead of Life is Strange, it would have gotten a totally different reception.
I understand if the last few years have conditioned you as a consumer to see an all-girl teenage punk band and immediately think that woke Europeans are trying to gaslight your kids into becoming genderqueer eco-terrorists, but if you allow that to be your reaction to everything, you are going to miss out on gems. Lost Records is a gem, and it deserved better than this.
I hope if you take away anything from reading this, it's to buy the game, if only so the company doesn't fucking die. I also hope that the volume of how much I've written speaks for itself in terms of how this game has hit me. Part of my tragic growth into being a boring adult is becoming a gamer that lets corporate slop become an excuse to stop being curious. Dunkey has a great video about the true gamerscore being predicated on how open-minded you are to try experiences outside of first person shooters and sports games.
So in a way, I'm grateful to Asmongold for dunking on this game. Because I for sure never would have seen it or heard of it, without him having a massive platform and using it to be wrong.
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