Don’t Nod, the studio behind the original life is strange and its (Stellar) Numbered SequelNearly 10 years have passed since Max Caulfield first stepped into the halls of Blackwell College, and the sincere quality of his writing still fascinates me. So even if Lost Records: Bloom and FuryThe studio’s next game, due out next year, has some of the funniest, sweetest dialogue I’ve ever heard in intense moments, and that sincerity kept me invested. I recently played for about two hours missing recordsand while the build I messed up was a bit crude, especially as it oscillated between ’90s flashbacks and today’s frame equipment, I’m already far more interested than I was at the time Talk to the developers of Don’t Nod About the project earlier this year.
missing records It focuses on a group of four friends who met as teenagers in the 1990s and bonded over their love of rock music and protagonist Swann’s camera. But what is clear is that when they reunited more than twenty years later, something It happened while they were filming a music video in their childhood hometown. missing records Cutting back and forth between Swann’s past and present plays on the player’s uncertainty as to why the group of girls haven’t spoken in years to create a constant sense of unease. Now, the mundane conversations I have at the dinner table with Swann’s friend Autumn feel tense even as we reminisce about the good times we spent together as teenagers.
The demo I played deliberately cut out some moments that might have relieved the tension, and Don’t Nod’s carefully orchestrated moments of mystery had me hooked, eager to discover what supernatural twists awaited in the noir cuts.
However, the parts of Swann’s story that I was able to play were fascinating in their own way, tapping into parts of myself that are nostalgic for the ’90s that I think I’ve started to forget as I get older and more focused on the present. . The demo began with her rummaging through her childhood room trying to find a movie she had rented from a local movie store but had misplaced in another box. As I examined all the knick-knacks scattered around her room, they were unmistakably ’90s-style, adorned with nods to the likes of Trolls and Stephen King novels, and it was like I was not thinking about it in In the case of these things, the VHS box in your hands feels the same plastic as it has for decades.
Between throwing things away as a child and moving across the country as an adult, I lost a lot of items and memories that were once central to my life. Not all ’90s media brings back those buried memories for me, but walking into Swann’s room was the first time I realized missing records Touched my nostalgia. But I didn’t revel in it. It’s not the optimistic dopamine hit that comes from mentioning something nostalgic. It’s more of a melancholic feeling, a recognition that time has passed and things have changed.
Many of the tactile experiences I had as a child have been replaced by scrolling and convenience. I imagine the juxtaposition of how Swann interacted with technology in her adolescence and today’s more modern world is meant to create a contrast between two different moments in her life, but it also reminds me how impermanent and disposable we are almost exposed to Everything is. I’m reminded of a box of VHS tapes that had been in my family’s storage building for decades, we replaced them with DVDs and Blu-rays, and then by streaming services that would drop movies from their lists without warning delete. I didn’t even feel desire, I just felt fear.
missing records It’s all about capturing these moments through technology, and Swann couldn’t imagine that these technologies would become obsolete and potentially be forgotten years from now. In addition to walking, talking, and inspecting items, I spent most of the time in Swann’s shoes, using the camera to record footage of her room and her friends’ band practices. Her most cherished teenage memories are of using a handheld camera to shoot 4:3 music videos for her friends who were eager to impress her. missing recordsThe dialogue so perfectly captures an awkward teen’s best efforts to fit in that I couldn’t help but sympathize with her as I cringed at the unabashed, unapologetic sincerity with which she spoke to her future friends.
While her anxiety may continue into adulthood, the raw, unpolished ways in which she and her friends filmed music videos in the woods outside their hometown have become a distant memory. I don’t know yet if those shaky, clunky shots I shot with Swann’s camera still exist in today’s games, but look at the end result we got together and see how many of the clips are clearly the result of which buttons I’m still getting used to did what it saw fit in the game’s photo mode. Swann was still learning how to be a director at that age, just like I was still learning how to operate the controls of a game. So, yes, the end result isn’t a professional, perfectly framed music video, but it’s the best I can do at the moment.
I expected missing records Playing on the ’90s nostalgia, as Don’t Nod told me, is an opportunity for the franchise Reflecting on his teenage years as an adult. But I don’t think I was prepared for how it would affect my own anxieties about how the world might lose records of its past. The tactile ways we once saved videos, photos and letters are disappearing. Technology has improved our lives, but it has also made us flippantly assume that something of historical or personal significance can be easily discarded at the push of a button. Where once you had to rip and burn a photo to destroy it, now you can simply delete it from the Photos app or your hard drive. I’m only in my 30s, so I’m not as far removed from adolescence as Swann and her friends are missing recordsBut many of the videos and photos from those years have been deleted, as social media accounts were deleted and old photo albums were lost in the shuffle between families. Maybe this is what happens with nostalgia as the world becomes more dystopian. It’s no longer a rose-tinted lens through which to view the good old days, but a reminder that history can feel impossible to preserve.
Lost Records: Bloom and Fury It will be released on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2025.
