Most of the writing tries to avoid a stereotype, understanding that an abused idea is one that has lost its power. It often seems that video games take on the opposite approach, happily putting the trails high on their backs like a trash lady lady. Sure, they devote the opportunity to say everything that influences or what seems true, but probably the theory resembles a dozen other films, television programs, books and games that you like is equally good.
Enter the Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, hunched from the weight of all television programs for teenagers and adolescent novels for adults laid on the shoulders.
You play as Swann, a teenage girl who lives in a compact fictitious city in Michigan called Velvet Cove in 1995. Swann and her family move to Canada at the end of summer, but a breakthrough with the city leads to an intense novel friendship with Nora, Kat and Autumn, three other teenage girls. Nora and autumn are aspiring musicians, and the Wannabe Film -Moder Swann becomes their cameraman while trying to songs, create music videos and turning the seemingly abandoned cabin in the forest into a teenage hideout.
As a player, this means that you have a camera with you all the time you can spend to film miniature clips of what you want. They are basically a collector’s – a film x birds, a movie and fragments of graffiti and so on – but if you capture some characters or scenes, they create “memories”, miniature editing films that can be edited, choosing and ordering shots again. I did not feel too much freedom or innovative spark, but this is another gathered trail. Mature dramas often have characters that seem nostalgic at their moment, and their self -reflection is often expressed by the camera lens. Think of Dawson, whose culmination culminates in a television series about his life called “The Creek”; Think about the initial titles Wonder Years; Think about Max’s photography in life is a strange, previous game Don’t Nod, which lost the album, still recalls.
Aside prehistoric vloging and a ban on several padlocks puzzles, your main interaction lies in the dialogue. Swann is almost constant conversation with friends, individually and in the group, and your choices affect her relationship and history. At least, we were said through interface elements. Lost Records is not a kind of game that quickly turns and rewards experiments, and if I encountered the consequences for each choice I made, they were muddy. To be candid, this is a tape 1: Bloom, with the final tape 2: rage to release in April.
Not much happens in terms of story, most of the time in the first half. It seems that the goal is to allow players to heat up four novel friends in good vibrations, but I found it too free. If you are going to make a game for a meeting, these friends will be a good suspension and although Nora, autumn and kat are a nice group, they felt too uncomplicated archetypes too often, designed more to throw themselves at each other than thrilling time to spend time with.
Without a clearly branched plot, the most vital feedback during conversations is a growing or heart breaking icon depending on the choice of dialogue. Is it too much to say that I hate it? Lost Records is sometimes very sentimental, and his characters deal with authenticity above all. SWANN, in an early scene, is clearly praised by friends, if she is candid with his musical taste, instead of pretending to impress them.
And yet the user interface is constantly complaining of the player. There were times when I chose the dialogue option, because it sounded fun as if I had played with my friend, but I met with a broken heart. All right, so none of these characters is ready, at least except for movie cutscenes, but I can’t find out why I would ever want to choose the option that makes one of my friends a little less. The checkpoints are recurrent and the conversation again rarely requires you to lose more than a few minutes of progress, and although I tried to be original for myself or at least Swann, I am too feeble so that my friendships do not even pass when she flattened an emotional journey and dismantled my agency activities .
Fortunately, your forest wandering, surreptitious cigarettes and Games of Truth Lub-Dare are supplemented with scenes established in 2022, when friends merge in the Velvet Cove for the first time in 27 years. I preferred these sections, although they are relatively miniature. The heroes are immediately more intricate and intriguing that they lived in adult life, and their dynamics of relationships is more convincing for the ways in which we can change since sizzling American summer. This later schedule reaches and makes the performance richer in the 1990s. Some items in 1995 will pass the “memories” prompt to the player, enabling the heroes in 2022 to think about their hometown and younger ones.
This seems to be a uncommon moment of synchronism between the history and the techniques of telling stories. Otherwise, there is very little here, which is moving the format from the life of Don nod, is strange in 2015.
During the telephone conversation, we will introduce the Swann version in your 2022 car, which contains several references to the Covid-19 pandemic. She also has a mask with her. This is not subtle, but I was immediately absorbed in such a mundane performance of the event that most video games would ignore. This sense of immersion survived about 40 seconds. Swann leaves the car to enter the bar, which has a bottle of hand soap outside and a box of free masks. Great! I worked with them and – I raised a box of masks, in which it became a rotating object floating in the space in the middle of the screen.
What does this say about Swann that she is 2022, and she does not wash her hands or wear a mask before entering public space? “The budget could not include a custom hand washing animation,” probably. What does she say about her that she is not worried about the transmission by contacting the surfaces? “It says nothing, that’s how video games work,” almost certainly. But I think these are bad excuses. One of the best writing tips is “every word should say”. It may be a consequence of video games narrative: “every interaction should say”. The Lost Records project resembles a collection of expected clues just like its history. I just want video games to stop turning their heroes into a strange Gremlins who go around and turning the garbage they found on the ground.
Is it possible that this video game of adolescent adult trails and teenage heroes of girls is simply not intended for me? I have a few overthrow of this idea. First, hey, this game Also It contains a tired 40-year version of those characters, which of course I consider very related. I was also a child in the 90s and I felt a growing nostalgia for Hey Arnold! And my Nintendo 64. I bet I love yellow -like, and I have a novel Rainbow Rowell and one day I can even read it, but I really think that good writing can exceed demographic data.
Although the last reason I would argue against “not for me” is straightforward: I want to play more.
Listen, I can talk about some of the lost records that did not work for me all day. If I didn’t play for a review, I would probably stop after a few hours and never came back. At the moment I reached his climax and finally introduced a drama and rates that were missing in the rest of the story. Lost Records is insipid, derivatives, there is a lack of momentum, it does not reward player agency and twice made the ball so challenging that I had to look away from the screen. I would like it to be half as long. I would like him to learn to give up ideas that lost their power, just like Sarah in the maze. I would like you to learn to tell your story about a teenage girl with energy and originality … like a maze. Despite this, I can’t wait to find out if any of them pays off when the second and last part is on April 15.
