Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Tape 2 Review - A Mystery Box of String and Scotch Tape
FULL SPOILERS AHOY.
Whenever I see someone from high school — which is more frequent than I anticipated, as many of my old friends somehow live within a three-neighbourhood radius in Brooklyn — it feels paranormal. We meet in the present moment, look at our 20-something bodies, gesture with arms riddled with tattoos, talk with words and tones honed at university, but our past selves haunt the interactions, linger beneath every word and movement. We know one another, or at least we did, once, at a tumultuous point in our lives. We are bonded through trauma and time and place and circumstance, and yet we’ve escaped all of that only to meet again.
Part of me wants to ask them, point blank, if they see him, the ghost of me, the one with the beard and short hair and lanky body that they knew so well. Or if, beneath my tits and curls, displaced and dispersed within my curves, he is gone. I never do. It’s often best to let the past remain a spectre unacknowledged.
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Tape 2 confounds me. Despite releasing only a month and a half after Tape 1 (which ends with the violent reveal that back in 1995, Kat, the lyricist and resident troublemaker in the high school friend group, has leukemia), Tape 2 halts all narrative momentum in an attempt to pick up the game’s most interesting plot strands and tie them into a messy, scratchy friendship bracelet. Many of the personal circumstances that quietly propelled Tape 1 — Swann moving away at the end of the summer, Autumn’s familial responsibilities, Nora’s dream to move to LA and make it as a musician, Bloom & Rage’s attempt to punkify their bumfuck Upper Peninsula town, the supernatural mystery of the Abyss — are only mentioned briefly before being tossed aside. The result is a more focused story about the lengths the girls will go to help Kat achieve her goals before she dies, but the bloodletting comes at a great cost to the player experience.
Despite the fact that developer Don’t Nod delayed Tape 2 for greater optimisation and to “refine the experience for players and enhance the storytelling for a truly immersive continuation of the journey,” the finished product feels glitchy, rushed, and incomplete. The hyper-realistic graphics popped in and out frequently, affecting both moments of reflection and catharsis; during the climax, Kat was stuck in a seated position inside and outside of cutscenes, and the silliness of her squat kneecapped the scene’s emotional impact. The narrative starts by separating each major character, and they only get one segment to re-bond with Swann before the climax. The video camera, once a foundational, if underbaked mechanic, is reduced even further, with a lack of new collectables to record and minimal plot relevance. The gameplay, whatever little there was in Tape 1, is also almost entirely gone. Save for one Unpacking-esque minigame near the start and a “stealth” section in the middle, Tape 2 is a pure visual novel, which isn’t inherently a bad thing until you realize all the opportunities for unique gameplay that present themselves that Don’t Nod simply ignores for the sake of racing through the narrative. During the destruction of the Mikaelson property, all the graffiting and property damage happens between a fade-in/fade-out transition, which (ironically) trades an opportunity for the player to express their rage with a scripted, boring experience identical to everyone else playing the game.
What remains — the character relationships, the Stand By Me aesthetic, the central mystery — are turned up to 11, often to the game’s detriment. The sexual tension between the girls is ratcheted up to the point of desperation, which felt partially natural considering their bonds amid trauma and the general horniness of adolescence, but the narrative consistently disregarded my previous romantic choices. I’ll be blunt: the game really wanted my Swann to kiss Nora despite the fact that I never pursued that type of relationship. (Alternatively, when Swann finally kissed Kat, my University of Michigan hat–wearing beau, I hooted and hollered so loud that my roommate had to check on me.)
Swann herself may be behind the camera less, but the game's cinematography leans harder into “cinematic framing,” frequently making the common mistake of using extreme close-ups as shorthand for intense emotion. In reality, this just makes scenes disorienting to watch and obfuscates character intent, something the stocky, imprecise animation already hinders. Tape 2 reduces itself as a game while crudely mimicking cinematic techniques without understanding why they work in other media, ultimately making it a more bland, less appealing experience regardless of its more refined narrative core.
If this was what Lost Records: Bloom & Rage had to offer as a package, I would recommend it with caveats. As stated in my previous review, the girls of Bloom & Rage are endearingly human, and spending more time with them makes the jumbled final experience worthwhile. I’m a sucker for the UP, gays, female bonding, and riot grrl. There is something deeply touching about the displays of solidarity and unabashed affection past and present Swann provides for Nora, Autumn, and Kat. Being a teenage girl requires constant violence: against parents who fence you in with rules and curfews, saddle you with expectations and burdens; against other girls who pick and peck, scratch and claw, to establish a social hierarchy; against hormones that roil emotions and spark attractions to her, yes her, that girl to your left, and the one to your right. Who else are you supposed to love but someone who understands exactly what you’re going through?
But I cannot recommend the game at all, because Lost Records pulls what I very derogatorily call a J.J. Abrams: its plot relies on a mystery box, literally and figuratively (the package and the Abyss), and provides the least interesting, most illogical answers for the sake of “emotional resonance.” Like many Abrams projects (think Lost and Super 8 and other things that seem good until their endings ruin them), I hate the ending of this game, to the point that I’ve ranted to multiple people about its bizarre denouement.
The final hour, in which the girls burn down Kat’s family farm and release the deer, is fine enough, and Corey’s seeming possession harkens back to (and profoundly simplifies) David Lynch’s BOB, the hypermisogynistic evil spirit at the core of Twin Peaks. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done before, but since it’s Bloom & Rage, it feels okay. That is, until Corey chases the girls to the Abyss. There are almost a dozen permutations of events that can occur at the Abyss — Corey can throw Kat in, Corey can be dragged in with Kat, Kat and any combination of the girls (including her sister, Dylan) can beat the shit out of Corey — but there are only two ways it can end: Kat gets taken by the Abyss by force or by choice.
Whatever happens, it is now, in the final hour, that Kat finally explains a rule that seems pretty fucking foundational to the conceit of the game: the Abyss “magically” makes the surviving Bloom & Rage members forget about the night under the condition that they never speak again. Or, in my version, Kat speaks for the Abyss and makes them all promise to never see one another again before peacing out into nothingness. In both cases, the threat of what happens if they break the promise is so vague that weeks later I’m still dumbfounded. Throughout Tape 1 and Tape 2, the adults do recall forgotten information, much in the same way being surrounded by old friends will provoke memory, but they don’t forget Kat. They don’t forget making the promise. They don’t forget that something horrible happened, although their dialogue consistently makes it seem like they just don’t want to talk about it I Know What You Did Last Summer–style rather than being magically blocked from remembering.
Once the adults finally do recall what happened to Corey, which for me meant watching Kat and Swann wreck his shit before pushing him into the Abyss, literally nothing happens. There’s no magical reckoning, no earthquake, no change to the timeline. They merely remember, shed some tears, and sing a country version of “See You in Hell,” the song Kat wrote in Tape 1, before hugging and going their separate ways, promising to meet up again soon.
The ending belies that beneath the supernatural mystique and analogue aesthetic and girlhood coming-of-age, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage wants to be about friendship. It wants to memorialise those we lost along the way by fondly remembering them. It wants us to cast a light on the spectres of our past with those we can still tolerate and celebrate where we were and where we are now. It’s a valiant, heartwarming idea that’s like a golf ball being caught in left field: the instincts are right, but the set-up is so very wrong. If Don’t Nod wanted to play golf, they should’ve just done that from the start.
After putting Lost Records down, the credits still rolling, and the Abyss scene replaying on a frustrating loop in my head, I had the impulse to text some childhood friends. As I sent out my messages, I replayed some of my favorite memories: breaking into a defunct school bus to take silly photos, the impossible night we all somehow woke up at the same part of The Dark Knight but were certain no one else was awake with us, the dozens of stupid jokes and pranks and dares that live within my Snapchat memories. But as I awaited a response, I thought of other, more recent moments: the constant glimpses of my deadname in their phone contacts four years later, the time I announced starting HRT and everyone continued playing The Wolf Among Us as if no one had heard, the sincere ask of whether I should be invited into my friend’s groom’s party or his fianceé’s bridal party. And the dozens upon dozens upon hundreds of he, him, his, smashing into me like a bullet again and again and again.
I love these friends, but I do my best to avoid them, seeing them only twice or thrice a year with large gaps in between to allow for healing and mental preparation. I know for a fact that they see my ghost; I’m less sure they see who I am now, the woman standing right in front of them. There is often no satisfying bow we can braid the stories of our life together with, no redemption for past trauma we inflicted on those we love, no magical amnesia for painful memories. There’s a contradictory love sitting like a mystery box with an impossible, unsatisfactory answer right at the core of my being, and I have to carry it around with me for the rest of my life, but I do not have to open it if I don’t want to.
