Most texts try to avoid cliché, understanding that an abuse idea is an idea that has lost its strength. It often feels as if the video games are made in the opposite approach, pleasure to the tropical pile on their backs like Labyrinth’s Junk Lady. Certainly, they sacrificed the opportunity to say anything that affects or feels right, but perhaps the theory is to remind you of another dozen films, TV shows, books and games you like.
Enter lost records: Bloom & Rage, hunchback from the weight of all teenage TV shows and young adult novels stacked on their shoulders.
You play Swann, a teenage girl in 1995 living in a small fictional town in Michigan named Velvet Cove. Swann and her family will move to Canada in the end of the summer, but a meeting with the towns of the town leads to a strong new friendship with Nora, Kat and Autumn, three other teenage girls. Nora and Autumn are musicians longing, and filmmakers Wannabe Swann becomes their filmmakers when they rehearse songs, make music videos and turn a cabin that seems to be abandoned in the forest into a teenage hideout.
As a player, this means you have a camcorder with you anytime that you can give to shoot short videos about whatever you want. Basically, these are collections – birds X, pieces of graffiti, etc. But if you take some characters or scenes of some scenes, they form “memoirs”, short film videos that you can edit by selecting and resetting photos. I did not feel much freedom or creative light when doing so, but it was another trope collected. The upcoming dramas often have nostalgic characters for their own time, and their self -reflection is often shown through the camera lens. Think of Dawson, who has a story to the peak in him creating a drama about his life called “The Creek”; Think about the opening games of Wonder Years; Think of Max’s photography in a strange life, a game don’t nod before losing a record that evokes continuously.
The prehistoric vlogging is one side, and put a few key puzzles, your main interaction is in the dialogue. Swann is chatting almost continuously with her friends, individuals and in a group, with your choices that affect her relationships and the process of the story. Or so we are told through interface elements. Lost Records is not the type of game but rotates quickly and rewards for testing, and if I encounter the consequences for any option I do, they will be opaque. Fairly, this is 1: Bloom, with the ending tape 2: Rage is released in April.
There are not many things happening, the plot is wise, in most operating time of this first half. The goal seems to be for players to immerse in the good vibes of four new friends, but I find it all too slowly. If you will make a hangout game, those friends are better than a good person, and while Nora, Autumn and Kat are a lovely group, they often feel like non -complicated prototypes, more designed to release themselves rather than interesting time.
There is no clear branching plot, the most important feedback you get in conversations is the symbol of a developed or broken heart depending on your choice of dialogue. Is there too much to say I hate this? The record is sometimes emotional, and its characters are most interested in authenticity. Swann, in an early scene, is clearly praised by her friends if she sincerely about her music taste rather than fake to impress them.
However, UI scolded players continuously. There are times when I choose a dialogue option because it seems to be happy, like I am playing with a friend, just to meet a broken heart. Okay, so there is no character for these jokes, at least apart from the scenes, but I can’t find the reason why I want to choose an option that makes one of my friends like me a bit less. The test scores are frequent and redo a conversation that rarely asks you to take more than a few minutes of progress, and although I have tried to be verified with myself or at least with Swann, I am too weak to not attract my friendship even when it flattates my emotional journey and eliminates my actions.
Thankfully, forest trips, cigarettes and games of the truth are added by scenes placed in 2022, when friends are reuniting at Velvet Cove for the first time in 27 years. I really like these parts, although they are relatively brief. The characters are immediately more complicated and interesting because they have lived mature life, and their relationship is more attractive to the ways we can see they have changed since the hot summer of the United States. The time later came back and made the description on the nose of the 1990s, richer. Some items in 1995 will introduce the player to a ‘reminiscing’, allowing the characters in 2022 to reflect their homeland and their younger themselves.
This feeling is like a rare moment of the synchronization between the story and the storytelling techniques used to tell it. If not, there are very few movement of formatting forward from NOD’s life is strange in 2015.
We were introduced to the Swann’s 2022 version in her car in a phone conversation to implement some references about Covid-19 pandemic. She also has a mask with her. It was not subtle, but I was immediately fascinated by such a vulgar description of an event that most video games would be ignored. This feeling of soaking exists for about 40 seconds. Swann put her car in a bar, there is a bottle of hand -soap outside and a free mask box. Great! I interacted with them and I picked up the mask box, where it became an object that could rotate in the space in the middle of my screen.
What did it say about Swann that it was 2022 and she didn’t wash her hands or mask before entering a public space? “The budget cannot include a Bespoke hand washing animation,” perhaps. What does it say about her that she didn’t worry about transmitting through contact with the surface? “It doesn’t say anything, this is just how video games work”, almost sure. But I think these are poor reasons. One of the best writing tips is “Every word should say.” Perhaps a consequence for stories about video games may be “all interactions should be said.” The design of Lost Records feels like a collection of tropical regions is expected to be like its story. I just wish the video games would stop turning their main characters into strangers, who went around and turned the trash bin they found on the ground.
Maybe the video game of young adults and teenage female characters is not for me? I have a few objects to that idea. For one, Hey, this game But also Contains the 40 -person version of those characters, which I clearly feel deeply comfortable. I am also a child in the 1990s and felt increasing nostalgia for Hey Arnold! And my Nintendo 64. I fish I love Yellowjackets, and I own a Rainbow Rowell novel and one day I can even read it, but I really just think that writing well can cross the demographic.
Although the last reason I argued against the label “not for me” is very simple: I want to play more.
Take a look, I can talk all day about the parts of the unspoken file for me. If I didn’t play it to consider, I would have stopped after a few hours and never came back. Thus, I reached its climax and eventually introduced the film and the shortcomings in the rest of the story. Lost Records is bland, derivative, lacking in motivation, not rewarding the player’s agency, and it twice makes me cring it very hard for me to take my eyes off the screen. I wish it was half as long as it was. I wish he had learned how to let go of their ideas lost their strength, like Sarah worked in the maze. I wish he had learned that you could tell the story of your age about a teenage girl with energy and unique … like a maze. I, despite all that, desire to find out if anyone of them paid off when the second and the last part was released on April 15.
This assessment is based on a review provided by the publisher.
