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And... that's all for now. Hopefully this was an interesting read! And I hope that Dontnod will survive as an independent studio. Perhaps their Netflix game will help them? Let us hope that they'll be able to continue the story of Lost Records in future because they clearly want to explore more and continue as a series.
Some of the above nostalgic fragments are, of course, sadly quite unique to their time – the 1990s or thereabouts. What parents would feel comfortable enough to let their kids camp in the woods alone these days? But even today, besides the rare childhood friends that we are still close with in adulthood, most of our adult friends have not been shaped in the same way we have – they have their own kaleidoscope of memories, and as adults, we hold them close like pages in a locked diary, occasionally dusted off in the attic as we recall the things we did and said. And the things we wish we hadn’t.
"Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us." – Oscar Wilde
In the same way we have milestones when we are babies – our first word, our first crawl or our first walk – our teenage years are defined by them too. Our first music gig, our first house party, our first kiss. Unlike the baby milestones, these are not openly celebrated by family (unless you have a very unusual family!) To outsiders, they are out-of-sequence, unremarkable events, but to a teenager discovering their identity, every incident is a life-altering catastrophe or triumph. From the first blackhead spot to the last school dance.
The creators of Lost Records understand this completely. Childhood memories are not usually filled with car chases and earth-shattering revelations. More often than not, it is the mundane things we remember – the patterns on a bed sheet at a sleepover; the colour of the sky after a firework display overlooking a farm; the taste of the cherry-flavoured soda you used to buy at the shop every day after school. You remember not just the moments, but the feel of them – the sense of freedom and possibility, as alive as the soda bubbles fizzing in your mouth.
That’s what the girls in the game remember first too – not what happened to Kat and Corey at the abyss, but how they all met, how they talked on swing sets in an abandoned playground, furnished and decorated their own forest hideout, and from an overlook platform, watched the sun setting and meteors streaking across the sky.
If Life Is Strange’s enormous town-wrecking tornado was a metaphor for coming-of-age amongst the turbulent chaos of maturity, the cosmic memory loss in Lost Records could very well be a metaphor for trauma-triggered dissociative amnesia. Its two timelines – the past of 1995 and the present of 2022 – are often fighting with each other. The need to remember is at war with the desire to forget.
“Memento Mori. Remember you must die.”
The revelation of Kat’s leukemia at the end of Tape 1 is a veritable gut punch, but it eschews the usual trappings of ‘sick lit’ because Kat refuses to be defined by her terminal illness. She is allowed to be angry and funny and sad equally, and the other girls don’t even really get to say goodbye to her properly, but by collecting the mementos along the way, she has, in her own way, been saying goodbye all along.
Our yearning for the past grows stronger as we get closer to the end of our life. The reminder of the inevitability of mortality in the famous Latin quote above (also used beautifully in the movie 28 Years Later) is meant to be hopeful rather than morbid. By accepting the fragility of life, we should be inspired to live fully in the present. That is not to say we shouldn’t look to the past at all, but one of the defining pitons on the mountain of adulthood is the capacity to move on.
Even from the grave (or the abyss, depending on your reading), Kat encourages the girls to remember her, but not at the expense of never moving on. That new town should be moved to, that family should be started, that new job landed. Nostalgia-induced memories should not be used as a map of where to go, but as a journal of where you went. A reference, not a guidebook.
A record...
While some fans might be disappointed that the mystery package turns out to be a box of memories and trinkets from their childhood days put together by Kat before her passing, it is really the best outcome that aligns with the game’s themes. If a random person happened to stumble upon it, they might consider it no more than a box of junk, but to Swann and the others it represents their bond, their identities, and their shared love for each other. It is a curated collection of personal mementos, each item saying without words:
Memento Amori. Remember love.
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