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Rewind back to the 90s and live the defining summer of four high school girls as they forge bonds through their growing friendship, their punk band, and an unexplained event that will forever change their lives.
Experience the story in two thrilling parts, both included!
Navigate between the dual timelines of 1995 and 2022 and shape both narratives, with each offering a piece of the larger puzzle: the life-changing secrets they uncovered as teens and who – or what – has brought them back together. Reunited, they must piece together what was real, what really happened back then, and what lies festering under the surface of Velvet Cove…
Connect with your newfound sisterhood through lifelike interactions and conversations that feel real: engage in immersive dialogue that changes based on where you look and what you say; where you can do things like interrupt and ignore. Grab your camcorder and explore, filming Velvet Cove and capturing the essence of its people, places, and lush nature. Film just for the fun of it or try to find the dark secrets tucked away.
Play as Swann and get to know your new friends, each with their own lives and battles. Come out of your shell and embrace rebellion over the summer as you form friendships with Nora, Autumn, and Kat. Through your actions and words, you’ll shape your relationships with each of them on your journey to self-discovery. Will your bond wither over the years or will it feel like you were barely separated at all?
In a picturesque corner of Michigan in 1995 lies the seemingly sleepy little town of Velvet Cove. Between dense woodlands and serene lakes, it’s a place where beauty meets the bizarre. Cloaked in a carefully crafted dreampop soundtrack that blends nostalgia and ethereal vibes, you’ll definitely find it all nice and relaxing…
We’ve partnered with Maximum Entertainment to bring you a super cool physical edition which includes:
Hello and welcome to Lost Records Fans!
This webapp has been in the making since Lost Records: Bloom & Rage was first revealed at The Game Awards on December 8th, 2023!
Its creation coincided with my interest in learning React development. React is a JavaScript library originally created at Facebook and now used by some of the largest companies in the world. It allows fast interactive experiences that 'react' immediately without page refreshes. Think of Liking anything on Facebook and seeing the number of Likes update immediately. It is primarily a frontend library, meaning the UI users see and interact with. NextJS is a framework for React that allows server-side rendering, mixing both frontend and backend disciplines in one system.
I also created Life Is Strange Fans over 10 years ago. That site is built on Wordpress, and while it has many custom features, Wordpress is really not the ideal platform for such a community-driven site. I do plan to relaunch Life Is Strange Fans as a webapp very similar to Lost Records Fans eventually, but for now, Lost Records Fans is my main project. It represents everything I would want in a community app, with exciting features like an interactive Sticker Album and realtime Notifications.
I am a sole developer, and so it did take me longer to finish that I would have liked, but the Fans have been incredibly patient and I'm so happy to finally welcome everyone in!
Here are some ideas for the first things you could do now that you're part of this community:
And to celebrate the launch, we're running a Launch Giveaway, with awesome prizes including the Lost Records Soundtrack Vinyl from Kid Katana Records and branded fanny packs from Don't Nod themselves!
Head here to enter now!
Thanks once again to everyone for putting up with all the delays. Feel free to introduce yourself in the Comments below.
See you in hell! Or... you know, around the site 😀
PS: If you're a Don't Nod dev that's happened to join the site, let us know so we can give you your special Don't Nod role and Badge!
When people talk about nostalgia today, particularly online, it’s usually associated with classic movies or TV shows, retro gadgets or discontinued candy. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, the latest game from much of the same team behind Life Is Strange 1 and 2, including Michel Koch and Raoul Barbet, leans into this idea as any media set in the 1990’s would, but it also taps into another facet of nostalgia.
Nostalgia can be a time capsule, but it can also be a yearning for lost freedoms.
"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?" – Gordie Lachance, Stand By Me (1986)
Swann and her friends may be 16 in Lost Records, but this sentiment from Rob Reiner’s classic coming-of-age movie, still rings true. Our childhood friends were the touchstones of our formative years. They were the ones we played Truth or Dare with. The ones we argued with and made up with less than 24 hours later. The ones we camped in the woods with, tried our first taste of alcohol with, and took the bus into town with to rent the latest VHS at the local video store.
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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