Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is far from the first video game about teenage girls ever made. In fact, it is not even the first game from the developer does not nod that centers teenage girls. But unlike life being strange, Lost Records heroines are presented in a more realistic way. Rachel Amber would not have looked in his place among the actor of Gossip Girl, but the quartet for teenagers leading the new 90's set of adventure games looks much more like the people you actually knew in high school.
From acne to zits
I have never bothered too much about graphic technology being used to make hyperrealistic characters. Give me a game with a vision over a game that tries to replicate 20/20 Vision every day. There is very little overlap between the games that I think are masterpieces and the games that capture the great detail in a 4K camera. Sure, I love the last of us and Uncharted, but I also love games like inside and Neon White that are not aiming for something similar to reality. What is most important will always be art style, and “wow, you can see the pores on this character's face!” is not a compelling art style in itself.
Well, unless the pores are clogged, I guess. When I played through Tape 1 – the first of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage's two planned chapters – I was beaten by its willingness to present their teenage persons as actual teenagers, with all physical flaws and stains that mean. Of the four main girls in lost discs, two have remarkable acne. Nora Malakian, the wild in the Vansgruppen, has inflamed stains on her cheeks that she covers with redness. Autumn Lockhart's skin is darker and her acne is less noticeable, but she also has bumps on her cheeks.
Family
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is a necessary development for adventure game
Nod not reworking its own formula.
Two of the girls, Swann and Kat, have clearer hides. But Kat faces his own invisible demons and Swann has other problems with body image. In the Time Line 2022, she can make a preventative joke about how she was chubby and troublesome, which shows that you do not leave the person you were in high school completely, even decades later. She also expresses self-consciousness in the past, and it physically hurt me to hear her called “Fatso” by some twenty-twentysometations that her cross-group has run with.
Teens rarely look like teens
We see teenagers in the media all the time. Teenage shows, such as Riverdale and OC and Dawson's Creek and Beverly Hills, 90210, have been a staple on television for decades. But realistic depictions of what it looks like and feel to be a teenager are very rare – especially since most of these casts include actors well into their twenties.
I will never forget when I found out that Jason Earles, the actor who played Hannah Montana's older (yet teenage) brother, Jackson, was 30 during the show's second season.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem got some attention in 2023 for its increased focus on the “teenage” part of the equation, where the turtles were more silly, youthful and annoyingly hyperactive than in previous films. They had always canonically been teenagers, but that movie thought through what it meant more seriously (and threw actual teenagers and let them riff with each other). This means that some jokes will get a little Cingey with age – like the turtles that use the word “rizz” – but it's okay. Being a teenager is Cringey.
Tell me why and its two lives are strange items, NOD has not made several games about teenagers and young adults before. But comparing the presentation of the teenage girls in lost records with the teenagers in life is strange revealing how much of a step this is. Added graphic structure can be used to make completely beautiful people, safe. But I'm glad not Nick used it to show us teens who actually look like teenagers.
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Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 1 Review: Windows to '95
Nod not the 90s return to adventure game is more than nostalgia pasture.
