Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – how Don't Nod’s nostalgic narrative journey will make you cry

“It is very personal for us and we put a lot of ourselves in it”

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage / Don't Nod

Nothing pulls on the heartstrings quite like nostalgia, and Lost Records: Bloom & Rage wields it like a weapon.

This narrative adventure game by Life is Strange developer Don’t Nod, which releases February 18, 2025, takes you to the hazy summer of ’95. It follows the iron-forged friendship of four teenagers as they navigate high school, play music in their punk band, then witness an event that turns their worlds upside down. 

27 years later, after vowing to never speak again, destiny reunites them to unravel the mystery. 

With many members of the team growing up in the ’90s, Don’t Nod is pooling its talent in perhaps its most personal project yet, as detailed in the interview below with the game’s creative director Michael Koch, producer Cathy Vincelli, and studio executive producer Luc Baghadoust.

Video Games On Sports Illustrated: It looks like there’s a lot of love that’s gone into it. Can you just talk a bit about how close this is to all of you? 

Michael Koch: It’s a good thing we’ve been working at Don’t Nod for 16 years. Previously I worked on Life is Strange 1, Life is Strange 2, and we’ve been very lucky because with Don’t Nod we had the opportunity to always create games we wanted to play. We really didn’t have too much pressure to do something based on metrics. So each time I would say it is a passion project. 

I remember that for this game, we put a lot of ourselves in it, especially with the age of the characters, both in the present timeline and in the ’90s, because we grew up in the ’90s. Nowadays, we are very close to the age of the women in the present time in the character you’re playing in 2022, and so when the project started, we really wanted to tell a story about the ’90s, but what it is to grow up, to be a teenager in the ’90s, and to have this nostalgia of remembering our past and maybe thinking of what should have been done differently back then compared to who we are today. So on a lot of topics it is very personal for us and we put a lot of ourselves in it. 

People who grew up in the ’90s will find a lot of references. Were there things that you wanted to put in that you couldn’t get the license for? 

Luc Baghadoust: We had experiences of realistic settings. Remember Me was set in Paris, so there were statues and a tower and we learned the way that we cannot use some assets, a real statue, because there’s rights linked to that. And, working on the Life is Strange games, Michael , quite early, loved to introduce references in the game, to the real world, because if you have a fake brand, and you talk about movies with someone, about music, and you have to recreate fake names, it ruins the realism.

And so we learned what you can do and you cannot do. For example, you can say, ‘I love this movie.’ There’s no need to request any approval for that. The approval is required when you do a real poster, like the dinosaur movie you see here [Baghadoust points to a poster of Jurassic Park]. This we cannot do. So the exciting part is to create graphical art that we can do without any legal issues. But also we have the freedom to reference real names, real brands. 

Koch: We’re kind of creating our alternate reality, where some things are real, some things are not real, some things we invented, but we really want to encode the game in an era, in a time in the ’90s. It was really important to have some names set in the ’90s. So that’s why when they’re talking about movies, they can say the title, like you said, but of course, we have to have a graphical element. We cannot reproduce the title, the graphics of something existing, so we’re creating our own, blending those two.

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage / Don't Nod

I really like the visual style, especially the characters. How did you advance the character models and the style of the game? 

Koch: Thank you, it’s good that you noticed that. Because sometimes we had trouble with Life is Strange where there was heavy stylization. You know, with the texture, and people were saying it looks like old-gen graphics, because some people don’t understand. But some people are sensitive to the art style and it’s great that you noticed the stylization. 

Baghadoust: We really wanted to push the technical aspect for this game, for it to look really, I would say, next-gen, but current gen. Really high quality on the global side. But we still really want it to not look like a movie. We don’t want it to be photorealistic. So what we’re trying to do is make the game kind of look like it could be a Pixar movie for young adults, so without the cartoonish proportions, but still looking like everything is an animated CG movie. 

And we worked really hard with our art director and with our lead character artist to work on those characters so they can really feel like some people you might have known in your life, some people that feel real, some people you could have seen, could have been your friends as teenagers in high school. But also make sure that visually, everything looks good with the lighting, that they have really interesting shapes. And we worked a lot on the eyes, making sure that you see a lot of light in their eyes, same thing for the hair, same thing for their clothing, making sure that everything looks good with good shapes, that it feels like silhouettes would immediately be recognized from a distance and then even with close-ups, that it looks really good with the lighting on the clothes, because we love to do a lot of close-ups on characters. 

Digging down into the eyes, for example, if you were to compare an eyeball model from this one to the previous one, what would be the differences in the eyes? 

Baghadoust: Definitely we have more polygons on those characters because we really wanted everything to feel round and smooth, even for environments. We try to make sure something that’s round feels very smooth.  So you might want to even have the feeling that you want to touch everything because it feels smooth and soft. 

Koch: I think technically we are slightly more polygonal, so it’s really round, but it’s also a lot of shader tech, like for modern graphics. For those kinds of eyes we have a lot of passes where we are also modeling the small water lines. Something where you have some liquid between the eye and the eyelid so it feels smooth. So we even have some shaders that are making some blur just at the junction of the eyeball and the eyelid so it feels smooth, and some flesh that feels organic and not very harsh or hard. 

Baghadoust: I’ve seen the team spending a lot of time to make sure the eyes were right. That’s very important. Eyes are extremely important. 

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage / Don't Nod

I was wondering about the cinematic effects because I noticed there’s a lot of blur and light shafts. Did you look to any specific films to get this cinematography? 

Koch: I love these questions. Something we already did on Life is Strange 1 and 2, we already wanted to push lighting a lot, and we tried to do it even more in this game because in the past we were playing into memories. And with our art direction, we really feel like memories should feel like something that’s softer, that’s a bit blurry. A memory is not perfect photography, so we worked a lot on making sure that we have a kind of old photography look. When we’re playing memories in the past, we have a lot of light shafts. Like you mentioned, we try to always have volumetric lights so the light is always present. We’re even putting more light than what you would have in real life. 

So if this light was turned on in this room and we were in the game, we would still create a big halo around it, even if it wouldn’t be realistic. But just to make sure that the light feels more present, not just the light bulb, but also lighting the atmosphere, creating something soft. And we also work on having a post-process. It’s very technical but the post-process creates those small red lines on the contrast. So it’s like you put on an old lens from an old camera. And we are building up a lot of those small effects that I don’t think you would see really, precisely, each of them, but blending together it creates this hazy picture that brings more of the density of the lighting and the mood of the past. 

On the gameplay side, the dialogue options I noticed were all positive. There are no negative options. They’re all supportive. Could you talk a bit about trying to give the game an optimistic tone? 

Koch: That was something from the beginning, when we were starting to work on this game, we were at the beginning of the pandemic and we were looking at a lot of media, and we all wanted to create a game that felt slightly more positive than maybe what we did before, and I think we had this idea that we are talking about the group of friends and we still want to have some tension. There is still some dialogue that is less positive than others, but we really wanted to make sure that we are not going into the full antagonistic route. So the story of this group of friends would still feel like something wholesome that would bring things out in a positive in a way. So most of the dialogue choices are more about how you try to interact with them. 

Do you go closer to one or closer to another, rather than completely shutting out and say some bad thing, because we really wanted to bring this friendship story to the front. And they are friends, so in the end we know that they are really friends, so we don’t want to break them completely. It was really important that we reflect the choices in a way that would still allow the player to find their place, but not in a negative way. 

What’s the main tension of the game? What’s the big jeopardy?

Koch: The story is about these four girls coming back together after not having seen each other for 27 years because of a promise that they made that they wouldn’t stop talking to each other. So in the gameplay you’re playing as a little girl. You’re in the bar and you’re talking around this box and you’re looking at the box and you’re kind of rebuilding your memories from the summer where you all met and became close and friends. 

It’s really about rebuilding the story to get up to the end of the summer where something happened and they have to promise to never see each other again. So it’s a big build-up of what’s in the box. Why did they promise and why did they stop being friends? 

Baghadoust: Basically, it’s exciting to have these two different eras. You’re in the ’90s, mid-2020s and you’re progressing in the present, in the recollection of what happened, and in the past at the same time. So it’s really cool. It’s not like one after the other.

Koch: I’m just coming back to the previous question because I was thinking. The game is called Bloom and Rage. The first tape is Bloom and the second tape is Rage, and while we want the four girls to be positive, like if there is a very tight-knit group of friends, then we have of course outside adversity. So in the part we played it’s taking place only with the girls. That’s why we are building relationships and we have a very positive attitude. But you will still have some tension and some drama and some conflict with other characters, but we won’t talk too much about it for now. 

How big is this game compared to Life is Strange? 

Koch: For the length, we cannot exactly tell the length, but it’s really in two parts. Each part will be much longer than the five episodes of Life is Strange. I think in the end it might be slightly shorter than the five episodes of Life is Strange, but we still don’t know exactly how long.