Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Devs Talk Finding More Freedom After Life Is Strange

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is an upcoming retro narrative adventure coming in two parts in 2025. It’s the latest venture from developer Don’t Nod, the company behind the critically-acclaimed Life is Strange series. Set across dual timelines – 1995 and 2022 – the title follows the lives of four girls and the lasting legacy of the fateful event that changed their lives forever.

First announced at last year’s Game Awards, Bloom & Rage will follow characters Swann, Autumn, Nora, and Kat as they try to recall the details of that Michigan summer they all shared. Featuring immersive dialogue and branching paths, players will control Swann’s destiny through the things they say and the things they choose to investigate. With dual timelines, there will be two stories to be shaped in alternating fashion, with each affecting the other as players continue to progress.

Screen Rant interviewed Creative Director Michel Koch, Studio Executive Producer, Luc Baghadoust, and Producer Cathy Vincelli to discuss the Lost Records: Bloom and Rage‘s main characters, the dual timeline mechanics, and crafting a retro Michigan mystery.

Crafting Lost Records: Bloom & Rage’s Story

Setting The Foundation For Future Entries

Obviously, there’s one main protagonist in this game, but there’s the four main girls. I would love to hear a little bit about how you decided how you determined what you wanted their four personalities and their interpersonal dynamics to be when you were crafting this story.

Michel Koch: Yeah, this game is really a story about a group of friends. We want to talk about what it is to be part of a group, to try to find your place within a group of friends, so when we started to think of the characters, we were asking ourselves, “Do we want to be able to play each of them or only to play one?”
We quickly decided that we felt it would be
better to play only one character
, so you could really get to know the others
, then make the choices for this character and really try to get closer to one or the other, and we decided that you would play Swann.

Swann, she’s the positive introvert of the group. She’s a loner, she’s an outsider at the beginning, and quite early in the game something will happen where the three other girls will come to her for help, and that’s how she will meet them and start to experience friendship. When we start to work on characters, we start with archetypes. We wanted to make sure that we had each sort of character, of personality, with each of those girls.

We have Nora, she’s a bit of a rebel, and on the outside this is the archetype of the very rebel-like character, but deep down inside she has a lot of frailty and she’s a bit insecure. We have Autumn, the more chill leader of the group. She’s slightly laid-back, and she doesn’t have to talk too much for the others to listen to her, but some of her insecurities – she’s really always hesitating, wanting to make sure that she makes the right choice. Then we have Kat, which, in the end, she’s a true rebel. She’s the one that is very fierce, very unapologetic, and she’s the opposite of Nora. She doesn’t look like a rebel, but she’s the one that is very, very strong.

We start with those archetypes, and then we really want to change them a bit to make sure that the group feels like a group of people who you would’ve maybe met as friends in your teenagehood, and
we really try to make them feel authentic
.

In an interview awhile ago, the team mentioned this could be setting the scene for future Lost Records entries as well. I would love to hear just a little bit more about that idea in general and how you’re perhaps laying the groundwork for continuing this universe and that narrative with this first entry.

Luc Baghadoust: Yeah, before this game we worked together on the first Life is Strange game, and the second one, and there was a small connection between the games. You knew they were probably the same universe, but the games were quite different. They were on the same basis of narrative-driven games, with dialogue options, environmental storytelling. For us, this is our next game after Life is Strange 2, and
we didn’t think in terms of, “Oh, without the IP we cannot do anything,”
because the IP is owned by Square Enix, so now that Lost Records is the new IP, Bloom and Rage is the first game with this IP, and we have all the freedom to build what we want.

We have this character, these stories, but we have all the options to create, to reuse characters, to change settings, to keep the core features we like, to develop new ones, and to pursue this path of narrative games that we love to play and love to make.

Jean-Luc Cano, our writer, and Michel,
they have so much ideas for other games
. They shared with us some of these and it’s super exciting. There’s a ton of great games to make, and the interesting part will be to choose what’s the best one to do next, but there are already plenty of plans.

In terms of the dual settings of this game with the timelines, did you know from the beginning that you wanted that dual narrative with several decades apart?

Michel Koch: Yeah, this was really the starting point when – we got this idea five years ago with Jean-Luc, it was here at Gamescom, at the end of Gamescom, where we were presenting Episode 4 of Life is Strange 2, and we were starting to think of, “Okay, we will soon have been finished with Life is Strange 2, what would we do next?” and the very, very beginning of the reflection was like, “Oh, it could be interesting to make a game with two timelines.”

Because we were getting in our 40s, we were thinking,
“Maybe we want to start to talk about adults too, to talk about grown-up characters, like us, but we still would love to talk about teenagers,”
and we had this idea of starting to work on this game where a group of friends nowadays meets, reconnect after a long time and start to remember, and you would play in the shared memories of their past, and they have to recollect things to build up the puzzle of what happened.

We didn’t have a lot of ideas. We didn’t know yet at the beginning what would be the story, but we had this idea for a game structure alternating between two timelines, and the gameplay idea we were sure from the beginning would be the choice you make in both would affect the other.

How does crafting that sort of narrative work? Obviously, Don’t Nod has always done an adaptive narrative that as you make choices things change, but having it be between two separate timelines seems like it might be more complicated to make work, choice-wise.

Michel Koch: In one direction it’s not that different, because choices you make in the past – if at a point in the game, you are having a tattoo, then when you go back to the present maybe you can reveal and see, “Oh yes, I still have the tattoo I did 27 years ago.” This is exactly the same as
Life is Strange 2, where you were making a choice
in Episode 1, and you still see the results in Episode 5.

But the twist is that we are also doing it the other way
. When you are talking as adult Swann, and you’re remembering your past for something that you haven’t seen as a player, you have the opportunity to define a bit of who is what. For example, right at the beginning of the game you have an early dialogue option where you’re remembering about the cat you had as a teenager, and you have an option to choose the name of the cat, and then each time you play in the memories in your bedroom and see the cat, the cat will have the color and the name that you choose before.

I don’t think it was too complex, because it’s just other choices and branching, but the more complex part was just to think of interesting choices to make in the present timeline that will affect the past.

How Lost Records Differs From Life Is Strange

The Biggest Surprises For Returning Fans

In general, has there been anything about this new game that you guys found more complicated or challenging to try to do, compared to Life is Strange games?

Cathy Vincelli: In previous Life is Strange, I think dialogue was pretty straightforward when you were interacting with characters, and we wanted to innovate and develop on that a little bit, so
with our new dialogue system it’s more naturalistic
. You have opportunities to interrupt people when you’re talking, like you would in a regular conversation. Maybe choose not to answer, using your environment to look around to see if there’s anything you can trigger dialogues on to start talking, and different ways to initiate dialogue as well, so that was something new that we brought to the table and had to work on, and it’s a complex system.

There’s the camcorder system, also, that we heavily use. It’s a tool that Swann is using to interact with the world around her, since she’s an introvert. Just the fact of taking video instead of just images, the encoding process for that and having a collection of videos which then become a memoir that you’re able to re-watch as a little home video with Swann’s voiceover on the top, gives you more insight into the character.

For players who have been longtime fans of the Life is Strange series, what would you say might surprise them most about this new entry, compared to what they’re used to?

Michel Koch:
We tried to make the formula evolve or improve or change it as much as possible
, like the dialogue system, the camcorder, even the navigating in the room, the examining the 3D objects. We really tried to put you in the shoes where you have much more agency over the game, where things are reacting to what you’re doing rather than you just navigating through a more linear story.

When you examine an object, we will see new interactions on it. Those can trigger dialogue, because we’re looking at an object and someone in the back is talking about exactly what you do. Sometimes you will use your camcorder and do a close-up on an object, and then you will hear the others in the bar remembering this object, or the teenager in the room talking about it, and as you walk around, sometimes we have the other option that you can say as you walk to interrupt people or to talk about them. We are really trying to make the game feel alive and you being part of the group,
so the game is living around you and not waiting always for you as a player to do something
. I think that’s one of the big difference.

The other one is more on the narrative point of view, that it’s a game about four characters, not only about two, like Max and Chloe or Sean and Daniel. Those two were always duo, and here we’re really trying to put you within a group of friends, and there is a much bigger importance with healthy relationships. You’ve seen when you play the demo, they are here to really make you hesitate and try to decide who you want to get closer to. Do you want to maybe step back and stay a bit of a loner? We do try to please everybody, knowing that we cannot always please everybody. I think those are the main differences.

I know you guys can’t give too much away, but in terms of how where the story ends up can vary, how many different – not necessarily different endings, but how much different narrative pathing can players experience? How much do you picture them having to play through it to see everything?

Michel Koch:
I think seeing everything would require a lot of playthrough
. We have multiple endings, definitely, based on the relationships, on who you are closest to,
based on some important choices through the game
. Those will create different endings for the summer, like when you will recreate exactly what happened at the end of the summer of ’95, and different endings for the present, about the reunion evening and how the adults are reconnecting or not during this day.

But we have much more than that. We have a lot of small, short-term consequences. Like in this scene in the forest, right after this moment, you can decide if you go left with Nora, or right with Autumn, or wait for Kat, and those end up having three different dialogues, and those dialogues are different based on what you’ve seen before.
We are trying to put a lot of small but impactful variations in dialogues, in how people are reacting, everywhere through the game
, so I think that hopefully the playthrough will be unique for each player with those, with how you film with the camcorder, and seeing everything would take a lot, but I don’t know if players really have to see everything.

The first entry in

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage

will release February 18 of next year, with its follow-up arriving March 18.