At long last, we return for the grand finale of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. If you’ll recall from my previous review, I was a little underwhelmed by the game’s first Tape, and I had hoped the second would pull it out of a tailspin and present something worthwhile. Unfortunately, as I played through the entirety of the second act, hoping for some delivery on the game’s bigger ideas, I was once again left wanting.
Since I have already covered the first Tape fairly comprehensively, this review will be a little different from my usual style. The majority of the game remains largely the same, so I’m not going to go into laborious detail about gameplay or audio-visual design. Instead, I want to focus on the most crucial element of this game that doesn’t work: the overall narrative design.
I touched on it in my first review, but I want to elaborate on the structure of this game’s narrative because for me, it doesn’t really work—not only as a story split into two... Read more