Lost Records: Bloom & Rage: Tape 2 review — A beautifully sad Swann song

Tape 1: Bloom of Bloom and Rage left us on a terribly sad cliff hanger as our girl Kat was taken away to the hospital with Swann, Nora, and Autumn left there on their makeshift stage wondering if their friend will survive and feeling the shock of realizing she was sick with Leukemia the whole time they’ve known each other.

Now, just a couple months later, we’re treated with Tape 2: Rage… which is an apt title for how this story goes. It’s time to travel back to 1995 to see how our favorite band is handling this trauma. 

Badly… they’re handling it badly. Each of them is punished in their own way depending on the parental unit. Swann is taking the majority of the blame for the concert and is responsible for cleaning up. Nora is being shipped to her mother’s house in California (though she’s using that as a way to avoid her problems), Autumn is completely checked out in general, and Kat is under house arrest. 

Tape 2 is about 5-8 hours of content, depending on how quickly you move through the story, so I don’t want to spoil too much of the plot itself, but we really loved the reactions of Tape 1 to Tape 2 when it comes to the choices and those consequences. The relationships you have between characters during your playthrough will fully impact how the characters handle their emotions around you. 

Adam: During my playthrough, I mostly played Swann as a young woman who wanted to be a rebel but had never lived that life, so meeting Nora and Kat specifically allowed her to chase those feelings. This seemingly left Autumn out in many areas because she was the careful one. Since I didn’t have a GREAT relationship with Autumn, conversations with her in Tape 2 mostly went poorly, and the ending was fully impacted by that. Meanwhile, because I was such good friends with Nora and Kat, those moments were beautiful and gave me specific dialogue I wouldn’t have gotten and moments for their romances to flourish. 

David: Meanwhile, I played Swann as a very cautious but caring friend. She might not be down to commit tons of crimes, but she absolutely will put herself in harm's way at the drop of a hat for any of the three girls. This caused her to be closest with Autumn in Tape 1, and that continued in Tape 2, though Autumn was still oddly down on the group’s friendship throughout the episode. I think she had some great moments, but she’s the most distant of the group in this one. As for Nora and Kat, I was close with the former in ‘95, but in the modern sections, she very clearly didn’t want to be there. Kat and Swann grew a lot closer in this episode, while it feels like she and Nora drifted further apart despite my best efforts. I didn’t romance anyone, though the game still said Swann had a crush on Autumn, so I’m certainly interested in going back to see how all the relationships work and affect events.

As we move into gameplay, there were three things that drew this game back a bit. The first is the amount of texture issues we faced playing on the PlayStation 5. Full assets would come in as blocks or blank, and after 5-10 seconds, the textures would stack and get to what they’re supposed to be. This is most clearly seen during the adult conversations when Autumn’s jacket and hair would come in majorly blank and would start becoming more textured in the following moments. 

The next drawback is when the audio stacks on top of each other in the wrong way. We really enjoyed the audio moments of the girls sometimes talking over each other, since that happens in real life, very rarely are groups of friends fully waiting on the others to finish their sentence before moving on to the next sentence. The problem arises when the person talking is the one interrupting themselves. This again, happens the most and is most obvious in the present time scenes with the adult versions of our main cast. I found Nora was the one that happened the most, as she would start speaking over herself in the middle of a sentence if you moved or looked at a new thing while she was speaking. 

The final drawback was the forced stealth system in a game that’s never been about stealth… I think we can all agree that random stealth sections are never good, and that applies here. At a certain point in the game, you need to sneak into Kat’s room while avoiding Corey. His wandering around feels totally unnatural in a game focused on portraying realistic characters. Like, who would change positions at least six times, standing on the porch and looking out into the yard? This part is also a weird, 2D segment at one point, and I kept getting caught because I didn’t realize I needed to walk forward a bit first. This is the only part of the game where you “rewind” if you fail, though apparently, if you fail too many times, you can skip the section entirely. None of what you do here really comes back, as far as I know, so it feels like padding in a very short but otherwise tightly paced tape. 

The music, once again, does a fabulous job of setting the stage for the emotional rollercoaster that we’re on. We are thrown back to an era of synth pop mixed with punk rock moments. There are some beautiful sets of events where, without the music, it would never have worked. A great example is near the end of the game during a very special light show (that’s all I’ll say to not spoil anything). We both found ourselves listening to the soundtrack as well as some of the artist catalogs themselves since playing Tape 1 and Tape 2 keeps the levels high in all areas.

While this Tape is a bit shorter than the first, the amount of content we go through makes it feel a lot longer than it is in reality. It felt like playing through a motion picture at times, with specific choices literally dictating if specific characters live or die, stay happy or drown in sadness, get through panic-attacks or not, and even if characters get kisses. Tape 2 reveals itself to be one of DON’T NOD’s most reactive games, and while it all ends in the same place, the context for getting there can be wildly different depending on your choices in both Tapes. It all ends on something of a cliffhanger or extra mystery, which may be divisive but feels bold considering there’s no direct sequel planned, as far as we know. 

If Tape 1 portrayed the positives of girlhood in the 90s, Tape 2 portrays the negatives and the lasting consequences of the trauma life and society inflict on girls. Consequently, it also has the girls strike back at the world and each other, for better or worse, in both the past and present. It may not nail every moment, but it’s a fascinating exploration of friendship.

Tape 2’s payoffs from Tape 1 were more than what I could have wanted, given that I felt unfulfilled by the ending of Tape 1 in that way. If you’ve not played Tape 1 yet, having Tape 2 fully accessible right after will be a huge help to the enjoyment of this story. Little moments at the end leave the door open for some sort of sequel, but at the end of Tape 2, I’m satisfied with the result and expect to play it again to try and get the other endings.