Lost Records is a spiritual successor to the Life is Strange series that promises another high-stakes, deceptively dark narrative told through the familiar lens of a teen girl along with a fresh, gorgeous art style. It certainly delivers on the visuals and the soundtrack is mostly excellent-- well-suited to the scenes it accompanies while remaining enjoyable on its own merits. It hurts to say, but this game fell very flat for me in most other regards.
To begin, I want to first highlight that this game is very very pretty. The world is vibrant and full of little odds and ends to inspect and sometimes interact with. The character models for the main four girls and their grown up selves are incredibly detailed and feel both realistic and brimming with charm. I should note that their skin textures in particular feel meticulously crafted, showing off sprinklings of freckles, moles, and sometimes acne. This goes a long way to make the girls look like they could be real people. The lighting is gorgeous across the board as well, which helps solidify a strong atmosphere throughout the game. If you took a screenshot of any moment in the game there's a good chance you'd capture something "wallpaper-worthy."
But then you see the character animations and a good deal of that effect is lost. Often I got the sense that the girls were nothing more than puppets on strings with how they awkwardly jerked their heads around. Characters will teleport into place or flash into a different position in order to be ready for a scene, which can be pretty jarring to watch. I also noticed "shadow people" pop up briefly in the background in several scenes, which I can only assume is the result of a model being loaded into the scene in-frame for some reason rather than an odd attempt at horror.
The same criticisms apply to the facial animations. Characters sometimes won't open their lips at all when they are speaking. When they do speak, even if directly to you, they'll be staring off in random directions when it doesn't make sense to. These clunky animations and bugs alongside the very detailed models make for an experience that often nestles into the uncanny valley when in motion. The issues detracted from the intended tone of each scene they occurred in, which was most, making it hard for me to feel immersed in what was going on. I could go on listing more bugs I ran into (on PS5, for reference) but I don't want to beat a dead horse more than I have to.
Here are some video examples too! These don't feature any explicit story spoilers, but the second one reveals the design of an aged-up character which you might prefer to keep a surprise depending on who you are. It also features a spooky floating beer glass!
The plot and characters, which are typically the main selling points for this type of game to me, also were a letdown. I'd say the game is a bit of a slow burn, but it doesn't feel as though it builds up to much of anything so much as eventually leaps straight to it. Around 70-80% of the first "tape", or the first half of the game, roughly, felt more like a slice-of-life style of game where you hang out with your friends over the summer. It's cute enough, gives some room for relationships to bloom (pun intended) and if you're looking for that then I'm sure you'll be pleased, but I felt frustrated that by the end of that first tape I couldn't really articulate what the plot was trying to be.
Tape 2 starts off alright, basking in a somber tone that actually feels earned given the events just prior, but before long falls off the deep end in a collage of sequences that struggled to resonate with me because they either came out of nowhere or flew in the face of what I felt previous character writing and dialogue decisions I made would imply should happen (Autumn snitched to Corey???).
You do get some really good player agency through the dialogue in this game, though the results of your choices mostly manifest in smaller typically aesthetic nods rather than story-altering ones. This makes the aforementioned "character assassination" moments tougher to swallow, as there's not a ton of wiggle room for the writers to need to account for for characters other than Swann.
The main antagonist, Corey, also feels cartoonishly evil by the end of the game, which handily undermines what little sympathy and humanity the game tries to build for them. I suppose it goes hand in hand with Kat's sudden dive deep into curses and vengeance halfway through, but neither felt justified by the writing to me.
The gameplay mostly has you making choices in dialogue and gathering the game's collectables. The latter are collected via a pretty novel camcorder system which serves as the basis for the title "Lost Records." This was pretty awesome at first! The filter over the camera view helped deliver on the 90's aesthetic that permeates throughout the game. However, to record various subjects you need to keep the camera pointed at each of them for a short period of time-- around 3-5 seconds. It adds up. Every time you enter a new scene you'll have a slew of new ones to record, which for me meant grinding the flow of the game to a halt so I could record a bunch of birds, graffiti, and other extraneous stuff. It got tedious quickly and as a result I don't really have an interest in going for all the achievements like I always did with the Life is Strange games.
The trailers had me pretty excited for this game, so it hurts to come out feeling so critical of it. I really considered giving the rating a bump just because I totally respect what they were going for with this, but there's just too much I can't really defend. I'm hoping that this is just growing pains for the studio and they move onto something really awesome next.
