Life is Strange developers made one of the most beautiful games of 2025, and it’s all because Lost Records: Bloom & Rage understands the magic of childhood

The realization comes as I'm filming the nectarine sunset in Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, Life is Strange creator Don't Nod's newest narrative game: this indie studio is one of the best at demonstrating how to be soft in the hard world, where fear and death are inevitable. It's this expertise that makes Lost Records one of the best games of 2025. The magic of childhood is the most fragile kind, but Don't Nod tucks it gently into Lost Records' supernatural story of regret – its tortured relationship to youth makes me feel understood.

Before Life is Strange, Bloom & Rage director Michel Koch tells me, "there was no narrative adventure game that had this kind of slower pacing, more slice-of-life feeling where you could just take your time." It was important to him and producer Luc Baghadoust that Bloom & Rage would be a true successor to that muted style of game, and that Don't Nod would continue championing underrepresented characters, including women and children.

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage unfolds in two-parts, like a note passed in class. Its story bounces between 1995 and 2022 to explain how four girls – best friends, wielding ice cream, guitars, and the crackly camcorder with which I watched the sunset – became more hesitant women after experiencing a monumental loss they swear to never speak about. When a package arrives in the mail addressed to their pissed-off, high school rock band, they're reunited and have no choice but to speak about it.

"We think that teenagehood is really the most formative part of your existence," Koch says, eventually referencing two tragedies that once defined my sometimes-tortured relationship to being young – Twin Peaks and Bridge to Terabithia. "And everything that we are today as an adult – it all comes from who we were as teenagers. I think that's why coming-of-age stories has always been the kind of story we love to talk about, because we feel like it's really the formative years."

Inner child

Feeling kinship with her as my Lost Records playthrough continues, I start to believe that protagonist Swann is one of the closest to the anxious child she used to be. The dialogue and action options I choose ultimately determine Lost Records' ending, but I instead make my decisions based on what feels right for Swann – and maybe a bit of projection. But I think I'm justified. I know Swann was a loner who loved B-movies and her kitty I named Pumpkin, so I decide 43-year-old Swann should also be careful, nervous, yet clearly still wanting to be unchained – I could tell how much she needed Autumn, Nora, and Kat to chainsaw her heart when she met them years ago. Their fried, dyed hair and bad skin were so much more vulnerable than the camcorder she usually hid behind.

Though, I love being a voyeur with Swann in the '90s portions of Lost Records, filming the other girls from a distance as they pretend to be Bikini Kill in the garage, recording Nora as she blows smoke rings in the forest. That's by design – Koch wanted Swann to "appear, in a way, like a positive introvert," not as a lonely flower "that absolutely needed to overcome shyness."

"I've seen in so many games and media, these kinds of characters were portrayed like, 'You absolutely need to go out, to experience a lot of social gatherings, and you need basically to stop being [so shy],'" Koch says. "We really wanted to not say that about this character, and some part of that, I think, I was drawing from my own experiences."

Girls on film

I get that. Like Swann, I prefer to walk the woods alone. I watch '80s slashers in my bedroom with the door closed, only allowing my cat to witness whatever nasty set of vampire teeth are dripping on my laptop screen. But there are moments when – also like Swann, when she's at her most self-conscious – I feel an inch removed from other girls. It's as if they were all born knowing how to be a coordinated Hydra, while I'm a frog princess. Suddenly I'm alone by circumstance, not by choice.

As a service to both me and Swann, then, Lost Records' camcorder lets me become a documentarian on important things: my cat, trees in the Rust Belt, and Other Girls. Through their laughter and what seems like effortless pride, I feel that both Swann and I get more comfortable in our own bodies, frog legs and all.

"The first thing we did" when creating the camcorder mechanic, says Koch, "is that we bought on eBay an old camcorder from back then to make sure that what we remembered how it was, exactly. Because we had the idea of what it was to film with an old camcorder, but we wanted to make sure that our memories were true."

"Just having the object in your hand," Baghadoust adds, "feeling the small motor when you zoom, and looking at the small bluish screen when you have this not-very defined image – I felt more like a director, the responsibility of what you shoot, what you frame."

"It was one of my favorite parts of the game," he says.

But, of course, nothing is as easy as it seems to be on camera, and the Abyss comes for us all.

Tunnel vision

"I think that in all of our games, we always have a supernatural element that – I'm not 100% sure of this answer – but I feel like, the way we were writing those stories is as if the supernatural was more of a metaphor of what would happen even without it," says Koch, "just trying to enhance the emotions, enhance the fear."

In Lost Records, the Abyss is a tear in the earth, a strange pink blob in the Whispering Woods that the four friends flock to like deer to freshwater, hoping the little bit of unexpected magic in their suffocating hometown might grant wishes.

When they're united at their personal wishing well like this, Koch says Swann, Autumn, Nora, and Kat form a motley "coven" that the Abyss makes "even stronger, giving them some sort of magical power, which is kind of this metaphor again, of being a group together and being stronger to face other adversities." But, as time goes on, the girls realize that wishes and curses are sometimes different words for the same thing.

"When you're a kid," Koch says, "you imagine worlds – and it is magic for you until someone tells you it's not, or there is the harsh reality of adulthood that just says, 'You don't have any more time to think, to dream, to live your magic.'" That's what he appreciates about making games about teenagers like Life is Strange and Lost Records, so that Don't Nod "can still showcase the magic" of youth.

"And we also like the sadness of the harsh reality that when you grow up, some of the magic disappears," Koch adds.

"When you become an adult, it has consequences to live in delusions," says Baghadoust. "Whether it's for yourself or for others – there is need of reality to be able to function as a society and to move on. But a lot of people can choose to still believe in things that don't exist."

This is the secret about growing up – you never stop doing it. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage respects the discomfort and the miracle of that truth.

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is just one of many incredible games to qualify for our GamesRadar+ GOTY: The 25 Best Games of 2025.