Lost Records explores the joys and dangers of our cultural obsession with nostalgia

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I finished Lost Records: Bloom and Rage several days ago, but I’m still thinking about it. Developed by Don’t Nod, the creator of the successful Life Is Strange series, it’s a narrative adventure about four girls in a town in Wyoming, who meet one summer, form a band, discover a strange supernatural force in the woods and then meet up 30 years later to dissect what exactly happened to them. It is about growing up, growing apart and processing trauma, seen through a nostalgic lens. We meet the lead characters as adults, and join them as they scour their shared past, revisiting old places – a shack in the woods, their teenage bedrooms, the local bar – and exhuming old feelings. Lost Records has an excellent feel for the mid-90s when the girls were 16: you can explore rooms and pick up artefacts such as game carts, diaries and mixtapes and, if you were around at the time, you absorb the nostalgia as keenly as the characters themselves.

While playing I was struck at what a vital role nostalgia plays in video game design. I don’t mean in the extrinsic sense of playing and remembering old video games, and I don’t mean games that call back to old titles. I mean nostalgia as a central theme and a motivational force for characters. So many role-playing adventures are about unlocking the past through narrative archeology. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn, Avowed, Journey, Outer Wilds and Heaven’s Vault are all games in which your primary aim is to discover what happened to some ancient civilisation and, through it, your character’s own legacy and identity. It’s nostalgia that infects the landscape of The Last of Us as much as the deadly fungus – Ellie’s love of old comics, songs and joke books; the repeated use of ruined museums, theatres and playgrounds as key locations – that Naughty Dog wanted to tap in to by repurposing our own nostalgia for lost childhood pleasures. I’m reading Agnes Arnold-Forster’s excellent book Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, which looks at the origins of the concept and how it was first considered a fatal disease of the mind, a sort of mortal home sickness. In Death Stranding, this idea is made physical in the shape of the Beached Things, the smoky tar-like spirits that haunt the game’s ruined landscapes.

Nostalgia is the perfect theme for video games, because we have the freedom to explore and discover in them. They immerse us in landscapes and provide countless objects for us to observe and interact with. They also allow us to collect our own mementoes – most major titles now have photo modes where we can capture specific scenes, composing and editing the footage to our specific emotional requirements. In Lost Records, you can record video footage on lead character Swann’s camcorder; you do this throughout the game and then there’s a lovely payoff, which reminded me a little of the unforgettable climax to Cinema Paradiso.

What is particularly absorbing about Lost Records, however – and it has been one of the game’s most controversial aspects – is that it deals in the inconsistencies of nostalgia as much as the comforts. It is unapologetically ambiguous, with its central mysteries remaining largely unresolved. There is no comfortable catharsis, no shock reveal – what the lead characters learn when they reunite is that memory is unreliable, perhaps even duplicitous. In this way, it reminded me a lot of independent genre cinema – We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Skinamarink, It Follows. It is elusive and non-compliant.

We often think about games as power fantasies, but they are equally fantasies of reconstruction and remembrance. Games make us yearn for worlds that were never there. Perhaps one day, some sort of brain-computer interface will allow role-playing adventures to be set in our own memories, our own nostalgic kingdoms.

It sounds idyllic, but what video games have been trying to warn us is that our brains are unreliable narrators. Nostalgia is a door, but it’s also a trap.

What to play

If you were playing PC games in the mid-1990s, the chances are you were a fan of the real-time strategy genre. Dune II, Command & Conquer, Total Annihilation … how the hours flew by as we harvested resources, built war machines and set out to destroy the other side’s bases. Tempest Rising is a shameless paean to that era, set on an alternate 1990s Earth ruined by nuclear war and now housing two battling factions. The core loop of exploring, gathering, building and fighting is tight and compulsive, and the detailed visuals lend a modern sheen. Now let’s have a new Advance Wars title for the Nintendo Switch 2.

Available on: PC
Playtime: 20+ hours

What to read

I love that Polygon has written a guide on how to take physical notes of the hit puzzle game Blue Prince. As someone who spent his childhood making maps of Commodore 64 adventures, I approve of this most tactile way to navigate games. Last year, I used multiple sheets of graph paper (complete with little flaps for hidden areas) to map Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and it was so fun to be back.
The games industry can breathe a sigh of relief – it turns out Assassin’s Creed Shadows has performed well, despite manufactured outrage over its use of a black samurai in the leading role. Gamesindustry.biz has a good opinion piece on the subject.
Amid endless layoffs and studio closures, here’s a piece from Eurogamer about how institutional memory helped make Indiana Jones and the Great Circle such an assured and entertaining game. It turns out that experienced teams who have worked together for years make good games together. Who’d have thought?

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Question Block

The Sims 4 Cottage Living expansion pack

This week’s question comes from Andrew Wilcox, head judge and founder of the Cuprinol shed of the year competition, who asked via Bluesky:

“Why are there lots of sheds in games but no games about shed-building?”

Considering how big the cosy games market is, you’d think some clever indie studio would have attempted a shed sim by now. Imagine pottering about in your own virtual wooden den, perhaps doing a spot of carpentry or sorting seeds to plant. You can build sheds in The Sims 4: Cottage Living and Farming Simulator, but these tend to have very specific utilitarian uses, such as grain storage. Anyway, I put the question to game designer and keen shed botherer, Will Luton, who has worked at Sega and Rovio and now runs the consultancy Department of Play. He said:

“There are two problems to consider here: what is the main action (AKA the core loop), and what are the ways you move through the game (AKA the progression vectors)?

“There are multiple ways you could address these. Is the main game more about designing the shed? Or are you making it to a specific design? This defines if it’s more open-ended and creative (like Townscaper) or more systematic (like Car Mechanic Simulator). This decision also likely defines the type of interaction: isometric drag and drop v first-person traversal.

“Once you’ve made one shed, why do you want to make more? There must be some kind of ‘unfolding’ where new mechanics or possibilities unlock. So, for example, when you complete your first shed, you unlock a nail gun, which means you can assemble much quicker and more sturdily. Maybe now you can make sheds over 10sqm. Or perhaps you install electricity, which unlocks lighting and power tools. Maybe you have a shed yourself that you can constantly upgrade and add new tools to, which allows you to then make bigger and better sheds for clients.

“So to answer the question: there is no reason why someone hasn’t made this game. Indeed, if the reader happens to have £500k, I’d help them to bring it to market.”

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