One thing you realise as you get older is that memories are plastic and that the stories you tell about your life change with every recollection, depending on who you are at the time. This is one of the themes – and indeed the mechanics – of Lost Records, a narrative adventure about four teenage girls who develop an intense friendship in rural Michigan during the summer of 1995. In the first instalment, they form a band, discover an old shack in the woods to use as a clubhouse, and encounter a supernatural force emanating from a deep hole they discover nearby. But as autumn draws in and the girls plan a climactic rock gig, tragic secrets are uncovered.
Cleverly, the story is told mostly in flashback, as the characters meet again, decades later, in their long-abandoned home town – they’re older, wiser and with new perspectives on what happened to them as teenagers. Lead character Swann, a keen photographer whose video camera provides a key game interface in the first episode, is living a solitary life, while Autumn is still filled with anxiety and Nora is now an influencer. Missing is Kat whose terminal cancer diagnosis obliterates their world at the close of part one.
While the first instalment focused on the excitement and hubris of the teenage characters, this is a much darker story concentrating on the adults as they pick apart their lives. Through dialogue trees and interactive memory segments you help Swann navigate the meeting, as well as moments from the past. There is less of the video camera this time. In the first part, there were multiple occasions where you had to film certain scenes, creating a nicely personal bank of footage which could be edited and reshot. There is also much less actual gameplay: an early scene where you have to pack a box and a later stealth sequence where you sneak into Kat’s bedroom are the only real moments of ludic challenge. I missed taking more of an active role.
What you get instead, are some incredibly poignant narrative scenes, as the girls battle with the reality of Kat’s diagnosis and the raw ambiguity of their feelings for each other. Two moments stand out especially: Swann and Nora meeting alone one afternoon, talking and exchanging gifts, every word, every gesture, communicating a mass of unspoken feelings. Then, Swann sneaking into Kat’s bedroom and helping her cut her hair before chemotherapy takes it. This is some of the most profound, sensitively structured and emotionally resonant writing about the teenage experience of love and loss I have ever encountered in a video game.
Tape Two ends on an ambiguous note, though I think this is utterly true to the experience of playing. The mysterious hole in the woods, which the characters call “the abyss”, can be interpreted as entirely symbolic, as can all the supernatural events in the game, and this is a brave, credible narrative decision. Sometimes, there are no answers, and sometimes the magic we perceived around us when we were young turns out to have been something else entirely – perhaps just friendship or imagination, or the yearning to be something in the world.
The effect is like Stranger Things directed by Kelly Reichardt – a realist fantasy in which silence and ambiguity come to the fore. Lost Records is ultimately a game about love, grief and self-recrimination, and the different intensities of those forces as we age. By the end you miss the optimism and verve of those girls in the woods, as though you were one of them – and quite possibly, in a lot of ways, you were.
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