Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is missing one critical QoL feature from Life is Strange

There’s nothing I love more than a game with a compelling storyline, providing a reason to replay, and Lost Records: Bloom & Rage offers a huge amount of replayab🎃ility. With countless branching dialogue options, multiple endings, and Collectible Memoirs to find, there’s a lot to go back for. 

However, Don’t Nod might have damaged the long-term success of Bloom & Rage, at least in my humble opinion, by failing to provide a crucial quality-of-life feature that was present in Life is Strange (the studio’s previous massive hit) — an option to skip dialogue when replaying scenes. 

To be clear, I’m not talking about having the option to skip over the entire story when playing through from start to finish. This is a story-based game, with most of the emphasis being on the narrative set up by discussion and interaction. I don’t even want the ability to skip over that, because going through the story is fun, and it’s easy𒐪 to get swept🌞 up in it. 

However, there are 25 scenes that, once you’ve completed them for the first time on a save file, can then be played again as many times as you like in any order. Going back int🎃o any scene in Collectible Mode is incredibly useful in gathering all of the Collectible Memoires you might have missed, or witnesﷺsing alternative dialogue tracks without affecting the outcome of your main save. 

In Life is Strange, this Collectible Mode allowed you to skip over the dialogue moments that you’d already seen, and it was bliss. In Bloom & Rage, you have no choice but to watch the same scene on replay until you’ve memorized all the voice lines and could probably draw it 🐽fro❀m memory. 

As someone who writes guides, 🌊perhaps this is something I’ve simply noticed more than most would. However, just this morning I watched the same scene on repeat for three hours to gather up the different responses from each girl to get a romancing guide together. 

I’m fairly confident I could๊ now comfortably voice all four characters in that scene at this point, and I can confidently say that it was much less enjoyable the sixth time I was forced to listen to Kat get🏅 excited over Bikini Kill. 

If you’re jumping back into a scene to collect a single four-second Collectible Memoir, is there really a need to sit through a 10-minute dialogue that you’ve already seen? Not having the option to skip over these long conversations in Collectibl💫e Mode is a quick way to put even the most ardent of completionists off the idea. 

With Tape 2 still yet to release on April 15, I’m hopeful that perhaps this feature will be added later, although I still don’t understand why it wasn’t added when Don’t Nod included it as a basic feature in Life is Strange. It see🥃ms like a strange thing to overlook. In tꦗhe meantime, my inner completionist is just going to have to get used to seeing achievements left unclaimed.