Hello, readers! I’m Luc Baghadoust, Executive Producer of Don’t Nod Montréal’s newly announced narrative adventure game, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. I’m here to talk a bit about the game, our studio, and the teams involved in bringing this new story to life. We are thrilled to finally reveal at tonight’s The Game Awards what we’ve been working on and are so proud of: a new game and a new series!
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage began after Michel Koch (Creative Director) and I worked on Life is Strange 1 and 2, when we got the opportunity to kickstart a new adventure for Don’t Nod: forming a new studio in Montréal. Expanding overseas had been a discussion for a while and with strong support from Don’t Nod Paris, we made the leap. Michel and I both already loved North America, and the industry is vibrant here, with so many exciting studios and talents.
A global pandemic was not something that we anticipated, obviously, and it was a challenge to set everything up. Luckily, Don’t Nod adopted a remote work policy company-wide, which enabled us to collaborate remotely. Creating a new team was a fascinating experience. Along with Don’t Nod Montréal’s Managing Director, Frédérique Fourny-Jennings, we are shaping the studio’s vision and its projects. We were lucky to be able to bring Don’t Nod’s uniqueness and values to the Montréal scene.
We brought with us key people who had been working on previous Life is Strange games such as Baptiste Moisan, our Lead Designer, and Juliette Devillers, our Lead Character Artist, amongst others. We’ve also been able to attract fantastic talent to the Montréal Studio, a lot of whom had been impacted by those games and wanted to help us tell our new story. So a big thank you to the team in Montréal and each new talent that has joined us and helped make all the pieces click together.
Jean-Luc Cano, who wrote the scripts for Life is Strange 1 and 2, and his team of amazing writers collaborated closely with Michel in developing the story and characters of Reunion. We firmly believe that the best characters deliver the best stories, and we think you’ll all love Swann, Nora, Autumn, and Kat: four high school friends that form bonds over the course of a once-in-a-lifetime summer. Fate sees them reunite 27 years later after promising to never speak again. It’s a reflective tale with friendship, emotion, mystery, and magical surrealism.
Now about Lost Records! Bloom & Rage is the first game in the Lost Records universe. We obviously wanted to continue creating narrative adventure games with a strong focus on characters that resonate with people. Bloom & Rage shares a lot of DNA with our previous games, but also innovates in some areas too. Making a universe and having the stories within it interconnect with each other is something we’ve been dreaming of. The possibilities are endless and the stories we can tell within this universe are huge. Don’t Nod Montréal is hard at work making sure we bring these ideas and games to life!
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is scheduled for release in late 2024 but if you want to keep up with news and updates, follow Lost Records on X, Instagram, and TikTok. There’s definitely more to come that we can’t wait to show you.
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