Zarf Updates

The problem with Bloom and Rage is that I never played Life is Strange. Or I played maybe one chapter of the first LiS, didn't get hooked, and put it aside.

B&R isn't exactly a response to LiS. It's the devs of the first two LiS games stepping off that franchise to create an original title. Which means it's intentionally trying to attract an audience who knows what they want, and I don't know what that is. Of course they also want new players -- they want me to enjoy it from a standing start -- and I did. It's a great game. But I'm a bit disoriented trying to write about B&R. I don't know how it fits in. Or what it fits into.

Then again, B&R is about four teenagers who don't fit in, and then they find a hole in the universe. So maybe disorientation in the right frame of mind.

It took me a while to get into the characters. As a middle-aged guy, my response to being in a teenage girl's bedroom is "Eww, creeper mode." And I wasn't a teen in the 90s, or a girl, or rural. And I never had that "perfect summer" bonding experience.

I got on board though. These kids are engaging disasters. Autumn is passionate and unsure. Kat is reticent and vicious. Nora is punk and not as shocking as she thinks. Swann is hesitant and awkward and... the protagonist, so whatever direction you steer. Let's go with "impulsive". They're all stuck in backwoods Michigan and going out of their minds. They start a terrible punk band.

(What was I doing in the summer of 1995? Writing A Change in the Weather, I guess. Which was... a sentimental reflection on being an isolated teenager, and then you fall out of the world, plus maybe supernatural stuff, and it's thematically wrapped around the music I was listening to at the time... Oh wait goddammit.)

(80s folk, rather than 90s fempunk. But it's a way in.)

On top of that, the story is a split timeline: the kids meeting in 1995 and their adult selves reconnecting in 2022. For me, the adult viewpoint grounded the teen experience in my life. I hope some young people are playing who find that the teen viewpoint grounds the strange-and-distant grownups in theirs!

I am going to skip over the plot. It's strong, a rat-king knot of raw-burn emotion and cosmic horror/wonder -- but a recap won't get us anywhere. I want to think about how I played the game.

B&R is a narrative game. It's got the "she will remember this" bat-signal. You are openly invited to decide Swann's goals and choose the relationships she has with the other three girls.

Except -- messy teens. Swann is bad at relationships! She's...

I'm going to make a Disco Elysium comparison, sorry, hang tight. The point of Disco is that Harry is a loser. He has effed everything up. You have effed everything up. That means you have permission to fail some more. If you blow a skill check, or lots of them, repeatedly -- that's Harry's story. That's who he is.

In Bloom and Rage, you are going to say something hurtful and upset your friends. Because you're sixteen and you have no idea how to handle it and neither do they. That is okay. That is Swann's story. (Your adult selves have more chill but they're not great about it either. I relate.)

The problem is, the game doesn't exactly play that way. It tracks plenty of possible story branches and variations. Lots. But the main thing it tracks is a relationship score with each of the other three girls. The "she will remember that" marker explicitly signals whether the heart-score went up or down. At the end of the game, you get a chart for each relationship, graded from "okay" to "friend" to "BFF" to "crush".

In some sense, therefore, the canonical Swann is the girl who is always trying to make nice; she says the friend-iest thing in every situation. Which, sure, that is a possible Swann. Surely there are others? Can she be an opinionated hardass for a minute? If you stray from the sweet-and-supportive path, it feels like the game punishes you, or at least scolds you.

For some scenes, this makes sense. You want to get Kat's stuck-up older sister on your side. That's realpolitik. But the four protagonists are the core of the story. I wanted messy spectrums of resolution, not linear scales.

(I just flashed on Chris Crawford's original Balance of Power (1985) -- which apologized for jamming the world's international relations into a simplistic US-vs-USSR scale. Crawford later updated the game with a "multipolar" mode. I don't know how well it played. Point is, this design tussle has history.)

The other problem is the same one I have in every branching-relationship game, which is that dialogue menus suck for conveying intent. There's a moment (vague spoiler) where a plan has gone pear-shaped and you have to choose between saying "I'm responsible" and "This was all Kat's idea". I said it was Kat's idea -- which it was. Obviously this had consequences.

But the game does not model the difference between "I ducked the blame" and "I gave Kat the credit." Because, come on, it was an awesome plan. (If you're sixteen.) Everybody should know what Kat pulled off! Respect her power!

In a later scene, Kat is hurt and upset that I hung her out to dry. That makes total sense. I don't think I had an option to apologize. I definitely didn't have an option to explain what I was thinking. "I admire you too much to lie about you..." Maybe she wouldn't have bought it, but the idea never came up. That's not what the writers put on that binary choice.

Pretty sure that's why I never got to kiss Kat. Dammit. Speaking of linear relationship scales.

So I wound up with a relatively low-connection, lonely ending. And I am torn about it. On the one hand, it is my ending. And it made a great story. B&R isn't all dating sim, remember; it's in the Stranger-Things orbit of supernatural something going on, and that got wild at the end, and I am very satisfied with the choices I made.

And yet again, it was not "the good ending". I want to go back and max out some of those relationship meters. I want to do better by my friends. I want that kiss.

Relationship meters, sigh, what a silly way to play. But is it even possible to get past "crush" into "first love" without multiple runs and maybe a walkthrough?

Disco Elysium is about failing, but you get multiple tries at most tasks. The game loop is "raise your stats, try again". (Save-scum if you want; judge yourself.) B&R tries to do the messy-failure thing with one-shot consequences -- no do-overs. It's agonizing. Deliberately, to be sure.

It was Life is Strange which had the diegetic do-overs, right? I wonder how much the designers of B&R iterated on alternatives. Swann has a camcorder, which is thematically similar but not the same game at all. (Except one scene, which plays interestingly. But even then you have limited retries.)

But I think I will leave it there. Bloom and Rage is a tribute to being sixteen. It's achingly intense and also corny as heck. The band sucks. Don't laugh. I mean, yes, laugh -- remember how ridiculous things got? But also remember how important things were, and are.

Tangential footnotes that I couldn't fit in:

Is Bloom and Rage supernatural horror? No. Magic, if it is magic, is not the source of antagonism. (The story's bad guy is a mundane jackass.) Something is new and incomprehensible and terrifying about the world -- hey, that's puberty for you. The question is not how you will defeat the supernatural, but how you will build it into your lives.

Every time I play one of these growing-up games, I think about Gone Home. Which was set in the same year! Backwoods Oregon rather than the U.P., but B&R is certainly reaching back to Gone Home as a touchstone. And, you know... B&R mentions the idea of a road trip to Seattle. The story doesn't go there but certain elements of my ending... one can absolutely imagine the Sam and Lonnie and [spoiler] adventure.

(Quick AO3 check: nope, nobody's written it. I'll keep the idea in mind.)

(Open Roads is set in 2003, so adult Tess would be on the 2022 meetup end...)

Do I need to play Life is Strange after all? It's gotten to be a big series. Haven't decided.

Speaking of: Bloom and Rage is a great title (and a great band name), but I kinda wish the designers had gone the anagram route. Rages If Silent. Glean Its Fires. Salient Griefs. Regains Itself. They all work, seriously, it's amazing.