Technically, Bloom & Rage is episodic, although it comes in only two parts, with the second one due for release on April 15 as a free download if you buy part one (or Tape 1, as the game has it).
It was nowhere near as successful though and so Don’t Nod parted ways with publisher Square Enix and all the other games have been made by American studio Deck Nine – which was going fine until last year’s hugely disappointing Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, which brought back Max but, inexplicably, not Chloe.
That means we don’t know how the story is going to end, and it is possible that it could take an unexpected swerve at the halfway point, but it starts off with four former friends – Nora, Kat, Autumn, and Swann – meeting up again for the first time in 27 years, in the rural US town they used to call home.
Nora is the older girl who wants to be famous, Nora is the sensible one, and Kat is the one most into the supernatural aspects of the story – although her backstory and voice-acting make her the most compelling of the group.
The game is set in both 1995 and 2022 but almost everything in the present-ish day (which, unlike the 90s is viewed from a first person view) is deadly dull, with the four estranged friends mostly just sitting around talking – except never about the things you want them to.
