Lost Records: Bloom & Rage leads a 2025 double-A line-up that’s already looking incredibly promising

Spring 2025 is shaping up to be a great season for fans of oddball indie-ish releases.

Kat, Autumn, Nora, and Swann walk through eerily blue-lit woodlands at night, illuminated by flashlights. - 1

Image credit:Don’t Nod

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage follows a quartet of friends across two timelines: their tight-knit teen outcast years in the 1990s, and their present-day reunion in early middle-age after nearly three decades apart. Actually, the time skip is exactly 27 years, which is either a direct reference to It or an oddly specific coincidence.

Keeping up the similarities, the four friends parted ways after their relatable Xennial coming-of-age drama was abruptly intruded upon by the discovery of something very weird in the woods near their hometown. What exactly that weird thing is has been quite deliberately obscured in the trailers and demos we’ve seen so far, but it’s discovered at the bottom of a crater and glows with an otherworldly purple light. So perhaps you can begin to draw your own conclusions.

It’s hard to say much more about Lost Records for the time being, and I think that’s very much the point of a drip marketing effort that’s been heavy on the mysterious pronouncements and light on anything that could actually give the game away. Despite my earlier prescience about the set-up, the only thing I really know to expect is the unexpected when the game launches in two parts across February and March.

Nora and Kat stare intently at something off-screen that is bathing their faces in purple pulsating light. - 3

There’s something in the woods… |Image credit:Don’t Nod

Lost Records may have been oddly laser-targeted to a very specific intersection of my interests, but it’s far from the only game on this scale that’s got me eyeing up the beginning of next year with some excitement. While there aren’t too many giant triple-A hype machines padding out the schedule yet, the first few months of 2025 are set to be a treasure trove of ever-so-slightly smaller releases that are nevertheless a bit too prominent to be fairly seated at the indie table.

Personally I’m thinking specifically of Split Fiction , the latest collaboration between Hazelight and EA Originals, which sees two authors – one writing science-fiction, the other fantasy – trapped in a skeezy publisher’s AI-generated rendition of their own imagined worlds. Fellow gamers who live with their Player 2 of choice will surely be as excited as I am for Hazelight’s latest reminder that couch co-op still exists, to say nothing of that rare on-the-nose approach to genre-blending that’s sure to show us some things we haven’t seen before.

Mio and Zoe meet baby dragons, with their facial expressions suggesting very different feelings on the matter. - 4

Split Fiction sees science-fiction and fantasy fans bury the hatchet to go up against the real enemy: automated plagiarism. |Image credit:Hazelight Studios / Electronic Arts

There’s also – to highlight just another handful of personal picks – Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in February, the hotly-anticipated sequel to everyone’s favourite RPG reminder that life as a medieval knight was a proper slog; wacky civic infrastructure management threequel Two Point Museum in March; and The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy , a turn-based tactics collaboration between the creators of Danganronpa and Zero Escape, expected in April. Just to give you some idea of both the scope of the games I’m talking about and the breadth of what’s on offer.

Some years see tentpole triple-A releases dominate the conversation, while others skew harder towards indies. But if 2025 takes a third option, and becomes the year in which everyone gets to enjoy as many cool double-As associated with their particular niches of nerdery as it looks like I’m about to, I don’t think we’ll have anything to complain about.