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

I still think about the time, several years ago now, when I mentioned off-handedly in the comments of an article I wrote about video game adaptations of Stephen King stories that my dream game in this vein would be a Don't Nod adaptation of It. I've especially been thinking about that since the announcement of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – a game developed and self-published by Don't Nod, due out in early 2025 – because I'll be damned if it doesn't clearly take quite a bit of inspiration from King's iconic 1986 doorstopper about an eldritch spider-clown from outer space, and the ragtag bunch of misfits destined to fight it.

Before I get accused of being too smug here I want to make it clear that obviously I don't for a second think anyone at Don't Nod has been combing the comments of gaming sites for inspiration. It's just that I get a kick out of having proof on hand that I'm good at sussing out marketable ideas for story-rich adventure games, a genre I know well and care a lot about. And, given it's been a few years now since the 2017-19 It remake duology hit cinemas, it feels like the right sort of time for the spiritual successors prompted by that iteration of the story to start making themselves known.

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.

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.

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.