Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Tape One)
- PS5 (Don’t Nod)

This narrative adventure from the makers of Life Is Strange is a dreamy, exploration of teenage friendship in the distant past of the mid-1990s. The story rotates around Swann, an introverted teenager experiencing her last summer in Michigan before her family moves to Canada.

After an encounter with bullies outside a video rental store, Swann befriends fellow 16-year-old misfits, Nora, Autumn and Kat. The gang find a shack to call their home and form a riot grrrl band in order to vent their angst. The game is split between these memories of the past and the present day.

The girls, now in their forties, reunite when supernatural phenomena from that summer comes back to haunt them. Like Life Is Strange, Bloom & Rage is a charming coming-of age character study. Your decisions and dialogue choices, especially during the teens’ fast-paced banter, impact the course of the story.

Swann uses her camcorder to capture the world: from cat videos at home to crucial moments in the story. You can even watch and edit this grainy video and audio. While the gameplay is minimal, it is a nostalgia-drenched portrait of the pre-digital era, accentuated with dreamy synth music, pop culture ephemera and characters we care about.

7/10

Preview
- Xiaomi 15

China’s dominance in the smartphone sphere – brands like Oppo, Honor, Vivo and OnePlus – is giving Western competitors another gut punch. Xiaomi 15 has arguably the best camera seen yet on a phone. The phone is bulky – 10mm thick with a 6.3in screen – but that’s largely to fit the giant quad Leica camera set up on the back.
Leica is one of the oldest and most prestigious lens makers in the world, so you know this yolk means business. There are three cameras – main, zoom and ultrawide – all 50MP in power. The front facing camera is 32MP.

There are two Leica pre-set modes, which pop colours and add contrasts. Xiaomi is also issuing a posh version of their phone called the Ultra, and with a Photography Kit Legend Edition: a case that transforms the Ultra into a camera complete with buttons and dials.
None of this comes cheap. Xiaomi 15 with a 12GB+512GB configuration is priced at €1,099 from Eir, Tesco Ireland, Vodafone Ireland, and Harvey Norman Ireland. There’s also an offer through these stores until the end of March: you can buy a Xiaomi 15 and get a free Xiaomi Robot Vacuum Cleaner X20 Pro (worth €559) to clean up after the party.

Preview
- Sony photography
Sony’s World Photography Awards are coming to a picture perfect climax. The annual event received over 419,000 submissions from photographers across 200 countries for 2025, which it’s narrowed down to 30 finalists.
Ten category winners will be announced in April. Bird-watchers, train spotters and sports enthusiasts will also be tickled at Sony’s latest lenses for their Alpha series cameras. The super-telephoto zoom G lens (FE 400-800mm F6.3-8 G OSS) and FE 16mm F1.8 G are professional affairs. with respective prices of €3,000 and €1,000.

Preview
- iPhone 16e

A spiritual successor to iPhone SE (Apple’s budget smart phone consigned to the scrap heap after its last hurrah in 2022), the 16e is the iPhone 16 except with bits missing.
So we get a single 48MP main camera lens but no ultrawide. Wireless charging, but no faculty for MagSafe (Apple’s proprietary gizmo). And if you were expecting Dynamic Island, Apple’s mini-viewer on the home screen that lets you check alerts and activities in progress, forget about it.

MagSafe is just not there. Despite its limitations – and the fact this is Apple’s cheapest smartphone on the market – it’s far from cheap, costing €729 for a 128GB entry level model. But there’s also plenty of other stuff here to shout about.

The camera has 4K video recording and optical image stabilisation. AI through Apple Intelligence can sort your life out (notification summaries, updated Siri and Chat GPT) and there are satellite features (Emergency SOS, Roadside Assistance, etc) for anyone who gets lost on the way home.