Mixtape Review – Something’s Flattened My Cola

Mixtape lands in a strange place for me. In the late ’90s and 2000s, you could count on there being a video game adaptation of whatever blockbuster movie was released. Hell, even TV shows like Alias got a video game. None of these were ever particularly good, but they were everywhere. After being burned by the lack of quality for so many years, people just stopped buying them, and I’ve been wondering what the movie industry would do after the Telltale adaptations started to slip. However, I think we’ve found the next vessel of cinematic gaming in the Beethoven and Dinosaur-developed coming-of-age adventure, Mixtape. Still, outside of its John Hughes nostalgia trip, one question I kept coming back to was, “Why is this a game?”

Mixtape introduces us to three friends on their last night together before summer vacation, after high school begins, and they enter the next phase of life and their friendship. The leader is Stacey Rockford, whom players control for most of the experience. Then there’s Slater, the oldest friend, and lastly Cassandra, a good girl trying to do bad things against her strict parents’ will. It’s a nice trio, and the opening, which runs a bit too long in retrospect, sets the relaxing tone of gameplay that players should expect for the remainder of the story.

Mixtape’s Soundtrack Doesn’t Always Match Its Characters

Similar to the developer’s previous game, The Artful Escape, music plays a significant role in how players will attach themselves to this adventure. It’s the backbone of the entire experience, but I felt that, as many hits as there were on the tracklist, it didn’t fit what these characters were going through. I mean, come on, listening to Lush while skateboarding? They’re a good band, but for a game all about its soundtrack, I didn’t really enjoy it at all. Growing up in the music and skateboarding scene likely affects my opinion here, and maybe I even feel a bit like Stacey when talking about music, but I didn’t think most of the musical choices ever truly fit the mood of the scene outside of the opening autoscroller.

Following the opening is a series of additional autoscrollers where you’ll do the exact same thing, listening to a song you likely don’t know because pretentious ’90s new wave kids kept it secret from everyone. It’ll go on a little too long before you get a dose of story and do it all over again. Stacey is leaving to follow her dreams in the music business, Cassandra is moving to college, and Slater is staying in town. Over the next three to five hours, you’ll get some flashbacks of their friendship, how they met, how they typically hang out together, and a bit about their home life. However, strangely, Slater is kept out of a lot of the backstory, and while you learn a lot about Cassandra and Stacey, I can’t tell you much about Slater.

Mixtape’s Limited Gameplay Raises One Big Question

I understand the comparison to interactive walking simulators and visual novels regarding limited gameplay systems. However, Mixtape lets its visuals and nostalgia do most of the work to keep a player’s attention. The gameplay systems are kept to the absolute minimum, with some flashback scenes not incorporating any interactive element. That’s when I started on my quest to answer the question, “Why is this a game?” In a movie, I could easily look past Slater being just the burnout dude character, but in a video game, I want more. I want to know how he grew up, why his mom hates the cops, and why she offered them Margaritas. Was it a joke? Does she usually do that? I’m not sure. I’m playing a video game.

Games are meant to give you a deeper understanding of characters than a three-hour film can. A movie can take liberties with its backstories by throwing subtle hints into the conversation to give you an idea of their characterization, but it’s a bit different in gaming. If I had to put it in visual novel terms, the Slater route sucks. It gives us no insight into his future beyond the fact that, for the last four years, he’s been working on music no one has heard. Cool. But I guess that messy future is the same for each character taking their next big step, though at least I understood why they were doing it. Hell, I know more about Stacey’s older sister, who isn’t even in the game, than Slater.

The remainder of the narrative follows this group to their last party together before they split up. There’s some lingering tension, but it’s so surface-level that even the story doesn’t care to make it a big thing, and for the most part, you’re on autopilot to the credits. I saw someone say there’s no fail state, which is wrong. You can die in the game, but it’ll just rewind a few seconds. At one point, I became so uninterested in holding the controller that I gave it to my girlfriend, who doesn’t play games, ever, and she even became bored after the fourth autoscroller.

Mixtape Works Better as a Vibe Than a Game

Each time the game lets you actually play, it’s followed by an “Oh, that’s cool,” and a few minutes later, it’s still doing that one thing. OPUS: Prism Peak has some similar storytelling moments toward the end of the game, but it saves them as big reveals for the player, rewarding them with wonder and awe. Like a pre-teen having their first kiss, Mixtape blows its load in the opening, and it never picks up. The character writing is brilliant, the transitions are top-notch, and the characters are all cooler versions of your friends, but nothing about this experience told me that I should be playing it.

I would rather be watching a movie. I play video games because they give me control. For one, I can skip through dialogue that I finished before the voice actor, but here you’d better lock in. Further, interactable objects clearly show you which item you need to interact with next to advance the story, removing every sense of “challenge” this game could push on you to progress. You are rewarded for nothing, and that’s reflected in my overall energy toward this game.

Mixtape Review Conclusion

Mixtape is the game you’ll see played at your local art hop. It’ll be put on at your alt indie friend’s wine party for the most pretentious people in the world to pick up for a few minutes and then tell everyone after about this “crazy video game they played,” even though it was likely the first game they’ve ever played outside of Monopoly GO. Listen, I think the problem here for me is that I’m a lot like Stacey. Growing up, I used to gatekeep the music I listened to, so I understand these characters. I enjoyed the experience overall, but I gotta ask again: “Why is this a game?”

Similar to a mixtape you received from your first crush, Mixtape is a game best played through once, where you’ll eventually forget the tracklist and never listen to it again. It’s equivalent to every movie post-Superbad that wanted so badly to carry the torch of that adolescent period but ended up being a brief distraction. It’s a game created by great storytellers, animators, and voice actors, but its lack of gameplay elements and its unwillingness to break free of its John Hughes chains make me question, once again, “Why is this a game?” Maybe next time you have artsy indie friends over, instead of putting on that uninspired Spotify Daily playlist that causes your friends to argue the greatness of Mitski over Phoebe Bridgers, put Mixtape on and reap the rewards of now giving the most pretentious people in the world credibility to say, “Oh, and I’m also a gamer.”