Clementine's Medicine Cabinet

Assorted repository for short essays about art (she/her)

[amouseabouttown]

Mixtape Review: What's in a game? (Spoilers!)

Mixtape is a 2026 story driven game developed by AA studio Beethoven and Dinosaur. The game follows teenager Stacey Rockford as she explores her hometown in northern California for the last time, before she has to leave the town (and all her friends) to embark on a new life as a music supervisor in New York City. Much has been said about this game, from its glowing representation on numerous game journalist pages, to the less than popular reception it has received on social media. Through all this acclaim and vitriol, it seems Mixtape has more become a game people put things onto than something in itself. And maybe that is because there is nothing there at all. Mixtape is not the first narrative-focused, gameplay-shy video game ever made. The Telltale games studio pioneered it as a genre, and even after they died the appetite for games like them have not diminished, with the warm reception of last year's Dispatch being notable. However, this game differs from other choices matter games by having a completely fixed narrative. Instead, player interactivity is limited to small vignettes, such as skipping stones across a pond or painting a door on a shack. In this way Mixtape reminded me more of something like What Remains of Edith Finch or Gone Home. Games which are traditionally known as "walking simulators". To have a game that is so stripped back to basics, to stave it off from becoming ridiculously boring, one must have a unique narrative or visual style - unfortunately, Mixtape has neither, and suffers greatly as a result. Mixtape is by no means an ugly game, but does not do anything unique with its artstyle. Indeed, both within it's graphics and within its form, Mixtape owes a great deal to the Life is Strange franchise, specifically the first game. Both feature a pastel, dreamlike artstyle set in the Pacific Northwest at a time of adolescent delinquency, and both feature slightly-too-cringey dialogue, annoying characters, and long pauses for musical backings. In this way, it would be easy to expect Life is Strange to falter in the same way Mixtape does, without the strength of narrative to back up the lacklustre interactivity. However Life is Strange succeeds at one key aspect where Mixtape falters - cohesive narrative structure, direction, and aim. Mixtape's narrative only takes place over the course of a single day, so in order to pad the already slim runtime, Around every 5-10 minutes the game cuts to a flashback where we see a previous scene of our three friends interacting. While this helps to flesh out the relationships between the three leads, it disrupts the main narrative of the story in the present greatly, especially when each of the flashbacks are so disconnected to each other. Many times I finished a flashback coming back to the present, and completely forgot what I was doing or why I was doing it, because the game stole my attention away for a short minigame. This constant cutting also means the game's story advances at a glacial pace. The runtime of the whole game is maybe 3 1/2 hours, but true conflict and narrative progression does not meaningfully occur until over halfway through, when friend of Rockford Cassandra's cop dad forbids her from hanging out on their final day. By this point I had spent so long doing basically nothing with unengaging and annoying characters I had no interest in the actual plot, or the pitfalls that they engaged with, however small they are. About that, let's talk about those characters, and crucially how the game treats them. Despite holding a strong aesthetic of "eff the cops", Mixtape seems very afraid to show its leads in any real danger, or doing anything particularly wrong. The major point of conflict in the game is essentially resolved with a short two minute conversation where our epic punk protagonists.... use their family ties within the police service to get off scott-free from a legitimate crime.

Reinforcing this inability to face consequences is Rockford's most notable section of gameplay, where she has to race the cops to stop Cassandra from facing a public drinking charge. Whether you choose to dodge the obstacles in Rockford's path or not, she makes it to Cassandra just in time along with several personal flourishes, such as photobombing a picture with classic middle-fingers-up or kicking a perfect field goal. Rockford feels like the embodiment of a contradictory concept of a "perfect punk" - she has all the vibes of breaking the rules, even though the rules of the world seem to bend around her. It almost seems like this may have been intentional. She constantly breaks the fourth wall and has the insane base character motivation of stalking a music producer to get a job, a goal that the other protagonists rarely push back on. However I can't imagine why this would be intentional as it breaks the entire thesis of the game.

Playing Mixtape feels like nothing. Controlling it involves so little effort and engaging in the story seems actively detrimental to enjoyment. Mixtape seems only able to be enjoyed through purely that - its admittedly excellently picked collection of punk, new wave and shoegaze songs with only a few misses over its 24-track collection. Mixtape thus seems to shirk its video game skin to appeal to a very base level of entertainment. It has pretty sounds, and pretty colours, and very little more. No wonder people are up in arms over its undeserving 10s and 5 star ratings. It seems to spit in the face of all it claims to be. Both punk, and game. "Body and soul, I'm a freak, I'm a freak."

[amouseabouttown]

Dog Days Dog Daze review: Verisimilitude (Spoilers!)

Dog Days Dog Daze (or DDDD) is a 2026 Visual Novel written by Snek RK for the Daydrinking Game Jam. Fundamentally, it is about exploring broken girls who all love substances, and how they deal with the collapsing world around them. The game focuses on a variety of colourful characters, all with gorgeousfacecards in different styles to represent their personalities. The main characters are Roxy: an almost-30 trans woman who drinks way too much beer, vomits a lot, and currently houses two of the other main characters. Those being Katherine: Roxy's trans sister and general whore, and Vale: Roxy's current girlfriend, a trans woman who's just beginning to find herself after escaping an abusive male household. The other two main characters are Mia and Lee, an unlikely couple scrounged out of Mia who is a (slowly) recovering heroin addict with plenty of skeletons in her closet, and Lee, a more stable girl who took her in to live together, and helps as community outreach in protests and soup kitchens. Side characters include: Odessa, a spunky girl who's always ready for a fight, Faye, Lee's sister and only cis woman in the game, stuck between her hetrosexual marriage and the exciting world of the trans community (yes she's a chaser), and Fabiane, Mia's ex and homeless girl who's largely responsible for the mess Mia is in.

DDDD has a very large amount of characters compared to a traditional trans toxic yuri story, and it all being set within a large modern city truly established the sense of community it is working towards. These women are all deeply wronged, and the game wants you to know this, reinforcing that they'll probably never get better. But they do have each other, and when they're not directly interacting in person you can occasionally see them texting in a pop-up box on the right side of the screen. Community is maybe the most important theme of the game, shortly behind vomit.

The storytelling is in a nonlinear format - rare for a visual novel. Chapters are split into 3 to 4 vignettes which can be experienced in any order. Each one contains certain characters in short moments, whether that be Mia and Lee meeting each other for the first time at a soup kitchen, or the whole gang meeting up and getting drunk and high at a punk concert, the first or second time. This nonlinearity, with player choice over which story gets told first, and stories separated my many years playing back to back, works twofold. It helps to flesh out the characters over the course of the story, not frontending the exposition, along with representing the floaty and disconnected lens many of the inebriated girls experience life through.

Perhaps my favourite arc of the game is the relationship between Roxy and Vale. Vale is a supremely lost girl, only recently becoming integrated into the community through Roxy, with her only choosing Vale out of pity on a whim one day, wanting to enrapture another lost girl into her fold. Vale has to return to her home several times across the game however, to “keep up appearances”, and each visit goes worse than the last. Around 2/3rds of the way through, Vale attempts suicide after a chance encounter with her brother at a hardware store while she was wearing a leash. Roxy has to chase her down and rescue her at the last second. This is not the only time the game covers death, and not even the most graphic (Odessa's spontaneous murder of Fabiane in the final chapter comes to mind) but it stuck with me how real it felt. It is given no particular fanfare, and the writing is excellent in how subtle it is. It has all the stress needed to make it land, but it still feels.... unexceptional. Vale is lost and broken and the society she lives in doesn't deserve her. She doesn't belong in it, and she attempts to exit. Only Roxy, another misfit, stands in her way. These girls don't get to have peace, not in this world. However they do get catharsis, with Vale helping Katherine and Roxy destroy her brother's car. Of course, this is done through alocohol enabled vomiting, all with Roxy climaxing as she sticks her fingers down her throat. Like I said, broken girls. Beautiful girls.

I would argue that DDDD is elevated from reality to the point of caricature if these girls didn't feel so real. Yes their substance abuse feels exaggerated, their sexual deviancy feels forced sometimes, but any trans woman who at the very least has observed the community for a long enough amount of time has found girls exactly like this. It is a game that approaches reality like a comet, streaking across the sky and blazing a beautiful bile-coloured trail. You keep playing and you keep repeating in your head “These poor souls” but they keep existing. And why do they? How do they? because through the haze, they have each other. They protect each other. They make each other worse, but they keep each other alive. DDDD is about the best summer you could ask for. DDDD is about the worst life can throw at you. No wonder girls are like puppies - everyone need their pack to survive. And a six-pack of beer.

“I want this all to have mattered.”