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 it's glowing representation on several 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 by no means the first narrative-focused, gameplay-shy video game ever made. The Telltale game 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 it's 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 a time 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 occurs 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 2 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 it's 24-track collection. Mixtape thus seems to shirk its video game skin to appeal to a very base level of entertainment. It is 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."
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