We all know by now that games can be more than simple reflexive entertainment. They can exercise our brains through clever puzzles, get our blood pumping through brutal brawls or fast races. Games can make us laugh and cry. They can be true forms of interactive art. This is how Annapurna’s newest game, Mixtape, has been touted: a brilliant masterpiece of art in its highest form. Now after playing it for myself I have to ask, what the hell am I missing? 

Meet Stacy, Slater, and Cass, who get drunk… a lot.

Now to be clear, I was extremely excited to play Mixtape. In fact, it was one of my most anticipated titles of this year. I love games that use the medium for artistic expression, such as GRIS, Limbo, Journey, Disco Elysium, Hellblade, Happy Game, and This War of Mine. I even loved The Artful Escape, which was made by the same developers as Mixtape, Beethoven & Dinosaur. Unlike The Artful Escape, however, I didn’t find the same level of enjoyment or whimsy in Mixtape. 

In Mixtape you play as Stacy Rockford, a teenager, and a diehard music enthusiast who is about to move across the country now that high school is coming to an end. On their last night together, she as well as her friends Slater and Cass, set out to have one last night of adventure together before they part ways. It’s a coming of age story about growing up, and learning to let go while holding on to only the important things. On the surface it sounds great; poignant and highly relatable to so many of us. 

I didn’t know a single person who owned a Mini Master except for one rich family. These were not common in the 90s, despite what the game wants you to think.

However, I have several issues with the game that made the experience fall flat. The first being the characters themselves. I know we can all be obnoxious as teenagers, but I found the main characters to be particularly insufferable, especially our protagonist, Stacy, or Rocky as her friends call her. I get that she’s an uber music lover, but she seems to have little regard for anyone that doesn’t agree with her music choices, to a contentious degree. She also has a lot of meta moments speaking to the camera a la Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but unlike that film, she’s not charming and charismatic, she just comes off as unbearable with a superiority complex. She’s not cute, she’s just grating.

Her female friend, Cass is alright, coming from an overbearing family and trying to make her claim to her own identity aside from their expectations. My main issue with her isn’t until the end, when she has a standoff against an important figure in her life that is so wildly unbelievable that I actually laughed out loud. I get that this is supposed to have the same impact as any number of the John Hughes films Beethoven & Dinosaur were clearly inspired by and referenced in Mixtape, but it it comes off as ludicrous instead.

Don’t worry, even if you crash into a car, you’ll just rewind a few seconds so you can try again with no consequences or remarks.

Then there’s Slater, the loveable, dimwitted stoner… who never actually smokes anything, despite frequently talking about joints. He comes across as every stereotypical stoner from the 80s and 90s you’ve ever seen, think Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Because he’s such a caricature he comes off as one dimensional, and his 90s “slang” is largely unbelievable, sounding way more modern than what we actually used to say in the 90s. In fact, I found myself continuously wondering if the developers had actually grown up in the 90s at all.

Then there’s the gameplay itself, of which, there isn’t much. This is almost exclusively a walking simulator, which is fine if the goal is provide more an experience instead of a game. I get that. If that’s the case though, maybe don’t have your characters walk at a glacial pace with no option for running or even walking slightly faster. So when the experience is tedious, you need something to break it up, and to be fair, Mixtape does have something for this: minigames.

Yes, one of the first minigames involves an awkward French kiss. 

There are a few mingames in here, but they’re so shallow and one note that they feel almost like an afterthought. It doesn’t help that the controls during these minigames are wonky and unreliable, so playing them feels more like a chore to get through instead of being a fun diversion from the long stretches of cutscenes. There’s also no penalty for messing up or crashing in any of them, so there are no stakes to make them more interesting.

There’s also an odd design choice where several of the “minigames” involve the characters floating around the town or over the fields they hang out in. I get that there’s supposed to be a feeling of daydreaming during these scenes, but it just feels strange and at odds with the other sections of the game. This could have worked much better if the friends had been smoking some of that precious weed Slater keeps asking about, but this isn’t the case with any of these sections. It feels like they’re there simply to pad the runtime, which is already quite short, taking about three to four hours to beat the game.

Why are they floating? I don’t really know.

Aside from Mixtape‘s premise that I was so initially hyped for, another aspect that grabbed my attention was its art design. Mixtape features a sort of stop motion animation art style that’s achieved through lowering the framerate of the characters so they move in jerky, stilted movements. This works a fair amount of the time, but other times the framerate runs a bit too smoothly and it comes across as nothing more that a mediocre looking game. This might be the first instance i can think of where a decent framerate actually hinders the look of a game.

Now one thing I will give credit to is the sound design. The voice acting can be hit and miss (I’ve already talked about Slater’s stereotypical stoner voice), but it’s mostly well done throughout. The soundtrack is excellent and comprised of licensed songs, but it doesn’t always seem like things teenagers would be listening to in the 1990s. With songs from bands like DEVO, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Iggy Pop, Smashing Pumpkins, and The Cure, there’s a lot to enjoy listening to while playing, but I felt that about half of the songs either weren’t things teens from the 90s were listening to, or they were very niche choices for the group of kids to be listening to who aren’t necessarily as big of music snobs as the protagonist.

The soundtrack is stacked, despite it not being believable that a group of kids would listen to these songs in the 90s.

This brings me to what I feel is my biggest gripe with Mixtape: it doesn’t come across as a genuine experience of someone growing up in the 90s. As someone who was the age of these characters during this time period, I kept feeling like Mixtape was some sort of nostalgia bait experience created by people who didn’t actually grow up during the 90s. Instead, it feels like someone created a “game” based off of what they thought it was like growing up in 90s, based off of what they saw in films and TV shows. The music is all over the place, the film nods are all over the place, all ranging from the 1960s to 1990s, and even some slang that wasn’t popular until 2010s. If you’re going to try to manufacture a nostalgic experience, at least make sure it’s an accurate representation.

Hooray for manufactured nostalgia bait?

I am so bummed by my time with Mixtape. For a game I was so excited for, it didn’t deliver what I was expecting or hoping for at all. What I felt with Mixtape wasn’t blissful nostalgia brought about by a poignant narrative. What I felt was complete and utter bewilderment that such a pretentious, mediocre product is being absolutely glazed as brilliant perfection by nearly every other major outlet. There are no stakes, no dialogue choices, no secrets, no alternate endings. There’s nothing but a boring, hollow experience that had me questioning if the creators even knew what the 90s were like. So I ask again, am I missing something?

Mixtape is available now on PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X|S.

Reviewed on Xbox Series X.