Mixtape Review

Mixtape knows you were once a teenager, and it's never going to stop reminding you of that.

Clearly inspired by a long line of American films, including Dazed and Confused and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, it's largely a hang-out movie masquerading as a video game. That's not necessarily a bad thing, if those old coming-of-age films were your jam.

Presumably set sometime in the 1990s, the game follows the story of Stacey Rockford, an audiophile who lives in the northern California town of Blue Moon Lagoon and aspires to become a music supervisor in New York. Annoyingly snarky and pretentious, as teenagers often are, Stacey has already canceled her road trip plans with her closest friends, Van Slater and Cassandra Morino, and intends to fly to New York the next morning to pursue her big break in the music industry. She spends her last day with her best pals, reminiscing about the past and trying to find alcohol for that one big final party later that night.

Sound familiar?

Stacey always knows the perfect song for every situation, frequently breaking the fourth wall to educate us about it. Yet the rift forming between her and her friends leaves all of them grappling with more difficult emotions and memories, ones harder to fit with a song.

The game is a visual smorgasbord, ecstatically colorful and well-framed, with characters moving like stop motion figurines through stylish, dreamy vignettes -- not completely unlike the structure of Annapurna's What Remains of Edith Finch. The designers are in complete command of the sights and sounds of this world from start to finish.

But the writing and characterizations leave a bit to be desired. The game admirably tries to flesh out its young characters' backstories, but you don't get much of a sense of evolution as the narrative progresses. Cassandra experiences the most character development of anyone, but it's limited to the fairly cliche "good girl goes bad" trope, as she embraces her inner punk and rebels against her prudish family and cop father.

With a name like Mixtape, you know that music will be a huge part of it. And indeed the soundtrack is full of indie rock bangers. Yet, while highly intentional, the soundtrack sometimes cheapens the experience. The game leans so much on music to "make the moment", as one character remarks, that it can feel like a musical montage in search of a better story at times. Sometimes less is more, and sometimes an emotion digs deeper without a song telegraphing it.

The gameplay is all very basic, but some of the more involved skateboarding sequences are exciting and expertly choreographed. It's rather a bit like a series of integrated mini-games. All are mechanistically simple, but some are more conceptually interesting than others. Pretending to be a kaiju, for example, is more interesting than sweeping away leaves, even if both are pretty mindless. Magical realism abounds in many of these gameplay sequences, adding a fun fantastical flavor, even if you end up flying through the air one time too many.

The game only lasts a few hours. By the end, your enjoyment of it might depend on how much you relate to the American 90s suburban punk kid experience. Its themes of figuring yourself out (or not quite) and moving on with your life could resonate even more broadly as universally human.

I just wish the game, for all its magnificent aesthetic glory, took a less well-trodden path with its narrative, and was more of, well, a game.

Image: Annapurna Interactive