The concept of Mixtape feels like it was made in a lab for me.
I was a suburban kid who had to leave some friends behind when I went to college. I found it hard to fit in at times in high school, and my favorite radio station to listen to was 89x in Detroit, which was an alt-rock station.
I feel like so much of the discussion of Mixtape has centered around whether people feel like they can fit into the shoes of the three lead characters in the game. If you can relate to the general vibe and attitudes, it’s a hit. If you can’t, then it’s not.
That has never made sense to me. One of my favorite parts about media, and video games in particular, is that they allow me to step into someone else’s shoes. Games give you time to really be immersed in a world in a way that movies or TV shows can’t. And you physically play as someone else, which immediately makes that character feel relatable or sympathetic in various ways. Many of my favorite games are ones that make me imagine a life and world completely different from my own.
But undeniably, there is power in being able to connect with an experience on a more personal level. I enjoyed plenty of games about fatherhood before I became a dad, but once I actually had my first child, there were many moments that hit much harder for me.
So it’s with a fair bit of surprise that I say I respect Mixtape in a lot of ways, and I still enjoyed my experience with it for the most part. But I consistently found myself not fully clicking with it, despite how much it seemed tailor-made for me.
The reason I respect Mixtape is that it constantly takes big swings. It freaking goes for it all the time. I find it to be a very bold video game. But the thing about taking big swings is that they are more likely to miss. And for every big hit that Mixtape has, there are a few rough whiffs as well.
Isn’t Life Essentially One Big Game of WarioWare If You Really Think About it?
Mixtape is about, you guessed it, a mixtape! You play as Stacey Rockford. The game takes place during the last night that Stacey will have with her two best friends (Van Slater and Cassandra Morino) for quite a while. Stacey is heading to New York to pursue her dreams of being a music supervisor. Meanwhile, Cassandra will be heading on a road trip with friends before college. Stacey was supposed to be on this road trip but bailed because of a somewhat vaguely described urgent reason that made her decide she needs to be in New York sooner. This has caused much friction in the friend group, as Stacey herself says.
Stacey has crafted an itinerary of sorts for the day, and with that, she has also put together a mixtape of songs to set the mood for each event. This brilliantly allows for the game’s soundtrack to essentially be a central character in the game. As each song plays, Stacey actually looks at the camera and introduces it, and sometimes explains why a particular song was chosen for a particular moment. Once again, much like the general setting of the game, this is a smart concept that felt like it was destined to be an easy win for me.
And sometimes, it really does succeed at what it is going for. During many of the musical segments in the game, there is also a short minigame of sorts, and they can get pretty radically different. There are several segments where you travel through traffic either on a skateboard or a shopping cart. There are spots where you help orchestrate an entire fireworks show, and when you float through the air as well. The musical segments hit the most when they make you feel like you are actually playing a music video of some sort. In one of the opening skateboarding segments in the game, your entire crew claps along with the song that is playing as an example. There’s also an early segment in the game where you can coordinate synchronized headbanging from your crew while they are in a car, which I think will put a smile on just about everyone’s face. There’s a lot of joy and care put into so many elements of this game.
Unfortunately, there are also a lot of minigames that are incredibly mediocre and didn’t hit for me at all. Whenever the minigames go outside the scope of feeling like music videos (and end up feeling more WarioWare adjacent), they are almost never good enough to feel worthwhile. In these moments, the game gets shallow and is rarely super mechanically sound. I’ve played a lot of baseball minigames in various series over the years, and Mixtape brings one of the weakest ones I’ve ever seen to the table as an example.
The one good thing is that the general pacing of the experience means that you are never stuck on anything for too long. If you don’t like a specific song or minigame that much, you will likely be on to something else very quickly. Mixtape’s pace is relentless in a good way. Even when I wasn’t as into the game, the game is so bold and weird at times that I was always at least fascinated by what they would do next. You will do things like make frozen drinks, pose in photo booths, throw toilet paper rolls, and paint doors here in addition to the more over the top moments. It’s odd, and not always the good kind of odd. But it is at least interesting, and that means something to me. At the very least, all of these random activities fit in with the general 90s high school things that people did to stay entertained in a world before screens were everywhere.
At Times, This Game Feels Like The Hit Song “ABC” By The Jackson 5, Where A 12 Year Old Is Telling Me About How Easy Love Can Be
That same pacing also plays into the plot. Mixtape is only a 3-4 hour experience, so it is constantly moving in a way that isn’t super common for video games, and it’s a refreshing flow. Once again, just like the minigames, I was always pretty interested in what would come next, even if I wasn’t always a fan of every decision that was made.
The game is built around the aforementioned teenagers Stacey, Van, and Cassandra. I think a lot of people’s enjoyment of this game will center around how much they enjoy these characters. I’m not usually a big fan of high school characters, but I actually thought they were all pretty well made. At the very least, they feel consistent and authentic. I can’t say I truly connected with or loved any of them, but they all make sense, and I think that’s important.
As a parent, I constantly think about how my actions will affect my child in the future, and I think Mixtape does a nice job of showcasing how each of these characters was formed in part by their family situations. You can see how Stacey was likely greatly impacted by her older sister; you can quickly surmise how Van ended up being so chill when you see his mom; and Cassandra’s relationship with her dad is a centerpiece of the entire plot and has clearly affected almost everything about her. The game does a great job of slowly dishing out bits of lore on each character and letting you put all the pieces together yourself at the end.
My only problem with the characters is that while they mostly make sense, there are moments where I felt the writers slipped a bit and inserted a bit too much of themselves into them. There are several scenes in the game where Stacey and crew are talking about life and their high school experience in ways that seem way too introspective for a bunch of 18-year-olds. These scenes are supposed to be compelling, and there are plenty of good observations in them, but they just did not make sense to me coming from the mouths of kids. These are the few scenes where all of a sudden I could sense people in their late 30s to early 40s writing these characters, and in those moments, the illusion shatters a bit.
My other big issue with the plot is how it concludes some of its biggest arcs in the game. There are two specific conflicts that are really what the game is all about. These conflicts are both set up in really compelling ways, and I was very into them. Unfortunately, both of these conflicts are resolved way too quickly and cleanly after all of the buildup. Given the complex nature of both of these situations, it really bummed me out that they both wrap up in such simple ways.
Luckily, the game bounces back with a strong conclusion to the plot as a whole, but there were definitely plenty of missed opportunities here. Despite some disappointments, I was absolutely along for the ride for the entire way, and I was never bored with it. It’s not bad at all, but I didn’t think it lived up to its own promise either.
I Don’t Care If It Was Released In 2003 And Wouldn’t Fit The Game At All, The Lack of Hit Single “Stacy’s Mom” Was A Huge Missed Opportunity
While I have mixed feelings about various elements of both the story and the gameplay, I have very few reservations when it comes to the music and art in Mixtape. Even if you dislike everything else about this game, I think it can still easily be enjoyed by anyone as an audiovisual showcase of sorts.
Stop-motion art styles have become increasingly popular in games in recent years, and Mixtape might be the best looking version of this art style that I’ve seen outside of South of Midnight. I love the details in all of the character models, and the environments are consistently lovely. The fireworks scene I mentioned earlier is an absolute visual delight, and it is one of many moments that made me feel that way.
As you’d expect, the licensed soundtrack is also full of bangers. Stacey’s goal in life is to curate soundtracks for movies, and sure enough, the songs almost always fit the mood perfectly, and I always enjoyed Stacey’s fourth-wall breaking to set them up before they play. Despite it being a good soundtrack, I did feel disappointed by it on a more personal level at times. Given some of the bands that were advertised for the game, I was expecting to encounter at least a few songs that I was very familiar with and had enjoyed in the past, but I genuinely had not heard the vast majority of these. This is an indie game, so it probably makes sense that they couldn’t shell out for something like “1979” instead of “Love” from The Smashing Pumpkins, but there are only a few songs in that game that I really strongly connected with, and I expected it to be way more. Once again, they are still good songs that all fit within the moment that they are in, so it’s not something that I explicitly hold against the game. It just takes place in an era that seems like it’s close to mine but is actually roughly 10 years before I finished high school. This will still stand as one of the top soundtracks this year when all is said and done.
Mixtape Is A Game About Jim Thome, Adam Dunn, and Sammy Sosa
Baseball always has a few guys who are pure home run hitters. These guys strike out all the time. There will be many times when they come to bat with several runners on base and two outs, and they will go out in a blaze of glory. But then, a few games later, they will be the guy who hits the grand slam that wins your team the game. If you are a fan of someone like this on your team, they can quickly alternate from someone you hate to someone you love. But either way, every single time they are up to the plate, they are must-see TV.
This is essentially how I feel about Mixtape. I was very locked into this experience from start to finish, as I was always fascinated to see what they would do from either a plot, writing, gameplay, music, or art perspective. You never know what is coming next. These surprising moments come in constantly, but I did end up feeling like there were a fair bit more strikeouts than home runs.
But man, every one of those home runs was freaking awesome. This was a strange, slightly magical, and slightly disappointing experience. I’m glad I played it, and I’ll be thinking about it for a while, even if some of those thoughts are about how it could have been better.
Score: 7.5/10
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