The conflict of any artist working in the medium of nostalgia is whether to provide a realistic account of what the times were like, what one wishes they were like, or just convey how they felt. Mixtape is certainly disdainful of the first approach, which is pretty on brand for a story taking place in the irony-poisoned 1990s.
That said, developer Beethoven & Dinosaur’s game still plays things coy in terms of how it places this story in the ’90s. There isn’t a single smartphone in sight, and when our music-obsessed protagonist, Stacy Rockford, describes burning CDs, it’s only at her school, on a machine that costs thousands of dollars. Elsewhere, the other high school delinquents we follow throughout the game aren’t founts of ’90s-era signifiers. Even its music selection, the easiest Member Berry to get an audience of a certain age to swallow, only plants its flag in the post-grunge era a scant few times—a Silverchair track here, a Smashing Pumpkins track there.
And yet, just like Beethoven & Dinosaur’s previous title, 2021’s cartoonishly psychedelic The Artful Escape, Mixtape is chasing a vibe. It’s more interested in conveying how Stacy Rockford felt on her last day in town with her best friends as opposed to parading ’90s ephemera for the pleasure of recognition. Stacy—a neurodivergent music nerd whose encyclopedic knowledge of post-punk alternative would make Rob Gordon worship the ground her weathered Converses walk on—knows how she wants her last day with her friends to go, programming the day the same way she crafts the perfect music mix to go with it.
Stacy’s vision is a fantastical trip down memory lane: to go from postered bedroom to postered bedroom in her boring-ass hometown with her friends—stoner metalhead Slater and good-girl-gone-bad Cassandra—reliving the “greatest hits” of her teenage life. The goal is to get utterly blackout drunk at their secluded forest hiding spot, before ending the day at a popular girl’s end-of-year party. Every transitional skateboard trip down a winding road has been planned, and Stacy—and the developers by proxy—has the perfect music to sweeten every single moment.
The developers make their intentions crystal clear later in the game, with Stacy likening life to an artist’s discography, and the memories that stick as “greatest hits.” Where Mixtape absolutely excels is turning those memories into fragmented sequences of interactive audiovisual revelry, not beholden to flatly retelling the mundane victories, failures, and oddities of Stacy’s life, but pumping them with all the interpretive fancy they can stand.
A perfect day wandering a forest with her friends is represented by letting players fly across verdant fields and float through the air. Stacy’s first kiss is a hilariously gross Warioware-style minigame where tongues clash inside a mouth like slaughtered meat. The aforementioned Silverchair track causes the entire world inside and outside of Slater’s busted hooptie of a car to headbang in unison. Siouxsie and the Banshees’s “Spellbound” is the alarm bell sounding over a desperate sprint to warn a friend that the police are on their way. An argument leads to a betrayal, which Stacy can only soothe by playing Portishead’s “Roads.”
It’s cliché to watch and hear teenagers arrive at a profound understanding of their mortality, but there’s beauty in seeing that transmuted into pure visual majesty, speaking of impending endings while lounging across a lumbering brontosaurus against a pale sunset, just before the life-ending asteroid hits. Somehow, with all of gaming’s infinite possibilities, taking fantastical liberties with the big emotions of teenage life is still something of a rarity. The exhilaration of Mixtape is seeing a narrative where those walls are completely broken down—the small-town world of our heroine and her teenage problems inseparable from her dreams.
The musical journey we take through the life and times of Stacy Rockford is flawlessly underscored and curated, every emotion given its own voice and melody from the margins of mainstream pop and rock. The right song playing at the right moment can feel magical enough to make a person feel like flying. Mixtape frequently makes that flight not just fully interactive but literal—youthful freedom lighting up the world with a euphoric player-controlled fireworks display while sailing through the air in a caravan of convertibles.
This game was reviewed with a retail copy purchased by the reviewer.
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