This new narrative game reminds us that even something as objectively great and cool as music can turn you into an insufferable nerd.
Obsession is embarrassing. You may not realize that when you’re deep in it, but everybody who has to deal with you certainly does. That’s especially true when you’re obsessed with music and just have to let everybody know it—when you commandeer the radio in their friends’ cars, or assume the right to play DJ at parties, or make unsolicited mixtapes for others and hound them for their thoughts on it. Music is cool, of course, but obsession fundamentally isn’t; that makes music obsession a combustible combo, like matter and antimatter, for anybody without the self-awareness to just be cool about it—for people like Stacey Rockford, the main character in Mixtape.
Mixtape wants you to think Rockford is the coolest person in, if not the world, at least her home town, but she’s not the coolest person in her friend group—or even second coolest. You’ll wish you could spend way more time with her two closest friends, the slacker musician Van Slater and perfect-child-turned-teen-volcano Cassandra Morino, who are both more developed, more relatable, and more human. Arrogant, selfish, and with mixtape picks that are either obvious (the good songs) or questionable (the bad songs), Rockford’s the kind of friend who’ll spend months planning out a meticulous summer vacation with her two best friends, and then ditch ’em shortly before they’re supposed to take off in order to go on a different trip by herself—and then play the victim when her friends get annoyed by that. She’s a bad friend with the unearned confidence and tireless self-absorption of somebody who’s rarely had to worry or struggle, and she also isn’t aware that her self-hyped musical knowledge and mixtape skills are pedestrian at best (She also makes a really shitty joke calling Pee-Wee Herman a sexual deviant, and anybody who watched last year’s excellent documentary on Paul Reubens knows he really doesn’t deserve that). Stacey Rockford isn’t cool; like many obsessives, her obsession is the entirety of her personality, the kind of shortcut confused teens often take, and it ultimately makes her feel desperate. And desperation is even less cool than obsession.
Rockford probably seems cool to a 12-year-old, though, and that reveals the audience that will most appreciate Mixtape: restless tweens looking for something that makes them feel special, feel older, feel like they’ve been let in on some secret club. Despite its suffocating nostalgia for ’80s and ’90s teen movies, despite its playlist of early college radio classics and ’70s AOR deep cuts, despite its fetishization of archaic tech like VCRs and cassette tapes, Mixtape is squarely for the children its Gen X characters would be raising today.
Their parents would most likely be annoyed by Mixtape and its vague recreation of a semi-recognizable 1990s that isn’t pinned down to any specific year. Some of them would cringe at recognizing too much of themselves in Rockford (yes, I’m in that camp); others would just see the kind of pedantic dork they probably tried to avoid in high school. Mostly they’ll feel pandered to as the game works overtime to evoke nostalgia for their youth without subtlety or authenticity.
Just as obsession is embarrassing, it’s also very hard to depict music obsession in particular in a way that isn’t inherently annoying. You have to lean into the person being an asshole, like how Paul Giamatti plays bitter jazz obsessive Harvey Pekar in American Splendor. But if Mixtape realizes that Rockford is an asshole, it doesn’t show it; she displays the least growth of its central trio, the least introspection, the least understanding of what it means to be a friend, but remains the focus. And if that sounds like she’s neurodivergent, the game never overtly addresses it and really doesn’t even hint at it. Mixtape lives thoroughly in Rockford’s head, never straying from her perspective even when the narrative itself becomes clearly more interested in the tension between her friend Cassandra and her overly strict parents.
Mixtape would be a better game if Rockford’s two friends, Slater and Cassandra, had as much of the spotlight as she did. That would undermine the central mixtape framing, with every major moment soundtracked by a “perfect” mixtape Rockford made for their last day of high school, but then Mixtape would also be a better game if it wasn’t about a mixtape—if its soundtrack was just a soundtrack, and not some central spine crafted in-universe by a character who wants to dictate how her friends act and feel on a night that’s only their last together because of her own selfish decision.
Mixtape would also be a much better game if it didn’t try to evoke some mythical American teenage experience, inspired more by the ’80s teen movies of John Hughes and Martha Coolidge than real life, and instead focused on what it was like to be a teenager in Australia, where Beethoven + Dinosaur is based. It wouldn’t feel so inauthentic, so sentimental, so calculated in its overbearing nostalgia. Occasionally something feels real in Mixtape—the way Slater feels purpose when he’s making music, Cassandra boiling under her parents’ overprotective rules, even Rockford’s resentment of her friend’s other friend who isn’t part of the group—but it’s all so scattered and fleeting that it just reinforces how fake and insubstantial the rest of it feels.
It’s especially disappointing that this narrative-focused game’s story is so lacking, because it does some genuinely interesting things in the interactive space. Mixtape‘s various vignettes turn memories and standard life milestones into impressionistic passages of play, replacing the kind of consistent mechanics that a game typically maintains throughout its full duration with a grab bag of button presses, trigger pulls, and stick twiddling tailored for each moment. The most famous at this point might be the scene where Rockford reflects on her first kiss; the camera zooms into the two mouths as they’re smashed together, the player sloppily entangling the tongues together like they’re playing a dual-joystick shooter. For all of the story’s many faults, there’s sublime joy in soaring over the town and past buildings we’ve visited as Joy Division’s elegiac “Atmosphere” plays. Slater drunkenly trying to rent a video becomes a Bennett Foddy-esque physical disaster, and Cassandra slamming dinger after dinger on the softball diamond leads to an inspired visual setpiece, with each homer turning the small-town school field into a major league stadium bit by bit.
But the game’s weaker impulses shine through in the softball scene, as well. It’s set to Stan Bush’s “The Touch,” tightening the game’s shameless and overwhelming nostalgia from an entire decade to basically a four year span, and for a relatively small and very specific audience: fans of transforming robot cars who were between the ages of, say, 7 and 11 in 1986, when The Transformers: The Movie and its soundtrack permanently stamped Bush’s song into their brains. Instead of letting Cassandra’s titanic skill resonate, finding a song or piece of music that reflects the moment or emphasizes how this is the one place where she has the freedom and ability to control a life that’s otherwise stifled by helicopter parents, Mixtape defaults to nostalgia that’s targeting a niche audience and yet extremely obvious and overplayed for that audience. It isn’t about Cassandra; it’s about a song from a movie that a small set of players might have loved when they were a kid. It’s performative, insecure, too self-aware and self-impressed to be cool. It’s Stacey Rockford, and it’s Mixtape as a whole.
