Mixtape is a narrative adventure game where the story unfolds alongside a carefully curated playlist of songs created by teenage protagonist Stacey Rockford. To properly reflect the experience of playing it, I’ve created an original 10-song mixtape inspired by the game to complement this review. My rule here was that I could only use songs I would have included when I was Stacey’s age and experiencing the same small town blues. You can listen to it via Spotify or YouTube while you read along.
1. “The Opera House” (The Olivia Tremor Control)
“Let’s go to the opera / since all of our favorite memories have failed us.”
Selecting the opening track of a mixtape is one of the most important decisions you will ever make in your life. It’s the difference between just friends and til death to us part. You aren’t just picking any old tune. Not even close! Your opener is a mission statement in riffs and rhythms. Do you want to tell someone you’ll be best buds forever, even after high school? That you’re going through it and need help? That you can’t live another day without them? You need to set the stage in those precious first few minutes while still delivering a track so powerful, or just fucking cool, that it gets the listener to hit play again when the disc stops spinning. The energy matters. The tempo matters. The lyrics matter. (Unless you’re starting on some ethereal shoegaze shit.) This is your moment to grab someone by the hand and take them on an odyssey they’ll never forget. Memories that will live forever in stereo.
Like Rage Against the Machine at Lollapalooza 1993, Mixtape makes one hell of an entrance. The latest game from Beethoven & Dinosaur, the studio behind 2021’s rocking The Artful Escape, makes its intentions clear as you begin by skateboarding down a winding street to the throbbing synths of Devo’s “That’s Good.” I see the vision instantly: Suburban angst, youth in revolt, endless parties. I’m rolling into a narrative-driven coming-of-age story told through playable memories, all set to a soundtrack by a curator who knows their shit. Say no more. I willingly give my hand to creative director Johnny Galvatron and let him pull me into his teenage rebellion.
2. “Because of You” (Letters to Cleo)
“Remind me again of what I’m gonna miss?”
The stakes come down if you did your first job right, but track two is still a delicate operation. It needs to follow the same vibe you established from the jump — you can’t be hopping between Dinosaur Jr. and Steve Reich this early, man — but you can’t overshadow your opener either. And there needs to be a transition so fluid that it sounds like you’re listening to an album with deliberate sequencing rather than a reshuffling of disparate songs. Your goal here is to twist the volume knob down just one tick so you can start chatting with the person on the couch next to you. Call it a pause for exposition. Hi, how are you? Let’s catch up for a second.
Mixtape follows three teens living in a small town circa the mid-’90s who are on the cusp of breaking out. Stacey Rockford is the de facto leader of the trio, a know-it-all music snob who dreams of making it to the big city and becoming a professional Hollywood music supervisor. Van Slater is your lovable burnout who seems chill to hang around town forever. And there’s Cassandra Morino, a time bomb begging to get out from under her overprotective father’s thumb. Before life splits them up, the three amigos vow to go out on a high note by crashing the party of the year, all to the sounds of a mixtape that Stacey has curated for their final adventure.
Those are the perfect ingredients for a delightful video game take on Slacker, Richard Linklater’s definitive 1990 stoner comedy. The early-game comedy comes from watching three big personalities one-up each other as they shoot the shit in Stacey’s bedroom, reliving their high school memories through music video interludes, and name-dropping seminal bands of the era. You start to wonder if they’re even going to make the party at all as you get wrapped up in the cast’s natural chemistry. Welcome to the friend circle. This is the feeling you stand to lose when the tape ends and the last person leaves the party.
3. “Waiting Room” (Fugazi)
“I’m gonna fight for what I wanna be.”
Now we can start having some fun. With your crucial one-two punch landed, the rest of your mix is wide open. But don’t get too comfortable: There’s still an art to song selection. You want to introduce your listener to some cool music, but you don’t want them to look at the track list and get entirely turned off by a bunch of band names they’ve never heard of. I mean, The Olivia Tremor Control? Really? You need a recognizable band or two on here — or at least a “real ones know” kind of dive bar staple — to keep things approachable without going full-on college radio DJ. A gentle ebb and flow between familiarity and discovery.
While the story in Mixtape unfolds through bedroom banter and cinematically staged scenes, it’s really told by the music. The Beethoven & Dinosaur team take their roles as curators seriously here, composing a track list of more than 20 songs with virtually no skips. Familiar hits from the likes of The Smashing Pumpkins and Portishead seamlessly weave together with deeper cuts from Rainbow and Harpers Bizarre, creating a tapestry of genre-hopping sounds. Crucially, Mixtape actually understands what a teen who considers themselves a music aficionado would really be listening to. Stacey isn’t walking around in a Metallica tee like a cool teen in an out-of-touch TV show; she’s spinning B.J. Thomas, just as my coolest high school friend turned me on to Townes Van Zandt. There’s an authenticity to the song selection here that gives Mixtape the real sound of growing up. These are characters figuring out their futures through song.
4. “You’re No Rock n’ Roll Fun” (Sleater-Kinney)
“You wanna party with the lights on / Come on, I like the dark!”
When making a mix, think of yourself as a collage artist. It is your job to skillfully patch various sounds together, hopping between genres, eras, and attitudes. You still need to be mindful of any jarring transitions that derail the flow, but you have no shortage of options so long as your musical knowledge is broad enough. You’re a tour guide and your job is just to make sure that all the sights you plan to show your listener connect on a line. Boston to Washington D.C. to Portland. Let’s go places, baby.
The bulk of Mixtape’s interactivity happens in unpredictable minigame vignettes — each soundtracked by one of the aforementioned jams — that are a joy to discover initially. Early on, I need to help the crew evade the pigs after a house party bust by swerving down the street in a rickety grocery cart. Later, they blow off some steam by hitting a few sluggers down at the local baseball field. It’s like playing a more grounded Sayonara Wild Hearts, though one that still weaves into magical realist territory as the gang soars over rolling fields and detonates mailboxes while skating with a flip of the bird. You can feel the developers at Beethoven & Dinosaur having a blast crafting bite-sized shenanigans of varying shapes and sizes that let you feel like a participant in the story’s teenage riot.
5. “Sand” (The Microphones)
“I know I’m weak / I know that I’m sad.”
A mix isn’t about cobbling together a party playlist. Not really. It’s a way to communicate something to your listener through coded messages. Music allows you to say the things you’re too embarrassed to admit out loud. To whisper in someone’s ear through their headphones. Like working up the courage to ask someone out, getting to that point is a challenge. Do you come out the gate swinging with a sparkling power ballad, or build up to it after limbering your listener up? My first draft of this mix opened with Wilco’s “Misunderstood.” It was too obvious. I mean, it opens with Jeff Tweedy crooning, “Back in your old neighborhood…” You have to be more subtle than that, or you’ll risk blowing the whole puzzle.
After its feel-good introduction — one that has made Mixtape’s demo a pure crowd-pleaser at events like Tribeca Fest — Beethoven & Dinosaur starts to make its true intentions known. The carefree stoner comedy gradually gives way to a sentimental coming-of-age story. It’s going for 1985’s The Breakfast Club, John Hughes’ coming-of-age classic, but it occasionally skews closer to 2008’s Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, a twee indie rom-com released in the wake of Garden State. The sap gets poured on thick as the teens lay their anxieties out over emotionally-loaded songs that are wielded like weapons. Like a lot of indie rock, it wears its heart on its hoodie. Whether you find it earnest or cloying will depend on how mortifying you find your old teenage journals.
6. “Head South” (Modest Mouse)
“Here things go from gray to gray and back to gray again.”
There are two philosophies when it comes to the length of a mixtape. You can either stuff a tape with as many songs as you can fit on it, or practice restraint to make something focused. I’m personally an advocate of the 10-song tracklist. It’s not just that it lets your listener get your message in under an hour — 40 to 45 minutes, ideally. (No one has time for your triple album.) 10 songs give you a clear center point to build around. In this structure, track six is where you draw attention to a song that lays everything bare. Here, it’s “Head South” by Modest Mouse, the first song I heard as a kid that fully articulated how suffocated I felt by the small town I grew up in. An abrasive turning point, perhaps, but that’s how you ensure that your listener isn’t nodding off just as you’re getting to the point.
By the midpoint of Stacey’s story, I found myself starting to tune out of Mixtape. Its structure, where the gang bounces between each other’s houses and goes through another cycle of memories and minigames, lacks much dynamic range despite the fact that the story aims for big emotional moments. At some point, it feels as though Beethoven & Dinosaur put together a track list first and then tried to fit a story around it after the fact. The playable vignettes become mere visualizers for the music, struggling to give players something meaningful or fun to do while a good song plays out. Another skateboarding interlude? It’s the same problem that The Artful Escape ran into with its unremarkable platforming; the interactivity feels secondary to the music. There are crescendos in the sound and character arcs, but rarely in what you do.
7. “Broken Heart” (Spiritualized)
“Though I have a broken heart / I’m too busy to be heartbroken.”
If you insist on laying it on thick, you better make it count. You cannot give your crush a CD full of grand proclamations, nor can you put together 10 of the most sad sap ballads ever committed to tape. You’re going to render your big moments meaningless if every song is a melodramatic climax. Choose your one breathtaker carefully and deploy it when the emotional journey you’re building calls for it. You have to earn a “Broken Heart.”
There are several moments during Mixtape where I wonder if I’m actually connecting with the game or just the music. Portishead’s “Roads” vibrates my soul when I hear its iconic electric piano fill the quiet air after a tense turning point. Do I feel like I could cry because I’m watching a friend group splinter, or is Neil Solman just a damn good key player? It’s the same feeling I get when I watch Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, breaking down during a movie I don’t have strong feelings about because Hans Zimmer knows how to pull my strings. The musical guessing game threatens to become a distraction from the gang’s angst in moments here. Would Mixtape have the exact same emotional impact on me if it were a Spotify playlist instead of a video game?
8. “Machine Gun” (Slowdive)
“It’s just the way that the water makes me feel again.”
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And for every six-minute bummer, there is an uplifting follow-up that makes you feel like you can fly. The best mixes remember this push and pull. They are aching but tender. They tear your heart out and patch you back up. They make you want to grab a beer with your buds after you finish burning down a Starbucks. There is nuance to the rhythms of a human heart.
Even when Mixtape felt like it was about to lose me under the waves, it still had a way of pulling me back up to the surface when it mattered. Part of that is thanks to how lovable the central underdog trio is, but there’s also so much warmth radiating throughout its animated film-like visual design. Golden hour sunlight cuts through the trees on a warm summer’s day. The suburbs are presented in such a romantic way that it makes you miss a place you may never have even lived in. The minigames give Beethoven & Dinosaur plenty of places to get wacky, aggressive, and captivating, whether it’s showing you two ultra-realistic tongues French kissing or putting you at the center of a cathartic fireworks display. It’s those moments, where the songs meet the characters and visuals rather than overpower them, that Mixtape gets what it wants to say off its chest.
9. “The Funny Bird” (Mercury Rev)
“Like a wave along the coast / I’ve come to love the highs and lows.”
The time for fun is over. Like your opening two tracks, your finale needs to be surgical in execution. It doesn’t matter how upbeat your first four songs are; if you end on a down note, that’s going to dictate how your listener feels when the silence finally sets in. You need to decide where you want to leave things, starting with your penultimate song. You can’t ensure that your listener will ever give your mix a second spin. They probably won’t. This is your last chance to leave your mark. No pressure.
I go back and forth with how I feel about Mixtape after finishing the sleek three-hour story. On one hand, it’s a comforting blanket for a Millennial like me. Of course I see myself in Stacey, Slater, and Cassandra as they come to terms with the fact that their lives are about to change forever. The almost desperate need to create one final memory, like a band searching for an elusive hit, brings me back to that senior year summer before my friends splintered off around the country. If this was the last time we’d all be in one place, we had to go out on a high note.
At the same time, I struggle to pin down Mixtape’s true identity. It’s an ‘80s comedy with ‘90s attitude where the teens often talk like it’s the 2020s. (“Sauce?” In the mid-’90s?) Its ending still lands the gut punch, but I wonder if that has less to do with the game and more to do with a final run of classic alt anthems that simply cannot fail. Did I ever actually love Garden State or did I just love its soundtrack? I can’t decide where I stand with Mixtape when I apply that same question to it. Maybe it’s a wonderful coming-of-age story with something universal to say about growing up and navigating how to leave a chapter of life behind. Or maybe it’s Johnny Galvatron’s way of showing off a record collection that could never mean as much to me as it does to him.
That’s not much of a climax, is it?
10. “Slow Nerve Action” (The Flaming Lips)
“It’s all a waste of time again.”
The closer. A falling action. It’s that movie theater moment where the credits roll and the lights come on, but you need another minute in your seat to process everything you’ve just seen. “Was all of this worth my attention?” you may wonder as Steven Drozd’s thunderous snare strikes sputter out on 1993’s “Slow Nerve Action” — a song that has been an inseparable part of my DNA for decades now, and probably doesn’t mean much at all to you. You need to leave your listener something to reflect on. Something that’s bigger than the sound.
What have I been trying to say through a mix I designed to help unpack my thoughts on Mixtape, anyway? There has to be a point to all this musical romanticism that goes beyond forcing all of you to listen to some of my favorite ‘90s cuts. Maybe the better question here is: What is this mix saying about me? After all, when you make a mix, the songs choose you as much as you choose them. When I take a step back from this 10-song suite, I see that I’ve inadvertently revealed the exact person I am. I couldn’t help it; music tells all. Can you see me through layers of punk rock posturing and poorly repressed melancholia? Can you locate yourself somewhere in the peaks and valleys of these sound waves?
Mixtape is out now on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a prerelease download code provided by Annapurna Interactive. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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