Mixtape

I finished Mixtape in a single sitting and sat with the credits rolling for longer than I care to admit. Beethoven and Dinosaur, the Melbourne studio behind the BAFTA-winning The Artful Escape, have built their second game the same way their director Johnny Galvatron apparently builds a playlist: start with the songs that matter most, then figure out what story lives between them. The result is a narrative vignette game structured around a curated tracklist of licensed 80s and 90s post-punk and alternative, ranging from Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees to Iggy Pop, The Cure, Roxy Music, and The Smashing Pumpkins. The music is not a backdrop. It is the skeleton. You follow three high school friends, Stacey, Slater, and Cassandra, through their last night together before post-graduation life splits them apart. Stacey, a fourth-wall-breaking music obsessive with dreams of becoming a film music supervisor, is your primary anchor. She is also, fair warning, deliberately prickly: a music snob who bailed on the group's road trip because she decided it was her cosmic destiny to fly to New York instead. Whether that reads as a character flaw with nuance or just plain selfishness will likely determine how much you connect with the story. I found her compelling. Some players very much did not. The supporting trio is warm but slightly uneven, with Cassandra in particular feeling underdeveloped in the back half when Stacey's perspective crowds out the other voices. Mechanically, Mixtape is what some people will call a walking simulator and what I would call a mixtape of interactions. The game reinvents its own controls almost every sequence, cycling through skateboarding down suburban streets, a surreal kissing minigame, photography at an abandoned theme park, hitting baseballs, setting off fireworks from the back seat of a car, and brief flying sequences that arrive exactly when the emotional temperature peaks. None of these mechanics are deep. Skateboarding prioritizes flow and atmosphere over any kind of precision challenge, and if you crash, time rewinds cleanly with no loading screen interruption. There are no fail states to speak of and no branching choices that redirect the story. If you come here looking for systems to master, you will leave disappointed. The game runs approximately three to four hours, and that short runtime has become the centre of genuine controversy, with a Metacritic score of 85 surrounded by heated player pushback calling it an interactive film unworthy of critical praise. That discourse is worth knowing about before you spend your money. What those critics get wrong, in my view, is that the brevity is not a concession. It is the craft. Mixtape understands that coming-of-age stories only work at a specific emotional temperature, and sustaining that temperature for eight hours would kill it entirely. Director Galvatron described the intended feel as channel-surfing old-school MTV at 3 AM, and that landed for me completely. The hyper-stylized Unreal Engine visuals, all expressive cartoonish lighting and perspective shifts that reframe each scene cinematically, give the whole thing the texture of a memory half-preserved. The writing avoids forced melodrama and resists spelling out what it wants you to feel, which is rarer than it should be in this genre. The moments that do not land, a few autoscrolling sequences that drag slightly and the occasional song choice that feels mismatched to its scene, are real weaknesses but they do not hollow the experience. If you have ever made a mixtape for someone, or received one, or spent years organizing your life around the right song for the right moment, this game was made for you. If you need mechanical resistance to feel like you are playing something, skip it entirely. Mixtape is also on Xbox Game Pass, which removes the length-to-price friction almost entirely for subscribers, and that is the clearest recommendation I can make about how to approach it. Kai, Scout Team