I’m not the biggest fan of narrative heavy games with little to no actual gameplay, but there was something captivating about Mixtape when it was first announced last summer. As a person who turned seventeen in the year 1999, I’m always baited by attempts to nostaglize my childhood, as if my generation deserves the chance to leave behind its answer to The Goonies. Does Mixtape deliver the hits or should it be dubbed over in your Talkboy? Find out in our Mixtape review!
Mixtape
Developer: Beethoven and Dinosaur
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Platforms: Windows PC (Reviewed), Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
Release Date: May 7th, 2026
Price: $19.99 USD
Author’s Note: Yes, I am aware that this is subjective to my experience as a person who was a teenager in 1999. What I experienced and lived through in the Midwest of the United States doesn’t mirror or takeaway from the experience someone who grew up in the Seattle suburbs had, but it’s worth making the comparison as I suspect a lot more readers had a childhood closer to mine than the kids portrayed in the game.
Mixtape tells the story of a girl named Stacey Rockford who’s about to leave her sleepy suburb of Seattle to head to New York with the goal of becoming a big shot in the music industry. She’s convinced herself that she knows music so well that if she can get her mixtape to someone, they’ll hire her on the spot to pick and choose music used in films and commercials. Seriously, this girl has no personality at all aside from knowing music and she’s an insufferable asshole about it. It’s like someone saw High Fidelity (a movie from the year 2000) and was like “yeah, let’s make that but with teenage girls”.
Accompanying Rockford on this journey is her best friend Slater, who’s basically Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High and is hopelessly smitten with Stacey, and their newer friend Cassandra who’s basically Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off but gender swapped. Cassandra is a good student who’s also an athelete but is constantly pressured by her parents to do well, so naturally her father is a cop on the local police force. Stacey and Slater’s parents barely make an appearance at all, which highlights the fact that Cassandra’s dad only gets screen time because his role serves as a plot device.
The kids are spending their last few days together before Stacey’s trip so they do what normal teenagers do: They go get slushies at the convenience store, they skateboard, they explore abandoned areas, and ultimately throw a party. While planning for the party they discover that Rockford’s liquor stash is tapped out and decide that since her older sister was “so cool” that there’s a chance she’s got a secret stash in her room. The kids raid her room since she’s gone off to college and find a note that leads them to an old run down cabin in the woods where her sister and her friends used to party in secret. The whole thing is believable but it’s painfully obvious where it’s going, how it’s going to get there, and what’s likely going to happen long before it ever happens.
Throughout this adventure, imagination runs wild as there are sections where the kids are vividly having things happen that clearly aren’t real but are meant to invoke feel good emotions for the player. Kaledoscope LCD-esque sequences, bounce house grassy knolls with slipstreams where the characters can jump and float around like Peter Pan help make up for what would otherwise be a painfully boring run across the field to get to the cabin. It’s supposed to be whimsical, but it falls flat and feels goofy.
There’s a bunch of attempts at gags that are meant to get people talking, such as an extremely uncomfortable makeout mini game where Stacey and some dude who doesn’t show up until the very end of the game have a make out session, complete with zoomed in tongue wrestling with slobber sounds and saliva strands. It’s gross out humor meant to be shocking and get people talking, but all it did was draw ridicule from people who were looking for an excuse to tear this game down based on the art alone.
Mixtape is an unfortunate casualty caught in the culture war crossfire. By itself in a vaccuum, it’s an attempt at stoking the fires of nostalgia for 40-somethings like me who should be able to appreciate a charming look at a lifetime ago. The unfortunate part is because of all of the disengenious commentary made by mainstream journalists about sexualization of certain things, this shock value scene was quickly ridiculed as pedophile bait. I’m sure Beethoven and Dinosaur had no interest in any of these viewpoints being constructed, but sometimes you have to scope out the landscape before you enter the field. The same people who are shilling for this game are exactly the same reason a large portion of its potential audience are attacking it mercilessly.
Perhaps the biggest sin that Mixtape commits is that it fails at the basic premise of being a “video game” while succeeding at being an interactive movie. The first big opening sequence features the gang joyriding in a shopping cart down a street (a scene most familiar to people in the opening of Jackass the Movie in 2002) which gives you the button prompts to move the cart back and forth and do some spins and what not. You can also opt to do absolutely nothing and the game will continue on as if nothing is wrong, because it’s interactive in nature only. There are no consequences, there are no benefits, it’s just a thing that happens and you can choose to partake or watch. Mixtape is the perfect video game for people who like to watch video game playthroughs on Youtube instead of actually playing video games.
This alone wouldn’t be too egregious, but there are at least three notable sequences where you can also refuse to interact with the game at all and progress through it. If thirty minutes of a game with a less than three hour run time doesn’t require any actual gameplay, is it really even a game at that point? I’d argue that Mixtape is an interactive movie with some minigames spliced in to serve as intermission points. Skipping rocks at the pond, hitting softball pitches, and shooting bottles and cans with a slingshot are fine little distractions but they aren’t something you’d want to pay $20 for alone. In fact, the only justification for Mixtape‘s $20 price tag is the licensed music.
Let’s talk about the biggest elephant in the room: Having a main character who’s so intricately intune with music is a pretty good premise, but why do the developers think a teenager would have a crate full of deep cuts that would earn them a seat at the hipster table in the back of their local coffee shop? In 1999, a kid who had Rockford’s taste in music would have been ridiculed by her peers for being “old” and listening to “her parents music”. Furthermore, Slater often makes comments about being “metal” and there are several points where the group make comments about things being metal, yet there’s not a single “metal” song on the playlist. Do you really expect me to believe that there’s a chance in hell that these kids weren’t playing tracks off Metallica’s 1991 self-titled (aka the black album) or Megadeth’s Rust in Peace? No Slayer, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Kyuss, or even Australia’s own AC/DC? These kids are all wearing grunge clothes, so why is Silverchair’s Freak the only song on the playlist that’s even remotely close to the genre or feels like a song these kids would have listened to?
It’s funny because there are so many songs on this playlist that work, but there were far better songs available on the same album that would have fit the scenes better. Yesterday’s Hero is a fine song, but it was a lot more popular in Australia than it ever was in the United States, and feels like it was only included because they couldn’t afford to license Creedence Clearwater Revival. Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness saw a smash hits with Bullet With Butterfly Wings, 1979, Tonight, Tonight, and Zero, yet they chose to use Love, one of the most filler and forgettable songs on the album? I guess it was worth the reddit updoots. See also the rain scene where they chose Portishead’s Roads because it was in Tank Girl, instead of Wandering Star which fits the scene FAR better.
In fact, there’s a note stuck to the poster in Rockford’s room where they wrote down their potential playlist for their West Coast roadtrip, and that playlist not only makes far more sense for a group of teenagers, but it’s also full of songs that people have actually heard of and not just random art house D-sides; one of which is Muzzle, which would have also fit the scene far better than Love did. It’s got the aforementioned Muzzle on it, and Deftones’ Be Quiet and Drive, you know, a NuMetal song, the genre that was dominating in popularity in 1999.
This just leads me to the point that I’ve been struggling to make throughout the entire review: Does Mixtape exist simply to make people talk about it? Cause there’s not much of a game here to play, the writing is terrible and inconsistent, and the “nostalgia” reeks of someone from Australia getting all of their research about what life was like in the 1990s in America from Reddit’s /r/millenials forum and movies from 1981 to 1993. There’s also a few slight anachronisms that you’ll find (some of which I mentioned earlier) such as the kids taking photos with a digital view-maker style camera in the abandoned dinosaur park that looks like Gameboy Color photos or the VHS camera that they record the party on (while these things did exist, they would have been VERY expensive and it was clear these kids were supposed to low to middle class at best) or Slater making a “Jesus Take the Wheel” joke which didn’t become a popular phrase until Carrie Underwood put it into the cultural vernacular in 2005. Also, how did they do an ENTIRE section in a dinosaur park and not make one single Jurassic Park remark considering that’s one of the biggest movies of the 1990s?
The characters are all dressed like it’s 1993, and since they are in Seattle, it stands to reason that they were smack dab in the middle of Grunge. The problem with that is that in 1999, NuMetal was the craze and at least here in the midwest we were all wearing ridiculously baggy flared jeans that put bellbottoms to shame. There’s not one single wallet chain in the game, not one video game console in any of the kids rooms, and Stacey’s such a hipster that she knows songs that were barely hits in the 1960s but when she needed a “sports reference” she chose The Touch by Stan Bush from Transformers the Animated Movie and not Queen’s We Will Rock You or We Are the Champions? As I mentioned before, the music choices don’t make much sense because to be a hipster with the taste that Rockford has, she would have been the 1% of the 1% of hipsters, which would have made her the object of ridicule among her friends and they would refuse to play her mixtapes because it’s all old crap that they don’t know. The songs Stacey references but doesn’t actually play make more sense than 95% of her “mixtape”.
Ultimately, I suspect that there’s foul play behind the scenes here. I’m going out on a limb to suggest that Mixtape is going to wind up becoming the Trojan Horse for procedurally generated AI built games. It explains all of the problems this game has: incoherent and inconsistent writing, references to things that are outside of the time period, showing the kids in the wrong fashion instead of something more reflective of 1999, the inclusion of extremely deep cuts that there’s no chance a teenager in 1999 even knew existed, let alone listen to, and most of all the cassette tape debate that’s had social media buzzing for the past week. The game also showcases a CD-R that wouldn’t have been big enough to hold 74 minutes of music unless the files were 96kbps or less quality. Also, CDs would have said 500mb, not 500mbs.
As a last thought, the “reviewer gift pack” that Annapurna Interactive sent out to reviewers and influencers contained a replica of the headphones that Stacey wears: the KOSS Porta-Pro headphones. In the game, for some reason, her headphones have pause/play/rewind/fast-forward buttons on them. Just another piece of supporting evidence that the whole game was likely made with AI and once it wins a bunch of awards later this year, the usual suspects who are praising this game now and hating on AI in favor of “the artists” will be ready with their “AI is a good thing actually” pieces.
Mixtape should have been a slam dunk, but it’s so disjointed that it actively doesn’t know what it wants to do with itself. The stop-motion animation makes the characters look like stickers on top of the scenery instead of part of it, and had any of the game been built with the consult of someone who actually lived the experience this game attempts to revisit, it would have been a much more enjoyable experience. Instead, Mixtape is an interactive movie with a few minor sections that require input to ensure you’re still paying attention, and it’s wholly offensive to anyone who’s over the age of 35 because it feels like our life experience was mocked in a meeting room full of zoomers. If you’re not old enough to remember any of this stuff, it’s a passable at best visual novel and no worse than watching the next forgettable movie with an interesting box cover on an airplane. Beethoven and Dinosaur somehow have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Mixtape was reviewed on PC via Steam, using a retail copy bought by Niche Gamer. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Mixtape is now available for Windows PC (via Steam or Epic Games Store), Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.
