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It was only about a year ago when I learned that not everyone gets goosebumps from listening to music. There's a French word for it, freone, which describes the feeling some get when music or other powerful stimuli trigger a physiological response. This rush is felt in only about 50% of people in the world. It turns out I used to think it was all of us. That's probably a big part of why music means so much to me because I'm in the lucky camp that gets to enjoy this positively overwhelming response when the right song hits at just the right time. Mixtape is an adventure game that leans into this magical sensation, pairing its heartfelt, often hilarious moments with a sweeping soundtrack to create a coming
of age story I'll never forget. Mixtape is the second effort from Beethoven and Dinosaur, a small Australian team that includes some former rock stars who pivoted to gamedev and brought their love for music with them. In it, you play the musicobsessed Stacy Rockford, whose headphones may as well be an organic appendage. Inspired by movies like Superb Bad and the works of John Hughes. The driving force of the '90s set story is Stacy's attempt to make it to a killer beach party with her best pals Slater and Cassandra in tow. The morning after this party, Stacy is off to chase her dreams as a music supervisor. Basically, a professional mixtape maker for Hollywood projects. So, this is her and her friend's last
harrah together. whether they're ready for life to drag them into adulthood and see them go their separate ways or not. While relatively small, these stakes are deeply relatable, revealing a lot of big, honest emotions across the 4-hour runtime. The starring trio is incredibly well written, and all three foster empathy and investment from the very start of the game as they coast down the hills of their town on skateboards, calling out cars to dodge and doing flip tricks over trash cans. As Stacy breaks the fourth wall, announcing to you, the player, the song she picked for the moment, "You understand she's no phony. She knows her stuff when it comes to music, but her decision to leave town for New York has
driven a wedge in their friend group, who once made plans for a lengthy West Coast road trip that's now up in the air. Mixtape does so much so well, but one of the things I love most about it is its emotional honesty. Sure, as an adult with the benefit of hindsight, a friend moving away isn't the end of the world. But when you're a kid, it's your whole world blowing up. For Stacy, Slater, and Cassandra, they're on the verge of so much changing, and their comfortable routines are being thrown out, exchanged for the ambiguous world of growing up. Though the trio often joke around and give off a level of youthful sarcasm, they're also capable of letting down their emotional barriers
and spilling how they feel. It endear me to each of them in their journeys. Whether it be Stacy's bold career planning maneuvers, Cassandra's desperate desire to wiggle out from beneath her cop dad's iron fist, or Slater's somewhat untapped potential as a musician himself. How they stand up for each other, challenge each other, and even just how they, for lack of a better phrase, dick around, feels authentic, and it mesmerized me in each scene. Even then, sometimes it's the things they don't speak that affected me the most. Through it all, excellent performances bring these characters and others to vibrant life. The structure of those scenes is another tremendous highlight. As the night unfolds and the
friends remain hellbent on hunting down some alcohol and/or weed for the party, you'll spend hangout time in each of their bedrooms. There, flashbacks unfold to the tune of Stacy's carefully curated mixtape designed with the explicit intent to become the soundtrack to their grand finale in town together. Though the game often carries a punky middle finger of a spirit, the soundtrack is eclectic. From favorites like Dvau and Susi and the Banshees to lesserk known to me anyway standouts like Harper's Bizaarre and Stan Bush. You won't be shunned for not knowing them all as Stacy acts as the studios proxy providing a bit of musical history with each entry when she breaks the fourth wall. Allah ferris beller I loved
hearing these new to me tracks nearly as much as I loved revisiting some all-time favorites like the cure. Each of these flashback moments is given relatively light gameplay mechanics, often bespoke for just a singular sequence and then quickly disposed of. Like the studio's previous game, The Artful Escape, Mixtape isn't meant to challenge most players on the sticks. Though occasional fail states exist, like if you crash into a car on your skateboard, there's no penalty for messing up. It just rewinds instantly and resumes. Mixtape uses the language of games to tell its story, not test you. And thanks to the story perfectly marrying a killer soundtrack and clever mechanics, it hits just right.
Have a nice day. In one moment, you may be toilet papering the principal's house. Then in another, you'll be stumbling through a video store as the employee calls out to you beyond the fog of your drunken stouper. And this must be the first game to ever let you control a pair of French kississing tongues, swapping spit and twisting and a fervor of adolescent hormones. In one of my favorite sequences, the kids fly high above the town, soaring out over the forest, over the nearby lake, and into town, deriding their high school as they coast over the pool of yellow buses. It's all set to the tune of Atmosphere by Joy Division.
By my estimation, one of the greatest bands there ever was. Of course, the kids didn't really learn to fly that night, but it sure as hell felt that way to them. How lucky we must be to have had moments in our lives where we felt the same. Mixtape is telling you its story, but it trusts you recall moments of your own that resonate. As great as the game feels and sounds, it also looks exquisite. Built in Unreal, it takes advantage of the engine's impeccable lighting. Coated in a hyper stylized cartoonishness, it still manages to give its characters the emotiveness their excellent performances deserve. This puts the game on full display, averting the all too common video game problem of
a great story and performances let down by somewhat wooden character models. Every frame is a rad painting. And like the gameplay controls, the perspective shifts often, giving each scene what it needs. In one scene, for example, in which the kids flee a party crashed by the cops, you'll seamlessly transition from a traditional thirdp person perspective to the view from the news helicopter above. Watching the runaways take their outofc control shopping cart onto the interstate. Broadly speaking, Mixtape is an adventure game, if only because that's often the bucket one might drop a game like this into. a game where the rules of establishing and then iterating on gameplay don't apply. Not
one of these moments frustrates or overstays its welcome, with the minor exception being the time spent in the kids' bedrooms, when you're allowed to peruse for a bit and trigger missable dialogue by interacting with objects in each space. Collectively, it's less like you're playing a game with a great soundtrack and more like someone has turned a soundtrack into an interactive experiment. It had to be a game, and that's partly what makes it so much more affecting than if this were a movie. But still, the music leads. Mixtape is whatever it needs to be in each moment, and the studio makes a strong case for why it must be that way. By tying each memory or moment to a particular song,
mixtape delivers on its main idea. Music isn't something we do, it's something we are. When we work out, we put on the playlist that gets us ready to run through a brick wall. On our wedding day, we play a song that reminds us of when we first met or whose lyrics speak to our journey. When we scream the words to our favorite songs in a venue of 300 sweaty strangers, it bonds us to one another in a way nothing else does or even could do. Stacy gets this intimately, as does Beethoven and Dinosaur. Quite obviously, music can make us feel incredibly powerful or cathartically vulnerable. And when the right song hits at the right moment, it may just send a happy shiver down your spine, which is how I spent much of my
time with Mixtape and why I'll never forget it. Heat.
