ash's stash

mixtape, with bonus annapurna meltdown

not indie, not a game. not even a good mixtape!

now playing: people are people (instrumental) - depeche mode (some great reward)

disclaimer: i did not pay a cent for this game, but not because i got a review copy! you'll be able to swiftly tell on account of the fact that i'm not sucking the game off whilst listening to my Mixtape™ Compact-Disc™ Player with my Mixtape™ Headphones (As Worn By Stacey Rockford)!

i'm not here to tell you that mixtape is a bad video game. that is because, even by the most fluffy definition that stretches to include just about everything, at a most basic level, a "video game" is typically considered to be a ludonarrative experience, in some capacity. what does that mean? well, generally, it's supposed to be a piece of software that encompasses an interactive experience that you take part in, that simultaneously tells a story. other definitions are available, of course; and it certainly seems that mixtape is operating on some definition far, far, far removed from any that i would apply and in fact seems rather antithetical to each of those concepts. its interactivity boils down to such inconsequential elements that it makes DVD menu games of the early 2000s blush, and its story is little more than a vehicle to spew out vague floated references that more often than not are in no way accurate and served to take me out of it. i mean, come the fuck on, i was born in the early 2000s and even i know that not a fucking soul alive is going to risk fucking their perfectly good tape with a pencil. want to know how i know that? because despite being born in said early 2000s, i never said i was well off! i was privvy to tapes, both audio cassettes and VHS tapes! that sort of thing is echoed throughout the- no, not game. oh - the runtime of mixtape. there is an ongoing flagrant disregard for, well, reality, largely. there's a frequent lack of grounding in the time period it so allegedly is attempting to ape. i suppose that the big companies (we'll get back to that) have finally fucking mercifully started to move on from that tired 80s nostalgia fad after the ending of stranger things was so shit that it singlehandedly upset the apple cart on that for at least the next few minutes. hooray! but instead now we're getting 90s nostalgia. boo! 90s nostalgia that is written like it's yiik, but without the self-awareness. oh, god, that sounds horrid. what do you mean yiik could have less self-awareness? well, whilst yiik is telling a narrative about a man so unbelievably stuck in the past and up his own arse that he can barely give himself footing in reality anymore and uses the 90s nostalgia to further that effect, mixtape, conversely, is written by people who are like alex from yiik, down to the random slip-ins of idiosyncratic 2010s vernacular despite being so fixated on the past. for one example - despite the beginning of the game needing to explain what a CD is, and of course having the aforementioned dogshit tape scene, one character uses the phrase 'huge if true'. now, i'm not going to argue that this phrase didn't exist before a certain period in time, as i'm sure that somebody likely used that combination of words, or indeed a similar one, but... fucking really? most people are saying "big if true" because it was a bullshit phrase from, like, early 2010s NFL twitter that blew up to high hell because people rightfully saw it as this stupidly vapid and shorthand way of saying that something was interesting and warranted further investigation, which then itself evolved into usually being said sarcastically and ironically by most millennials and gen z kids. which makes it all the more interesting that it's seemingly being played as an entirely straight piece of dialogue, almost as though the person writing has had no experience with friendgroups of their own painfully clear age, let alone in the time period in question.

let's start from the top though. i remember seeing mixtape initially at day of the devs of summer 2025, as it was happening near the time of summer games fest, and so me and my friend group were happily drinking in any and all games being showcased. me, personally, i always like to watch day of the devs because i like tim schafer and it feels like getting to see an old family friend knock about for a bit, like you're seeing them across the street in a coffee shop and it puts a smile on your face to know they're still going on. anyway - i remember seeing mixtape there. i remember seeing at amidst all of these other games, these wonderful, colorful, thoughtful and above all else, unique experiences, and i remember what our collective takeaway was:

"somebody wants to capitalise on life is strange hype."

which honestly seemed like a fair takeaway! it seemed to have a similar art style, be similarly shackled to this sort of youth-culture sensibilities without actually being in any way shaped by the youth, and to be wallowing in a sense of nostalgia. i remember that all of us just sort of groaned, thought it was a bit odd that an indie game had access to the music of devo and iggy pop, and we entirely forgot about it within days. except for me! i saw mixtape poke it's head out and darken my door again after that nigh-year of absence, and you know what?

i must cordially apologise to life is strange. at least life is strange did literally anything interesting or thematically driven by its nostalgia at any stage. it also had more consequential interactivity. mixtape exists to inform the detractors of life is strange just how much worse things could be.

let's start with the relatively small potatoes. the file size, for what is actually here, is inexcusable. a few .mp3s does not constitute 10 pissing gigabytes, and the gameplay and visuals certainly are not there to make up for the extra space. additionally, i cannot believe that i had to sit and watch a shader compilation screen. is this really just... where we're at, now? where games even outside of the AAA space are so willing to just flagrantly disregard any sense of optimisation or appeal to pick up and play to where shader screens are going to be a norm rather than an exception?

that aside, we should likely stop dancing around and get to the... again, hesitate to call it a "game"... ah! the "overhyped dogshit" at hand.

we begin, somewhat, in medias res, with the main menu morphing into the first cutscene. should i even call it a cutscene when the game is one large cutscene itself...? regardless. we begin with our protagonist mugging the camera and giving starlord-level smug dialogue about what a CD is, claiming that "soon you won't be listening to music, you'll be listening to who you were." it was at this point that i sighed and threw my head into my hands, already knowing that it truly was as bad as i'd been led to believe. but let's push on regardless. the conceit of this introductory expository scene is to set up that this particular eponymous mixtape (ah! he said it!) is important, as it's a marking of the last night our protagonist, stacey rockford, being in her hometown in california, blue moon lagoon (incidentally, looked into this: not a real place in california), before she leaves for new york on a far more interesting sounding quest of becoming a protegé to a famous music supervisor, bella deltone. it's funny, the needle drop happens in full just after she proclaims "i bet one of us dies this time," a cruel joke on me to expect any form of stakes for the next few hours i was about to spend in catatonia. we start as we mean to go on, i suppose, which is also echoed by the introduction to the... "interactivity" of the experience. to continue to test my expectations, i saw that i was likely expected to hold and utilise the controller the game had been so quick to remind me to grab for the best experience, and you know... i just set the fucker down. i set my controller down and i watched stacey begin gliding effortlessly down the winding hills of scenic blue moon lagoon without a care in the world, bending her knees and curving bends all on her own, like a big girl. i didn't need to guide her at all. all three characters honked "car" one after the other to indicate the presence of what else but a motor vehicle. excellent, i thought, here comes a ten-ton ticket to fun. this'll make me need to get on the sticks. nope. swerved out of the way without any need for me to be there.

fucking christ, it really is playing itself, isn't it? no, surely, it'll get better soon. this is just the intro! games sometimes have really hands-off intros and can still be good! look at half-life! that's a twenty-minute jerk-off session followed by an incredible work of the medium! who knows! mixtape might rival half-life! those IGN journalists sure seem to think so! maybe i should just stick with it!

speaking of those three characters honking, the dialogue immediately struck me, and i wish i personally had been in front of that aforementioned car instead. the dudebro, slater, aloof from his near-skirmish with anything interesting, proclaimed, "duuude, i almost fuckin briiicked!" it was at this point that i knew that chances were slim that i was going to enjoy any part of this. even with life is strange, there was a certain charm to how that game was written. inpenetrable behind layers of slang and lingo that i can't even pretend to fully grasp or agree with, but in a certain awkward way that just truly sang "these are some troubled youths". i can't help but feel as though this line, though, was supposed to be a young and free proclamation, given the energetic score of devo backing it. thankfully, zut alors, something happened, next, reader - another car. the same honking. another obnoxious slater line. but this time, god in heaven forbid, i had to actually - gasp - press X on my controller device to do a flip trick in order to avoid this one! surely it'll - hey, why are they all clapping along to the devo? only stacey has headphones, or this CD. how the fuck do y'all hear the devo? oh, wait, focus, here comes another car, you're all honking about it again, watch ou-and it just sailed straight by again. oh fucking wonderful. the brief gameplay sequence ends with a title drop, which, despite its willingness to generate shaders for ten minutes before booting, still managed to hitch and jitter the game in an ugly, offputting way that would make even a good game give me the ick. incidentally, it was at this point that i paused the game to just sit there and contemplate if i was really going ahead with this, and i saw something: the pause menu depicts a CD. oh, cute, i sarcastically thought, before closer examination revealed that this was a CD-R claiming it was 500mbs. okay, already, i'm starting on my pedantic bullshit; that's just not correct. a CD-R can be 500MB. not mbs, an entirely fictional measurement that would not appear on said discs because that would be false advertising. it would read 500MB on the disc. here's a fucking image of a CD-R that i got off of google dot com, the most basic research able to be conducted, inside of three goddamned seconds.

this is my immediate issue with things like this. they're all about fruitlessly wallowing in this nostalgia, but they refuse to commit to even the most fucking basic details. again - the tape pencil thing, is likewise an example of this. it's wearing these old digs as a skin and leaping around as though you're part of the crew, when... no, sorry, but you're not. if you're not even willing to look into something for, again, three seconds of your dev cycle in your game grounded solely in "remember the 90s?" then why the fuck should i be paying you mind? but, sure, easy enough mistake to make. let's press forward. ah-hah, uhm. misnomer there. let's unpause and likely not need to press forward.

we continue on with our protagonists skitching across a bridge on the back of a car. for some reason, stacey was yelling "treachery! subterfuge!" i believe that this is what alien species believe "banter" to be without any prior exposure to the human race. is the joke supposed to be that the humble motor vehicle stands in opposition to their free skateboarding will? is it supposed to be symbolism for the girl jumping into the car eschewing their youthful tendencies to skateboard in exchange for the more boring and pedestrian transport method? am i entertaining myself more by inventing plot threads than i am by playing the game? well, the answer to that last one is definitive: yes! "it could be one of our greatest hits," stacey smugly touts after giving an expository rundown of the planned events of the evening, in phrasing that nobody would ever actually say out loud in real life, doubly so around high-schoolers, unless they wanted to be fucking stoned to death. the following gameplay section had a surprise - it had no fucking music. really? you're going to make devo, the one saving grace that i can have in this game, swan off into the distance from me, and now you care about it coming from a source that everyone could hear, one that materialised at the end of the last scene and had no reason to be tied to the song? doubly so seeing as stacey still has her headphones on? the mild interactivity serves as a backdrop to an utterly banal conversation about the propagation of underage drinking, before it gets cut short again. cassandra gets out of the car, coming up with an excuse for not skating. stacey claims this to be fair, and then there is an honest-to-god secret handshake... i can't even call it a QTE! there is nothing that makes you have to act quickly in this game! there is an input string that you have to rattle off to do it, but there's no time constraint! if i just sit there, fuck all is gonna happen! it's a slow-time event, just made to check that you haven't nodded off or already blown your brains out! stacey then begins giving another mug, with another smug speech, about how the "opening music for bands is always set. they know when it starts, when it'll finish." okay, well, i'm glad to know that you've never actually been to a gig before with any opening act, and i doubt that's a flaw of her character; i think that's likely on the writers for just having zero fucking awareness of culture, for reasons that i'll get into much much later. either way, though, another thing to highlight: unlike the intro, she's... just talking, to the camera, outright? in the intro, it was clear that we were hearing her thought-narration "you're probably wondering how i got here" type bullshit, which made sense, because it would be fucking strange if she was talking out loud to an invisible person as her friends gradually approached her. it is even fucking stranger the fact that they are both beside her and they don't address her. i was expecting an unfunny "uhhh who are you talking to?" type bit, but no - not even that! there is genuinely zero self-awareness present in this game, despite it having that kind of smarmy, smug writing, it is played entirely fucking straight! and somehow? i had forgotten just how infuriating it was to not be sardonically detached from your own material all the time when it fucking sucks. sure, pointing out a problem doesn't excuse it, but it's at least fucking something.

after being told by cassandra that she's ruined their planned roadtrip, stacey proceeds to exposit her need to give her mixtape (ah! he said it!) to deltone in new york to become "the world's premier music supervisor," complete with a flickering "vhs filter" title beneath her. we then cut to some wonderful stock footage depictions of the domains of a music supervisor, complete with yet more expository dialogue about how stacey rockford has wanted to be one since the eighth grade. there is also a glance at a far cooler artstyle for a fleeting moment with a very flashy graffiti-styled 2D look, but much like the devo before it, i was ripped away from the concept of anything being allowed to be interesting and planted squarely back into mixtape. back into it's shitty, spider-verse knock-off artstyle. it is yet another in a long list of pieces of media that refuse to acknowledge or understand why the low-FPS vibrant style works for spider-verse, and sees it as a way to hack some of the animation budget down, both in terms of time and money invested. and for a game, that should be a slam dunk; it's a quick, cheap and cheerful way to make it nowhere near as demanding. it was at this moment in proceedings that i heard that the fans on my 5090 that i purchased two short months ago kick its fans up higher than it gets when i'm playing monster hunter wilds. okay.

our three leads then proceed to walk up stacey's staircase in slow-mo to just like honey, topped off with a Totally Hi Larious And Relatable Scene of stacey's father gently asking her if she had called her sister to get picked up from the airport yet, to which she yells back at him to "stop pressuring me!" do you get it? it's that sort of only-in-hollywood teen angst, that real nobody-understands-my-pain type shit. the kind that makes you have unwarranted disrespect for anybody in a position of power (we'll get back to that!). but it's usually, typically associated more strongly with... you know... younger teenagers. like, because of puberty. this is not a way that an 18-year old acts unless they have been raised to be deeply spoiled and unappreciative by poor parenting - something that is very much not the case by the way that her father gently respects her. although, then again, maybe i'm wrong; upon walking over to investigate a family photo in the new section of gameplay, taking on that ever-tedious telltale mold of faux-gameplay of milling about a scene slowly and hitting A on things, stacey claims "if we had a sitcom theme song, it would be people are people by depeche mode," which is one of my favorites of depeche mode's, incidentally. small problem. it's a song that scrutinises needless discrimination in society against minorities, starting as a lament for people to simply respect the identities of one another ("it's obvious you hate me though i've done nothing wrong \ i've never even met you, so what could i have done?") and eventually transitioning into a plea to not be beat down on any further by a bigoted assailant, who the narrator still has a belief in, but unfortunately continues to be beaten by ("now you're punching and you're kicking and you're shouting at me \ i'm relying on your common decency \ so far, it hasn't surfaced, but i'm sure it exists \ it just takes a while to travel from your head to your fists"). so what the fuck are you trying to say here, mixtape? you're, in one breath, preaching the importance and significance of music, and yet you're seemingly disinterested in what it's saying itself? is mixtape the purchaseable equivalent of one of those people who'll tell you that they think hey ya is an anthem of happiness because they've never listened to the lyrics? i then waded toward stacey's room, interacting with a CD-R copy of portishead's debut album on her desk, claiming it was "cinematic, ambitious, ahead of it's time. just like me." it was at this point that i had already begun to mentally check out. i was becoming disenfranchised with this game within minutes of it beginning because it had nothing, truly nothing for me to latch onto other than the few times that i would sit up because it got things so egregiously wrong that i had no choice but to be attentive. which the following scene paid off in spades! back to back, the tape rewinding scene and then that insipid kissing scene. get it? it's like... kissing as a teenager is awkward! we need to show you these two teenagers necking on a hill and have you control their tongues with the analog sticks until you're arbitrarily permitted to hit A to cancel it. let me reiterate: it does not simply end the sequence, nor is it swift, you are sat there for a solid, truly fucking stomach-curdling minute and it expects you to be the one to call it quits. i just couldn't believe it. and i am no prude; i am a deeply sexual queer transgender person who has had accounts for everything under the sun at some point or another as a young child with unsupervised internet access, who had to be taught awkwardly how to kiss by my dear wife, and i'm considering this a bit full-on, doubly so for something that's not even 15 minutes into the game. i was earnestly baffled by the notion that this was scoring 10s everywhere despite it being so hamfisted with its far-from-original "being a teenager sucks" message, not doing anything new save for having a newfound way to disgust me, and yet here it was, with it's protagonist as a mouthpiece, attempting to claim that it was some grand sweeping masterwork in any way comparable to classic albums cemented in history. go fuck yourself. at this point, any further engagement i give it is at my own detriment and i accept that. i just have to see this car crash through. unfortunately, the following scene in a car featured no such crash; just a sequence where you could optionally press buttons to jingle keys for yourself whilst a car ride goes by with freak by silverchair playing over the radio.

now that the stage is set for the worst performance of all time, i've not got too much to cover, mostly because... yeah, no, as you can likely tell from the above recounting, it is not my cup of tea, and this is the case as a result of it not really trying to do anything interesting, new, innovative... and yet, it's considering itself in high regards, on this sort of pedestal. i fucking loathe shit like that. marvel movies are always so wank-y, what with having a cinematic universe that it expects you to be invested in like, 20 other movies and 5 shows to even remotely follow, seeing as no one movie gives any pay-off, but it becomes something that i resent because of the fact that it's so willing to indulge in itself and continue propagating that bullshit. it insists upon itself. mixtape, likewise, is so far up its own arse, and so buried in self-importance, that it neglects to remember if it's actually doing anything that warrants anybody else's attention in the first instance. if you're really that desperate to know the story, here goes:

we must get booze for the party tonight. it's gonna be so awesome saaauce.

noooo stacey don't listen to my album broooo

cassandra broooo your dad is a cop and he is a dick because we are anti-authority we gotta free you broooooo

and even then, those second two are a fucking final-act addition. like, that's not me being facetious, that's not me being in any way glib... you get back to stacey's room, like, over halfway through the game, and that's around when those two plot threads are even vaguely tugged on to begin unravelling them. it is a story that hinges largely on the glorification of underage drinking as a wonderful amazing thing that's going to bring them all together, until it decides that it wants to indulge in other teen dramas for the fuck of it, basically. it feels disjointed in when it does and doesn't want to proceed with it. which like, if i'm being charitable, that could be symbolic of how awkwardness as a teenager will kinda force you into uhming and ahhing about shit for a while? but even then, that shouldn't really be ringing through into your narrative in such a way that i have to interpret that being the case to glean a positive spin on it. what, just because you're not having me interact with it through playing it, i've gotta mad libs the fuckin' story together myself, man?

speaking of, woof, that "gameplay", which i hasten to add once again is entirely optional and the most it requires of you is menuing and maybe every so often moving the joystick slightly, is also not good. likely by virtue of what i just said - it's so inconsequential that you could happily turn your controller off for large swathes of time and not really see much be affected. it's that same old telltale games mold of watch a cutscene, look around an environment for a bit, watch a cutscene, look around, maybe have a mild minigame or QTE this time, rinse, repeat, blather. i already do not like telltale games, as i find that the interactivity bogs down what would otherwise be a well-written show or movie that could have been stronger if they focused on a singular story as opposed to branching narratives that don't each feel as good as one another, so it's kind of implicit that there's one canonical way to go about things - something that is very much cemented by later episodes of certain works. but i'll give them this: they at least had the branching narrative. they at least had something to do in the cutscenes. they at least kept you invested by needing you to press the buttons to get your protagonist to say something. it is the most baseline level of interaction available, but it is still more than mixtape can say. oh, not to mention, most of those telltale games did typically at least have decent stories attached. also more than mixtape can say. and it's funny, too, because sometimes, in its cutscene sections, mixtape does offer gameplay, and it almost unanimously bogs down what might have been a better section to have watched! there's this one black-and-white scene where you're sort of floating through this place, and it would have been entirely unremarkable if it was not for the fact that you could control it and make stacey bash into shit like a gmod ragdoll. it transformed that scene from utterly forgettable to misguided unintentional hilarity. where it strives for interactivity, it fails, and makes me wish that it simply didn't fucking bother, because it's either so baseline to be pointless, or actively detracts from the emotional weight that they clearly want a scene to possess. hell, there's an example of both of those hitting at the same exact time: the sprint to go save cassandra from her cop dad, has rather infamously been making the rounds, on account of the fact that not only is your input meaningless, but it's meaningless at what should be a pivotal moment in the plot. you're about to go get cassandra after you've spent all this meaningless time on cutaway memory moments like we're fucking spongebob truth or square in this bitch, and if any of that setup had have invigorated me in any capacity whatsoever, i would have been slapping my hands all over the controller regardless. i can get invested in some mid shit sometimes, even if it can go along just fine without me pressing anything - i am a sonic fan, after all. regardless, the game just... doesn't build up to this moment in any other capacity than showing that cassandra is a bit fucked and she has a cop dad and oh dear now the twain shall meet. the running sequence can, and will, play perfectly fine with zero input. you can entirely put down the controller and watch it. and you know what? you'll get a better experience that way! you'll get little gag setpieces like stacey sliding over a table face-first and saying "happy birthday!" as she passes a party, or see little bits of personality desperately attempting to eke through as she precariously backs up and ducks under ventilation ducts to get by. if you do choose to do inputs, if you do choose to do the platforming... you get an entirely bland scene where she runs along perfectly and it's nowhere near as hectic or entertaining! it's just a straight shot! even in choosing to partake in the gameplay, you are actively removing the interesting part! i didn't even fucking know that was possible.

to it's credit, there are a handful (well, hand-half) of scenes that have genuine interactivity about them. not this "press a button or don't" bollocks, things where some degree of genuine interaction is present. i liked the bit where you were able to spraypaint, although it felt like shit because of the animations feeling slow as balls and therefore ruining it. but, speaking of balls, that softball batting section - or, to appease anybody who knows me reading this, the honest to god The Baseball Minigame section - was pretty decent too. same with the stone skipping bit. each of these have interactivity to them, and they also inform you about the characters as you take part. granted, scantly, but it's still better than the squarely fuck all that the rest of the game is doing. it provides a framework for you to play with for a little bit before moving on. but that, itself, is another thing: the game is very distinctly cordoned off into these sorts of sections. the memories are each disparate from one another, serving no other real purpose than to serve as a track change, and for some reason a gameplay switch-up. which is especially egregious when most of the gameplay either fucking sucks or doesn't need me. it is just a collection of things that seem different enough to be able to evoke the most basic mental stimulation. it is quite literally "hype moments" being distilled into the sole entertainment factor of the game... sure is a shame that the moments are far from hype and it feels so transparently like it's trying to be bait for reactions to get clipped and shared that it becomes utterly meaningless. doubly so, seeing as it'll be practically impossible to share those clips due to the copyrighted music! wonder how you guys got that, again...? foreshadowing...

madly, for something calling itself mixtape, the thing that lets it down so often is the musical choice. it wallows in the very thing i criticised at the beginning; that stupid media trend for the last decade and change towards 70s and 80s nostalgia. it'll happily mention pearl jam, pixies, and many others, but the most 90s rep you're getting is one smashing pumpkins song, one portishead song, one silverchair song (and one from the late 90s, at that, so it barely qualifies) and by the skin of its teeth, the 1990 iggy pop song, candy. everything else runs as far back as 1971. if this was supposed to be some greater message about how good music is timeless, then it's not as hamfisted as anything else it's trying to say and therefore didn't come across. or perhaps good music really is timeless, seeing as it would need fucking time travel to play remember when by mitch murder, a song that first released in 2011. ironically, remember when is a song that makes heavy use of the stereotypical 80s drum pads and synthesizer beats - basically, think of what would happen if you put depeche mode on sleeping pills and asked them to perform a, charitably, languid piece of music. i'm sure that mitch murder himself is a swell guy, but his mega man album covers aren't exactly something that would be en vogue just yet to say the fucking least. i suppose there's a great irony in the fact that a track so heavily drenched in attempting to appeal to a nostalgia that is barely present in the decade its so blatantly a homage to being included in mixtape, a game that is attempting to appeal to a nostalgia that the writers do not have any experience of outside of romanticised throwback media like it. perhaps most damning of all - mixtape does not have any hip-hop or rap. a game. called mixtape. you know. the term mixtape originating from the early 70s, wherein DJs would distribute recordings of their gigs via tape. a mix recorded via tape, if you will. hell, even if you don't go back that far, the 90s were the advent of DJ screw, man, you're really not gonna have anything chopped n screwed? that's perfect for your zoomer ass, it's just the old-gen term for vaporwave edits. mixtapes, in the time that you are grounding this game, were largely used as sample platters for up-and-coming musicians in the hip-hop industry. the term 'mixtape' obviously also could be defined as it has been here, as a tape containing a mix of songs, but for it to not even touch on the other side of the coin here is very indicative that this game is handled predominantly by white, upper-class millennial hands that have no fucking clue what they're banging on about.

speaking of white, upper-class millennial hands! let's get back to one of my main sticking points against this game: it is so very fucking clear that not a soul on this team actually has awareness of what 90s life was like. fuck, human life, practically. i've already touched on the CD-R thing at great length, but i really do want to highlight the pencil-tape thing: moments after that scene in the bedroom that i checked out during, the pencil-tape scene happens, and it cemented my fate. it sees the protagonists finding a tape that stacey had received from a previous lover "after the incident." already, fuck off with that shit. nobody talks like this! at a push, say "after... y'know." or something like that, if you want to continue to have this cool aloof vibe, but anyone else wouldn't feel the need to mention it; they'd awkwardly get the tape and be like "oh, man, it's from so-and-so. jesus" and then maybe think about it, sure - that could actually be interesting, maybe provide actual introspection and see how stacey has dealt with a seemingly traumatic thing - but... no. let's provide the most basic "you're supposed to want to know" hook. "oh the horrors" bro. and then, it happens: she picks up the tape, jams a pencil into the spool, and spins it around and around and around. i don't feel like i need to reiterate, but in keeping with the game ensuring nobody's left behind, let me go once again for those in the back: NOBODY FUCKING DID THIS. at least, not for fun, anyway - maybe at a push if the machine ate the tape or something. in fact, i'm fairly sure that if you tried to do this, you would fuck your tapes. want to know why? because even if you were going to do this, in-game, it's in the wrong fucking spool! please do NOT do this! that's both "don't screw your tapes up" and a kind of general plea that i felt in my soul as i felt my soul being drained by the yakubian devils responsible for this dreck. there's this sort of general air about it, where this is almost like a fanfiction for a life the writer wished they could have aspired to. the small-town girl aspiring to be bigger than she is, going to parties, being "cool" (tenuous), having an anti-establishment slant, having friends. all of these things, with how they are written in this script, read as though the writers have no prior interaction with these concepts. take for example, that scene with freak; nobody has ever fucking headbanged like that. who the fuck headbangs to one beat, entirely brings their head to a full, complete stop, and then headbangs one more time? who in the name of god switches on-and-off a light in the back of a car to the beat of a song? who plays with the fucking locks on a car in beat to the song, doubly so when one of the people investigating it is the driver of said car? i especially like the section where their faces are entirely motionless as they hang out of the windows turning the headlights off and on, and it's immediately seen that the road has no other traffic on it whatsoever. not even like. some sliding gifs or something, man? i suppose that makes it fine that you keep randomly honking the horn to the beat too. that's them having zero awareness of basic human interaction, or like, moreso how to conduct yourself in a set of admittedly undefined instructions regarding your behaviour towards music. i personally have not seen anybody act like this hence why it weirds me out. but then, that smash cuts into a scene where stacey has intimate knowledge of where deltone is going to be in new york. despite living in california. in a small town. IN THE 1990s. how in the flying fuck would she have obtained this information? i don't think i need to say this, but the internet was not quite yet the hive of stalkers, scum and villainy that it is today to provide that information so readily, and magazines weren't exactly going to publish tabs on the exact goings-on of celebrities, especially not some random music overseer. artists? sure. some producer? unlikely, at best. and it's even more unlikely again that they would publicise that producer's favorite coffee shop down to the street name.

and the fucking capstone of it all, the whitest part about this fuckass game, it's not the lack of mention of hip-hop, it's not the lack of interest in the lyrics of songs that depict minorities being abused that you don't care about, it's not even the clear removal from society that they all have: it's that fucking cassandra police scene.

amusingly, before i do go on to describe it, the scene preceeding it literally fucking has slater doing the yiik hands on head thing. i'm serious. check this shit.

anyway, to continue.

an excerpt:

[cassandra holds up a lighter]

"i want you to understand, this ain't a catastrophe... it's a warning... daddy, if you trap me here, this will only be the beginnings of my wicked ways... cus i'm angry and i'm wired and i'm fixing for a whole lotta trouble. if you make me stay here i'm gonna burn the whole fucking place down!"

please keep in mind that each use of elipses here also denotes where the powerchords are being played in spellbound by siouxsie and the banshees. i cannot lie to you if you see this and think it's cool, you are fucking embarrassing, man. that song rocks, this writing fucking sucks ass. what the fuck kind of teenager is going to say to their father whilst rebelling, "this will only be the beginnings of my wicked ways"? that sounds like something i'd say to take the piss and to make my mother laugh, not as a desperate plea for angsty attention whilst waving a lighter around like i reckon i'm the next shirley winters.

[cassandra's father, the police officer, looks on from a cruiser]

"there'll be patrol cars up and down this road. get out of here, go on. back the way you came... i guess we have ourselves an understanding."

so... what? we spent a fair majority of the time false-"rebelling" against authority figures, like that stupid fucking scene with the principal, who lets cassandra get away with a detention, where previously he was going to expell stacey outright - you know, clearly setting up some sort of idea that those with powerful connections are going to inevitably be treated better, maybe it'll lead for some sort of conflict between them? that could be interesting! oh, fuck, forgot, it's mixtape. it was so funny for it to not only entirely eschew addressing the clear power imbalance and preferential treatment, but for the solution to be that some authority will bend the knee to you!? the takeaway here being that some cops are cool? despite the fact that the thing that is being considered fine is a cop, because it's his daughter being related to it, letting somebody get away with assumed arson (because at this point, he could not have known it was not her fault; she was standing in front of a house fire clutching a lighter), and later discovered underage drinking? lesson being: if daddy says it's cool, it's cool! or, even better, seeing as the entire cast is white and middle-class: wait, i don't need to rebel against anything, because the world was already made for me, and that's good enough!

and i suppose the most insulting thing isn't even technically the contents of the game. no, past all the soulless vapid nostalgic ideation of a period that was never lived in by anyone sans middle-class white suburban americans featured within, it's presence within the game is speaking to a far greater and more insidious evil, here.

this game was released by annapurna interactive, and people, for some reason, when you point this out on twitter, are quick to hop to defend them: "they released outer wilds!" they cry. "where were you when stray released?" they retort. well, let me tell you two things for free: one, in the case of outer wilds, lightning-in-a-bottle moments can happen that entirely forego an otherwise entirely mediocre back catalogue, and two, stray is the precise example of that. stray got away from most people on account of the fact that there wasn't a blatant attempt to ship several of the larger gaming publications free swag alongside their review copies. stray didn't get 10/10s across the board; it was rightfully criticised due to its shallow gameplay, lack of any real substance to either the puzzles or the platforming. and perhaps most pertinent to our conversation on mixtape today - people thought that eschewing a talking protagonist to write something that is, charitably, mediocre, instead of perhaps having the characters speak in the language that your companion translates for you, would have been infinitely more interesting. now, i do bring that up as a sly dig because by god would i have preferred the dialogue in this game to have been filtered through something that made me unable to decipher it, but it also highlights a bigger issue: these games are afraid to make a commitment to their one alleged USP, and instead focus on pushing their "unique" thing, i.e. being about a cat or being about an insufferable millennial, significantly more through the marketing materials than by doing any fucking research to make a good quality representation. stray is excusable; unfortunately, even those of us who are therian cannot fully attest to the life of a humble housecat in its entirety, and what little we can resolutely ascertain requires some degree of extrapolation to make into an interesting vehicle for gameplay. contrast this with mixtape. a game that is based on one of the most trite, over-explored, romanticised, harped-on periods of human history despite a fraction of a fraction of people having actually experienced it in the way its depicted, because you can jangle keys in front of people under the guise of it being old shit, and they'll clap like seals. funnily enough, no, somebody mentioning pearl jam does not constitute for anything actually interesting going on. nor does it constiute for well-written dialogue.

but why, pray tell, would a supposed indie game focus on a white suburban culture that very few were able to actually experience, whilst targetting what are inarguably the most marketable parts of the period, after having dropped a game that is literally just "Lol Be An Epic Cat: The Showstopping Experience"? well, it's simple. annapurna interactive is owned by a fucking nepo baby, and a really egregious one at that. can't be that bad, i thought, after i'd first heard talk of it. it's going to be something like, oh, it's owned by some c-list celebrity's tangential relation, or something like that. like, it's gonna be fuckin' kid rock's nephew or some bullshit. no - imagine my shock to learn that the ceo is megan ellison. you know? daughter of larry ellison? you know, the dude who is ceo of fucking oracle? ergo, the dude who owns java? which like everything in the fucking known universe runs on? the sixth-richest guy in the world who owns 98% of a hawaiian island, and his huge investment in paramount-skydance, which is also owned by his son? that guy?

oh, what a fucking joy! that'll explain how the licensing was no biggie, and why they were so adamant about not having a streamer mode; it was a fucking investment to get the licenses! it cost a lot of money to get some big songs, and they're not pussies who actually care about the customer, they care about the fact that they can show off the fact that they have the scratch to get all these licensed songs! can't wait for a few years from now when you decide that renewing the licenses isn't worth it and this game becomes inaccessible without sailing the seven seas!

so, since we're here, and we're up to speed on just how "grassroots" this fucking indie project is, for it to be very, very resolutely funded from an inherently evil (not to mention very very white-upper-class!) place, what else have we got cooking? well, there's the fact that before annapurna made video games, they also covered a gamut of other things, like film, theatre and, perhaps the one that confused me the most, animation. annapurna animation was founded by the ex-blue sky studios CEOs. what? so, we're several layers deep here, now. we have not only the sixth-most-richest-dude's daughter on standby, but we're also now dealing with CEOs of a company that was owned by disney? the fucking money must be flying here! there's got to be no small shortage of funds flying around in this "indie" space that is being founded by some of the biggest fuckers going!

and where that comes to a nadir, for me, the first time i properly recognised annapurna as an evil force, and everybody thought i was a nutcase, nobody got why it upset me: cocoon. cocoon is an otherwise entirely innocuous game. it would have remained as such, in it's own lane, before it won "best debut indie" at the game awards. few issues with that.

we have already pretty easily established that this isn't an indie game. annapurna interactive, whilst certainly an example of a technically independent publisher, are not indie in spirit. indie means something more than that: it means true freedom from the biggest purse-string holders, to explore the things that a developer wants to explore, be they derivative or new and bold, it means to not answer to those with FAMILIAL TIES TO AGAIN THE SIXTH RICHEST BLOKE ON THE FUCKING PLANET. so you've cocked that part up, what now?

well, its director, jeppe carlsen, had also worked on the indie shooter thoth in 2016, and i suppose also 140 in 2013. oh, yeah, also the fact that he was THE MAIN FUCKING GAMEPLAY LEAD DESIGNER ON LIMBO AND INSIDE??? arguably the most eponymous game of the XBLA indie game movement of the early 2010s, and its direct follow-up that was praised and heralded for years, and arguably the two games that reinvigorated the cinematic platformer subgenre (and conveyed more story without a spoken word than mixtape with it's dogshit obnoxious full script but oh who's keeping track?)!

when i flagged this point up years ago, nobody saw what the fucking deal was. nobody saw how strange it was that this was happening, or thought to look into it any further; well, it's just one of those things! lol! just the game awards being untrustworthy as an actual metric for good games again! let's sweep everything under the rug because we got distracted by the key-jangling victory of baldur's gate 3 as best game! yayyy! people actually did like and play that one!

i'm sure i shouldn't need to really go into too much depth about how this is a fundamental failure to recognise indie developers in favor of - what else but that eternal language - money. it wasn't about how cocoon was a debut indie game - it was that it conveniently was the first release of an already-established talent's new studio, and because nobody had fucking heard of it before the game awards, it got pushed to the forefront of a few minds who then likely went to purchase it. that being the intent, after all; what better way to bolster your game's reputation than by effectively hijacking an event that you know that gamers will be watching in order to position it as "the best debut indie of the year"? keep in mind - this was the same year pizza tower released. for all the jokes made at its expense now due to its insufferable fanbase, it is inarguable that pizza tower has had far more of a lasting impression, far more of an impact and frankly was just a far better game than cocoon. none of that came to matter though; pizza tower was an expression of indie art driven from a place of passion. cocoon was annapurna and That Bloke What Made Limbo looking for their next paypacket and needing to invent themselves a loophole way of getting it. speaking of which!

expedition 33, to my chagrin, won game of the year. why, i truly do not know; it's an at-best third-rate RPG that largely wallows in grounds that have been covered two thousand times before by other, older, better RPGs made by more competent and experienced RPG devs that don't let you paper mario parry literally everything in combat to trivialise it. expedition 33 is a game practically designed by committee, it having an incredibly large team for a supposedly "indie" project, and it having all the trappings; graphics driven largely by realism rather than a desire to actually have a compelling art style of its own, no willingness to innovate beyond cribbing mechanics of other, better games, a generic-at-best, vacuously-soul-sucking-at-worst soundtrack, the works. this, too, was yet another betrayal of the actual concept of indie: expedition 33 was made by ubisoft ex-pats. yeah, i shouldn't need to explain why i'm opposed to this fundamentally - ubisoft is a company ran by active sexual predators, who have been keeping an environment of that same manner for quite some time. i'm glad that they could split off to make their own things; doesn't mean i have to support them, though! and it certainly doesn't mean that those, again, ex-industry talents should be getting the attention that should be reserved for actual independent developers - like, ones that haven't done this shit for 10+ years under a professional company, first? it would be laughable to consider, say, far cry 3 an indie game, and to have levvied that against, say, dear esther. but expedition 33 is made by those same damn people who made far cry 3, they're just operating under a different label. and just as cocoon before it, don't you worry, expedition 33 made sure to snub some indie games too! namely, hades II, hollow knight: silksong and kingdom come deliverance II! and that's just for the game of the year nom itself! if we go to the best debut indie again, it beat out blue prince, and despelote, two games that i have heard endless praise of, for their respective cunning gameplay design and heartwrenching story. oh, i suppose dispatch was also there, but... that's not a snub, and it's equally produced by ex-telltale people, with a celebrity cast. it, too, is not indie.

mixtape makes expedition 33 look thoroughly fucking grassroots. fuck, if expedition 33 was astroturfed, mixtape has got to be, like, an entire fucking back garden of plastic! there's got to be little plastic flowerbeds, a plastic rockery, with little plastic squirrels running up plastic trees storing plastic nuts! there is squarely fuck all "grassroots" or "indie" about its background! if the company was not already large and funded enough by virtue of its founder's background, then it's a company made large due to over a decade of successful releases generating swathes of revenue! you cannot then be turning around and trying to publish this game about being a "rebellious teenager"! it's misguided at best! outright comically so! even if it wasn't written like the textbook example of "how do you do fellow kids?", this feels like a game that you do put out as your "debut indie game". oh, wait. beethoven and dinosaur were, like, practically unknown prior to this game's release. don't fucking tell me.

THIS IS A NOTE FOR THE FUTURE: i am writing this as of the 15th of may, 2026. if, by some horrible coincidence that would completely deconfirm the existence of any merciful god, in december, geoff keighley stands on that fucking stage in his poxy suit and trainers combo and says to the world that mixtape is even nominated for best debut indie, i hereby rescind any interest in what awards are won or lost at that show. it is clear that there is zero grounding in what people actually think, and the results are pre-decided by the hands that fund the show, with audience voting there to feign participation. that's already been the case, inarguably; the last of us: part II did not deserve a single fucking award that it won, and yet it was nominated for 11 and won 7. had to throw 'em off the scent there by making them lose a few!

to somewhat wrap up this off-the-rails article, mixtape is a game that stands in complete antithesis to everything that i love. it is a poor video game, lacking the interactivity that makes the medium truly special and does nothing interesting that couldn't be easily emulated through an interactible netflix series. the story procludes it from being a netflix series, as it is so trite and run-of-the-mill at its highest moments whilst being outright insufferable at its lows, to the point of it being genuinely insulting and arguably even dangerous in its messaging. and the soundtrack on which it is founded, the main premise of the game, does not stand to bolster it; in fact, it serves to highlight just how lacking in its own personality and ideas mixtape truly is. it relies on done-and-dusted, long-gone concepts strung together through a key-jingling bevvy of references to shit that you'll remember in lieu of anything actually substantial enough to be anything more than an inconsequential popcorn flick. but the fact that it has been positioned as something more makes me truly scornful of it. it has fine composition. it is graphically okay. the writing leaves a lot to be desired, but what mediocre game doesn't have shit writing? that's the whole reason that "focus m" meme became a thing in the first place. if it was considered in the same breath as the far cry 6s of the world, as this sort of mediocre fine-on-paper but creatively bankrupt blob, i'd be cooled way the fuck down on it; hell, i likely would have just been able to skip it and not bother. but this is being heralded as game of the year already. it's not even game of the month. it's not even a game! it's just a sort of mediocre string of button presses that serve to progress an uninteresting, done-to-death story that apes better prior examples of genuine art, both limited to video games and in the greater art landscape. if you truly must experience this, it is one of few games in history that i feel fully safe in saying that you get absolutely zero difference in playing it yourself vs. watching somebody play it. genuinely, i promise you, just watch it. it's like 2 hours 40 minutes on youtube. it's an okay movie. hell, even that three hours arguably isn't worth it. let alone the $20 they would have squirreled out of me if not for Ye Know.

my closing thoughts?

damn, i am fucking sorry, max caulfield. at least you were interesting.

post-script:

if you are one of the people who defends mixtape by claiming that other people don't have fun and whimsy, maybe i fucking don't, man. maybe i don't have enough "joy and whimsy" because i expect a game that's getting fucking 10 out of 10s from notoriously hard-to-impress games journalists to actually DO ANYTHING to warrant it outside of jangle some keys in my face. again: if this shit was not as lauded as it is right now, i would not give a flying fuck.

REVISION, 16TH OF MAY 2026:

wow, that was fast! annapurna confirmed on twitter earlier that the songs have been licensed in perpetuity! that's totally something an indie game has the capability to do! yeah, totally! seeing as none of the grand theft auto games have been able to do that, or any number of other AAA games featuring licensed songs, and they frequently get taken down as a result of that, i somehow feel mildly inclined to call bullshit. fuck this hack game posing as indie for cred and fuck the hacks trying to use a burdgeoning, already slop-flooding industry to make themselves look better. if you have this much money, and you thought your game wouldn't stand kicking it with the big boys so you had to eat at the soup kitchen, maybe you're just being fucking greedy.