(Taste Test is a series I started on YouTube where I try out a game I’ve never played before and give my first impressions of it — I’ve started translating this format to Patreon and Medium now)

The past week has been interesting. Well, longer than the past week, honestly, but things have gotten ESPECIALLY strange over the past week. Since I don’t do this full-time, I don’t have the time to catch most discourse on social media in the moment it’s happening — it’s usually after 5 PM and deals with me scrolling my social media, catching up on anything I missed during the day and maybe even replying with my own input (excluding Twitter, where my account is private and only used for monitoring and keeping bots from taking my name). Sadly, it was the last platform where the conversation was going left: the embargo was finally lifted on Mixtape and reviews started publishing, many of them giving the game either perfect or near-perfect scores.

That said, this Taste Test is not about them — it’s about Mixtape, the latest offering from Beethoven & Dinosaur on development, along with one of my favorite publishers, Annapurna Interactive. I’ve personally been looking forward to this game since first seeing its trailer during Summer Game Fest 2024. If you know me, you know how much I love a good interactive narrative game, from Telltale’s The Walking Dead to Tales From The Borderlands to Dispatch, I enjoy playing the oft-disrespectfully categorized “walking simulator”. For one, they’re great games for livestreams — I don’t have to sweat out gunfights while being crashed by third parties as I try to revive my teammate. Secondly, I just love a good story, whether it be televised, cinematic, video games, or an old-fashioned hardback book. The trailer gave the same vibes as the previously-mentioned games (as did another game shown during that presentation, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage — I need to get to that one soon as well), so it immediately left an impression on me and ended up on my wishlist. A clear nod to the ’80s and ’90s felt strong here, from the fashion to the music choices, and as a former music nerd and current shameless nostalgia nerd, I awaited the day of its release.

Mixtape follows three California teenagers: Stacy, Van, and Cassandra on their last day of high school. Stacy believes that music is the foundation of all things in life: your playlist is a representation of the person you are at the moment it is playing, and this is hammered home to us multiple times throughout the game. Like…somewhere around 30 times or so. She STANDS on this. As such, her goal in life is to be a music supervisor and she’ll be moving to New York the next day to live with her older sister and pursue that dream. Van is her best friend — a tall, skinny, laid-back musician that everyone seems to like. Cassandra is the model daughter, excelling in sports like softball and rhythm gymnastics, loved by both the misfits and popular kids, but strongly desiring to find her own identity as her overbearing parents try to micromanage her life. As players, we mostly take control of Stacy throughout the game, even though there are a couple instances where we operate as Van and Cassandra as well, but this story mainly revolves around Stacy and her acceptance of her impending departure from the only world she knows: her friends.

Now that I’ve spent a solid Saturday afternoon playing through it, I’m all about deciding for myself on how I feel about the game. Final Fantasy X is the most universally loved Final Fantasy game of all time — my favorites are tied between FF6 and FF9, so yeah, it be like that sometimes. Sometimes, you’re not going to fully agree with the masses. When it comes to Mixtape, though, I feel like I land somewhere in the middle of the previously mentioned discourse. I actually enjoyed this game — the story is beautifully written, sequenced, and presented. I related to a lot of the themes presented, from that love of music and applying it to multiple aspects of my life (a LONG time ago, I made music professionally and years before that, I’ve just always obsessed over music), to having to leave what I recognized as home to follow my dreams, to not always seeing eye to eye with the people I felt were closest to me. Some of my best friends I have today, I’ve known since childhood — I’ve also fought them a few times over the years. Miscommunication happens, and it only gets worse when powered by things like teen emotions. The final 3 minutes of the game specifically hit me especially hard and I can’t say why without spoiling anything, but the recurring theme in my life addressed there just…REALLY punched me in the chest hard.

More on the game itself, I enjoyed the presentation. The chapters of the game are often marked by Stacy pointing on the song playing in the background on her playlist, and it’s full of bangers. They actually had a couple of surprising picks here, with an appearance from the Chi-Lites roundhouse kicking me in the face when it popped up on screen. If you’re a streamer, you’re likely going to want to play this one on Twitch or have the music volume cut down to half to try to avoid those YouTube copyrights, because the devs made it clear that they can’t help on that one. I get it, honestly — the music is a central aspect of the game. If they tried to do a streamer mode with some copyright-free replacement music, it would not hit the same. As someone that was born in the late ’80s, though, I don’t fully bite the bait on the soundtrack being something a teenager of that era having unless their family had a crazy record collection or something (it’s me - I’m the former teenager with the family that had a crazy record collection due to my father being a DJ in college); it felt more like the soundtrack of a teenager in the mid-2010s that was really good at browsing Spotify before it became AI slop and ICE ads. Solid music, no doubt, just felt a bit like a reach. Takes nothing away from the overall story experience for me, though.

The entire game takes place in one town in Northern California, but covers various locations in this suburban neighborhood. It was jarring seeing a few complaints about realism in the game afterwards, as Mixtape doesn’t really try to lean into being realistic at all. It’s very much a “vibes” game. One moment, you’re skating through residential streets avoiding traffic; the next, you’re flying through forests, bouncing off river water; the next, you’re racing a shopping cart with 3 bodies on it through concrete, dirt, and wooden surfaces — realism wasn’t the goal and there’s truly nothing wrong with that. Rather than asking for frenzied button inputs to avoid death, it asks you for a couple button inputs to add to experiencing the moment that happens. A sequence that has you running in one direction and occasionally needing to jump or slide exists here. It’s not meant to be asking you to be challenged — it’s asking you to take part in the moment as the main character is simultaneously trying to make it to their friend before a critical moment, but also making a nod to a well-known movie moment in pop culture. This game places you in the role of a teenager that smokes weed, drinks liquor, loses themselves in the music they love (quite literally in some chapters), and sees the world around them as art. I value the game more when I’m skateboarding through a mall and blowing up structures by flipping the bird a lot more than sitting back and saying, “but Rob, you can’t blow things up with your middle finger”. The ability (or lack thereof) to immerse into that experience will vary from person to person, I feel, as art is not digested the same across the board. Life experiences can either add or take away from that impact, and with all due respect, someone’s ability to understand the art presented to them carries the same weight. Media literacy is not given, it is learned and earned, word to the population of people that somehow still think (500) Days of Summer is a love story.

As much as I’ve talked about the things I’ve enjoyed in this game and the things I DID relate to, I mentioned earlier that I still fall in the middle on the discourse, and that’s because there were just as many that I couldn’t relate to at all. As a millennial Black man raised in the DC metro area for the majority of my life, I didn’t really have any attachment to the setting. Also, with being raised in what we affectionately call “the DMV”, which was primarily a densely Black area until gentrification changed some of that over the past decade and a half (for those that don’t know, DC’s nickname for many years was Chocolate City), I didn’t directly feel like I related to the characters because they looked like me or anything. Hell, there’s only one Black character in the game for real, and not only are they an NPC, they only speak for the first time in the final hour of the game. Would it be nice to see more people that look like me and my peers in the game? Absolutely. Does the lack of them take away from this game for me? No, because I can still empathize with the situations the game presented. Plenty of suburbs across America as I type this still only have a handful of minority residents in them (which is likely why there’s still so many ignorant people that still don’t understand the beauty and power in diversity), so it’s not like it’s not feasible to think this small NorCal town in the ’90s might be tucked somewhere like that. Still, Stacy might not look like me, but I know the feeling of dreading moving away from my friends and my surroundings. Van might not look like me, but I know the feeling of being nervous about sharing my music with people I care about because I don’t want them to change how they see me. Cassandra may not look like me, but I relate to needing to disappoint my parents in order to make myself proud and find my own passions. Often in the gaming industry, my peers that look like me ask for this same courtesy, this same empathy, and it gets treated as an absurdity. Such is life, though, that’s a point against society, not Mixtape. Still would’ve been nice to see some more melanin, though, I’m just sayin’.

So does Mixtape pass my Taste Test? This is for sure a yes. Running at around 3 1/2 hours in my playthrough, you can easily get through it during a chill sitdown without committing days of your life to it. The story is heartfelt and earnest, even if a little cheesy at times. I can tell the folks at Beethoven & Dinosaur definitely watched a bunch of teen movies from the ’80s and ’90s growing up, which both adds and takes away from the game at times, but I’m personally not mad at it. Whether you’ll enjoy this one will likely come down to what you’re looking for in gameplay. If you’re someone that enjoyed games like the Life Is Strange series or the various Telltale games, you’ll be right at home here. If you’re looking anything more than that, save your $20, because sometimes a game is just NOT for you, and that’s also okay (…or you could always just play it and discover whether you may actually like it but never realized it before).

Mixtape is available on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC (via Steam & Epic Games Store).

RATING: 4/5