Mixtape Review: Brilliantly Bonkers and Beautifully Nostalgic (PS5)

There’s something quite wonderful about narrative games that fill you will nostalgia and feeling incredibly real and raw, such as Life is Strange and Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. Mixtape joins that special genre of games with its own unique take. After playing this narrative music adventure game, you’ll be left reeling at everything it’s thrown at you.

Mixtape is now available on PC, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PlayStation 5 for $19.99.

Story – A Final Day With Friends

Mixtape is a narrative-driven game set in the 90s (complete with video tapes, cassettes, and grunge fashion) that focuses on a group of three teenage friends: Stacey Rockford, Van Slater, and Cassandra Morino. They are very close, but Stacey is preparing to leave for New York to work as a music supervisor, her dream job, which means leaving her best friends behind. Mixtape centers on their last day together as they have one final adventure before Stacey departs the next day.

Three Misfits

In a nutshell, the three teens are a bunch of misfits. They race along the roads of their town in shopping carts and skateboards, sneak into an abandoned dinosaur park, throw toilet paper at their teacher’s house, and attend wild parties. This creates some tension with Cassandra, whose dad is a cop and very strict, trying to control every aspect of her life, including what hobbies she does and who she hangs out with.

However, at the end of the day, while they’re not exactly squeaky clean, they’re not bad kids, and they have each other’s backs. Stacey loves music and is notable for knowing the perfect song to play in any situation, Van is a kind, chilled out dude who shyly makes music and is a great artist, and Cassandra is a rebel trying to break free from her parent’s grip. 

As you play through Mixtape, you quickly see how tight these friends are. Their natural chemistry is just profound. You also find yourself growing attached to them yourself, feeling as if you’d known them all your life. For a game that’s only 3-5 hours long, this achievement is pretty admirable.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

One thing that’s quite unique about Mixtape is its narration. With the majority of the story told from Stacey’s perspective, she often looks directly at the camera and addresses the audience, which at first is quite jarring but also an interesting way to tell the story. Usually, Stacey looks to the audience to tell them what song is playing for the next segment, even providing some information about that song, demonstrating her impressive knowledge of music.

Solid Writing

The writing for Mixtape is also solid. The story as well as the dialogue is brilliant throughout. The conversations between the three friends feels natural and doesn’t come off like they’re reading from a script or only just met a few days ago.

Altogether, the writing for Mixtape is great.

Gameplay – A Wild Ride

As a narrative adventure game, Mixtape has a big focus on the storytelling, but it is still technically a game in that it has gameplay beyond just interacting with items and speaking to characters.

A Series of Mini Games

In describing the gameplay for Mixtape, most of it is essentially presented in the form of mini games. These mini game-type scenarios vary greatly depending on where you are in the story. 

Riding Through Town

A common gameplay feature is racing around the environment. This is usually on a skateboard, but also a shopping cart and even on foot at times. These segments are fast paced but great fun as you fly through the neighborhood, dodging traffic and other obstacles. It’s very fluid and easy to control. You can crash, but if this happens, the game quickly and automatically rewinds to a few seconds back so you can resume straight away and try again without losing the momentum.

The on-foot segments are fun to play, too, as button prompts allow you to duck and jump. Similarly, you needn’t worry about messing up and the flow of the sprint being ruined. If you miss a button prompt, it just keeps going.

At different points in the game, this open-world racing segment transforms into some really magical moments. For example, one scene has you running through the countryside, where you can jump and are effectively flying through the air, creating that wonderful feeling of euphoria. Another time, as you cruise along in a car at night, you can prompt fireworks to go off around you, which is an amazing experience.

The sequence with the shopping cart was good fun.

A Variety of Activities

There are other unique mini games to look out for throughout Mixtape. One of these is skimming rocks along a lake. This has been done in video games before, but Mixtape makes a whole fun game out of this. There are lots of different objects to hit, such as gnomes, cairns, cans, and even a beehive! You can also try bouncing the rocks through hoops such as a tire and lifesaver.

Other mini games include taking photos on an old device, toilet paper bombing a house, trying to hit home runs on a pitching machine, painting a door, and lots more.

These mini games stop Mixtape from just being an interactive narrative game where you simply interact with people and the environment to learn information or prompt conversations. It adds that extra variety, plus leaves you with some really memorable moments.

Interacting With the Environment

Aside from the mini games aspect of Mixtape, with its heavy focus on narrative, there is the usual narrative gameplay you can expect from a game such as this. Typically, this involves exploring the environment and interacting with items, as well as Van and Cassandra. This is completely fine. 

One thing that does set Mixtape slightly apart is one useful feature. When looking for something to interact with, items that trigger another scene or mini game are marked in a different color and style so you know just from looking what it means. It prompts you to make sure there’s nothing else to interact with before moving on. This saves a lot of frustration from missing something.

If there was any room for improvement, it did feel at times that the narrative interaction side of Mixtape felt a little lacking. While the mechanics worked well, it didn’t always feel as if there were a lot of things to interact with. Compared with games such as Life is Strange, the number of interactive items felt a bit sparse. It felt as if there could have been more. However, you did at least get enough to learn about the characters and their history.

Mixtape shares similarities with Life is Strange, but is still its own game.

Graphics & Audio – Fantastically Retro and Nostalgic

As a whole, Mixtape is a very attractive game. The graphics are spot-on in creating a real world in which these three teenagers hang out in and frequently cause mischief. However, what’s really special about Mixtape is how the characters are depicted. Their animation style is quite unique, almost feeling like stop-motion. This made the whole experience feel more like a flashback type of game, like a dream playing out, or someone’s memory.

We cannot finish this review of Mixtape without talking about the soundtrack, which falls at the heart of the game, alongside the three teens. The music is just fantastic. Even if you’ve never heard of any of the songs or even their artists before, you’ll still be able to admit that the soundtrack is just flawless. Whoever picked these songs out really do know their stuff, knowing which song to play to fit the mood of a scene.

It was also appreciated that the songs and their artist were displayed before they were played, with the song’s origin explained by Stacey (notably the year it was released). It made every song choice feel even more meaningful.

Mixtape was played and reviewed on PS5.