Mixtape is a musical portrait of teenage life

Playing Mixtape it’s like playing a video game version of a high school movie. The children joke about the meaning of life and what theme songs would play when they enter a room. They’re afraid of looking cool at a big party. They are obsessed with finding alcohol. But beneath all these tropes lies a meaningful story about nostalgia, friendship, and teenage angst – and it’s all supported by a great soundtrack filled with classic hits.

Mixtape takes place over the course of a summer day. You play Stacey Rockford, a music obsessive and recent high school graduate. Rockford leaves her sleepy California suburb for New York the next morning with the goal of becoming a music supervisor, and she and her two best friends – the low-key Van Slater and the rebellious Cassandra Morino – drift away the day before a big late-night party.

Rockford, Slater and Cassandra really feel like a trio of teenagers. On the one hand, they spend a lot of the game hanging out in their room and being lazy. They talk shit about music and life and their future and dating and whatever else is on their mind, all with the inflated self-confidence of teenagers who also know they have no idea what they’re doing. Rockford in particular loves to show off how much she knows about music, frequently breaking the fourth wall to address the camera directly about the current song choice for her meticulous playlist of the day (which includes tracks from legends like Portishead, Iggy Pop, and The Cure).

The meat of Mixtape walks around as Rockford and looks at various objects, like a CD or a map of a planned road trip, and listens to the trio’s commentary. Think of nostalgic games with a slower pace like Life is strange Or I came home — Mixtape at a similar speed. Sometimes looking at an item takes you back to a playable scene from its past, and these will have different situations or mechanics. They were so hyper-specific—mixing slushies in a convenience store, drunkenly stumbling into a video rental store, taking photos with a Game Boy Camera-like gadget while sneaking through a dinosaur-themed amusement park—that they constantly made me reflect on my own suburban teenage years.

As the story progresses, the game adds thoughtful layers to each character. Rockford, after persuading Slater to play him one of his own songs, asks him why he plays music, making me realize that Rockford, despite everything she knows about music, doesn’t play anything. Cassandra struggles with the desire for freedom as a way to push away her overbearing parents. Slater, although he outwardly presents himself as a deadbeat, reveals himself to be an incredibly kind and caring human being. Even Cassandra’s father, a hard-partying cop who serves as the game’s main antagonist, gets his time to shine.

So much Mixtape is, at first glance, banal. At one point, I spent 10 minutes skipping stones – a not insignificant amount of time for a game I completed in around four hours. This ordinariness, however, is what made the game so real. My high school experience as a nerdy kid in a band didn’t involve any of the types of shenanigans that MixtapeThe trio gets up. But I still connected with the story of a group of kids hanging out together, reminiscing about their time together and nervously scanning the future.

^{Mixtape is now available on Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.}