Music as a Time Machine
Mixtape begins with a simple but devastatingly accurate thought: one day, music will start to sound like a record of who you used to be. This phrase encapsulates the entire game. Each of us has songs that are best not played before a workday. From the first notes, they drag us back years – to where the grass seemed greener, responsibilities were fewer, and every random adventure easily became the main event of life.
The heroes of Mixtape live through one such adventure. Stacy Rockford, Van Slater, and Cassandra Morino are graduating from high school and preparing to spend one last night together before life takes them on different paths. The next morning, Stacy will fly to New York to fulfill her dream of becoming a music supervisor, but for now, the trio has one last beach party ahead of them.
However, showing up "dry" isn't cool, so the day begins with a search for drinks and gradually turns into a farewell tour of the places, songs, and memories that shaped their shared youth.
Stacy has already put together the perfect mixtape for their last night together, and each song brings back memories of first love, old grievances, mischievous pranks, and other important youthful trifles. The playlist features Smashing Pumpkins, Portishead, Devo, The Cure, Iggy Pop, Lush, and Joy Division, and Stacy occasionally breaks the fourth wall, addresses the player, and explains why a particular track is important to the story.
Attention! Gameplay Detected
Each track opens a separate sequence – a chapter with its own mood and, importantly, gameplay. You heard right: accusations that Mixtape is a "walking simulator" without interactivity seem far-fetched. Yes, the game avoids complex mechanics, but it constantly gives you something to do with your hands.
In one chapter, you're skateboarding down an autumn serpentine road to Devo's "That's Good," dodging cars. In another, you're headbanging to Silverchair's "Freak." Then you're skipping stones across the water, trying to hit as many targets as possible; running from cops with a drunk friend in a shopping cart; toilet-papering a teacher's house, and doing a dozen other silly things that usually make up the best and most absurd teenage stories.
In moments of drive, Mixtape works as a pure flow of pleasure. You press buttons to the rhythm of the music, weave through obstacles, or simply rush forward to rock music, and the game repeatedly evokes childlike delight from simple things.
In quiet scenes, Mixtape feels just as confident. Most memories are triggered from the characters' personal rooms, and what tells more about a teenager than their own den? We examine Stacy's, Van's, and Cassandra's belongings, latch onto details, and gradually piece together their characters from small things. The trio turned out great: moderately recognizable, moderately textured. It's easy to put someone from your own past life in their place, and this makes the characters feel alive.
At the same time, the game doesn't force us into their company. The characters already live in their own context, and we are invited to get to know them better through memories, plot interactions, optional dialogues, and exploring the environment. Gradually, you begin to understand their internal conflicts, friendly chemistry, old grievances, and small jokes that only they – and now we – understand.
Youth Understood Without Words
Mixtape's approach to emotions and player interaction is best explained by the notorious first kiss scene, where you have to control the slobbery tongues of two teenagers. It has already caused a flurry of completely inadequate reactions online – and yes, the scene is provocative, strange, funny, and disgusting all at once.
But that's the point! The creators evoke the same repulsion in the player that Stacy felt from that memory. The simplest interaction conveys a whole tangle of feelings in a few seconds: awkwardness, shame, the physical absurdity of the moment, and the desire to quickly move on to the next track.
Thus, Mixtape speaks to the player in a universal language (pardon the pun) of feelings. To be moved by it, you don't have to be a 90s American teenager from Northern California and know Stacy's entire playlist by heart. It's enough to remember what first love, night walks, and friendly "betrayal" feel like, when someone says they're sick but goes out with someone else instead.
This universality rests on a coherent artistic vision. Music, stop-motion animation, color, editing, camera, and direction work in unison, transforming everyday memories into vivid images and music videos.
When the characters run through a meadow and take flight, Mixtape wordlessly shows the lightness of adolescence. When Stacy sees that her friend, who promised to stay home, went out with someone else, the world around her turns black and white and begins to float weightlessly. Everything is perfectly clear and yet precisely hits a familiar feeling, filtered through youthful maximalism and the very nature of memory. After all, memories are always brighter, stranger, and more dramatic than real events.
Personally, out of the thirty tracks presented, I recognized at most three, and perhaps heard a couple more somewhere in the past, but this did not prevent the game from dragging me back to my own adolescence: to the skateboard on which I lost my straight teeth, to nights on the roof, to rides in a shopping cart after the opening of the first large shopping mall in my small town, to conversations about nothing, and to moments when adult life seemed infinitely distant.
Each of us has our own coming-of-age story. For some, it unfolded to Smashing Pumpkins and The Cure in Northern California; for others, to completely different songs, in a different city, and with far less cinematic scenery. Mixtape's strength lies in the fact that, while telling the story of Stacy, Van, and Cassandra, it subtly pulls out your own cassette from memory. And everything is already there: people you haven't seen in a long time; silly things you're still a little ashamed of; friendships that seemed eternal; and songs that, even years later, make your heart treacherously clench and send shivers down your spine.
Verdict
Mixtape is a game-emotion, a short, soulful, sometimes magical, cinematic, and very warm adventure about music, friendship, and the last evening before adulthood. In three and a half hours, it manages to make you laugh, embarrass you, evoke slight disgust, hit you with nostalgia, and bring back memories of your own youth.
Defending Mixtape against critics from social media is quite difficult, because many are arguing not with the actual game, but with an image they themselves created. They are not interested in the fact that the real Mixtape has gameplay. That it has sincere and lively characters who have never heard of any "agenda" and demonstrate quite conventional views on love, friendship, and relationships.
Perhaps many are simply scared by the thought that you can play a "game without gameplay" for three hours and get more emotions than from projects that take tens or hundreds of hours. Who knows. But I believe that Mixtape has every right to exist alongside big blockbusters, just as an author's short film has the right to exist alongside "Avengers." Because while debates rage, Mixtape quietly does its job and allows you to go for one evening to places where big games usually don't even look.