Mixtape is a musical portrait of teenage life

Playing Mixtape It’s like playing a video game version of a high school movie. Children joke about the meaning of life and songs play when they walk into the room. They’re worried about looking cool at a big party. They are obsessed with finding booze. But underneath all these tropes lies a meaningful story about nostalgia, friendship, and teenage angst – all backed by a great soundtrack full of classic songs.

Mixtape It takes place over the course of a summer day. She will play Stacey Rockford, a music nerd who recently graduated from high school. Rockford leaves her quiet California suburb for New York City the next morning on her quest to become a music supervisor, and she and her two best friends—the simple Van Slater and the rebellious Cassandra Moreno—move away the day before for a big party in the evening.

Rockford, Slater, and Cassandra feel like a trio of teenagers. For one thing, a lot of their game time is spent lounging in their bedrooms and lazing around. They argue with each other about music and life, their future and dating, and anything else on their minds, all while swelling the self-confidence of teenagers who also know they have no idea what the hell they’re doing. Rockford in particular loves to show how much she knows about music, often breaking the fourth wall to address the camera directly about the current song selection for her exact playlist for the day (which includes tracks from legends like Portishead, Iggy Pop, and The Cure).

meat Mixtape He walks around like Rockford and looks at different things, such as a CD or a map of a planned road trip, and listens to the trio’s commentary. Think of slower paced nostalgic games like Life is strange or He went home — Mixtape He has similar speed. Sometimes looking at an object will take you back to a playable scene from the past, and it will have different situations or mechanics. These things were so specific — mixing slushies at a convenience store, wandering into a video rental store drunk, taking photos with a Game Boy Camera-like gadget while sneaking into a dinosaur-themed amusement park — that they constantly made me think of my suburban teenage years.

As the story continues, the game adds thoughtful layers to each character. After Rockford convinces Slater to play one of his own songs for her, she asks him why he makes music, which makes me realize that Rockford, for all she knows about music, doesn’t actually play anything. Cassandra faces the problem of wanting freedom as a means of putting pressure on her domineering parents. Slater, despite being ostensibly presented as something deadly, proves to be an incredibly kind and thoughtful human being. Even Cassandra’s father, a party-busting cop who serves as the game’s primary antagonist, gets a moment to shine.

Lots of Mixtape On the face of it, it is normal. At one point, I spent 10 minutes skipping boulders, which is a significant amount of time for a game I finished in about four hours. However, this worldliness is what made the game feel so real. My high school experience as a band-obsessed kid didn’t involve any of the kind of shenanigans that… MixtapeThe trio arrives. But I still related to the story of a group of kids hanging out, looking back at their time together, and nervously looking forward to the future.

^{Mixtape Available now on Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PS5, and Xbox Series}