The Vapid Pretentiousness of ‘Mixtape’: A Narrative Game With Nothing to Say

Narrative adventure games have been on the backfoot since I began writing about them nearly a decade ago. Despite all time classics like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and DontNod’s Life is Strange leaving enduring impacts on the industry, the genre itself is still, to this day, ridiculed and dismissed with pejoratives like “interactive movie.” These stories are barely games, so the argument goes, but I’ve never found that compelling; I tend to prefer games that prioritize narrative and player choice, personally, which is one important component of what people in the Epilogue community refer to as a “Flora Game.” But after years of searching, I’ve finally played a game that makes me wonder if opponents of this genre were right all along: Mixtape. 

Mixtape’s publisher, Annapurna Interactive, was, for years, reliably my go-to source for indie games. In the late 2010s, I felt like an overworked bee scuttling from flower to flower, trying to make sure I was able to visit all the new games as they bloomed. Annapurna dropped What Remains of Edith Finch, Florence, Sayonara Wild Hearts, Kentucky Route Zero, and If Found… all within about a three-year span, not to mention supporting dozens of other remarkable games like Epilogue Essentials pick, Journey. But somewhere around 2021, something changed in my perception of Annapurna Interactive’s releases. 

Starting with Maquette, Annapurna’s output was like watching a star athlete sustain an injury that worsened over the season. You could see in real time their past performance compared to their current, and by the time the catastrophe of Twelve Minutes was released, Annapurna was benched. The scales fell from my eyes: Annapurna was not some perfect critical indie darling, i.e. the Criterion Collection of games. Sure, they still curated often fantastic games, but their track record was blemished enough to start sifting through their releases with less credulity.

In the interim, one of my favorite Annapurna releases from the 2020s has been The Artful Escape, a charming psychedelic sci-fi music adventure that defies such description that, fittingly enough, I’ve never managed to write about it. For me, The Artful Escape was riddled with obviously apparent flaws, but the game was so tailor-made to my aesthetics and idiosyncratic nostalgia that I fell right into the cosmic charms of its story. I had such a strong impression of The Artful Escape that the developers’ newest game, Mixtape, has been on my radar since its announcement. 

Mixtape follows three teenagers on their last day together in which they relive memories through the narrative structuring device of a mixtape that sets the tone for their emotional experiences. Mixtape’s story transpires in a fictionalized northern California town, Blue Moon Lagoon, in the 1990s, just at the end of the protagonists’ high school years. Because of this time period, much of the technology and slang feels borrowed from another era, lending some credibility to my theory that this game has been awarded such glowing critical praise because of how it wields nostalgia to mask over an ultimately threadbare narrative.

The primary reason Mixtape fails to be a meaningful experience is due to its insufferable writing. Considering the term “narrative adventure,” you’d expect the plot to be more substantial than simply trying to score booze for a house party. But that’s quite literally all there is to Mixtape: wandering around an environment, observing objects while the protagonist, Stacey Rockford, makes dully “quirky” comments, talking to your friends, and then some kind of mini-game vignette. The story contains underlying threads about social outcasts banding together and then feeling pained by that very group’s impending breakup. But largely, Mixtape is a glorified Spotify playlist that forgot to scrub the watermarks from the games it poorly plagiarised.

It honestly astonishes me how Mixtape received perfect scores from review outlets like IGN, Dualshockers, and VGC, to the point where Mixtape briefly held the title of the highest aggregately rated game in 2026. While I’ll never side with the slimy GamerGate basements of internet gaming discourse, my experience with Mixtape feels like the adage that even a stopped clock is correct twice per day. That is, the usual “anti-woke” suspects that usually lambast narrative adventure games finally have an example that I can’t defend. Mixtape wanders between myopic narcissism on one hand and stoner-level analysis of what it means to grow up on the other. The game functionally has nothing to say, and the vehicles through which it tries to say something are delivered in dialogue that sounds as if the writers fed a Max Caulfield cringe compilation from the original Life is Strange into an AI chatbot. And even though there is no there there, you’d hope Mixtape’s soundtrack would at least hold it all together, right?

From the outset, Mixtape’s protagonist, Stacey Rockford, turns earnestly to the camera and breaks the fourth wall to speak with the player directly. From these opening lines alone, I groaned:

“The compact disc delivers crisp, high-fidelity audio in a portable form factor. With a sixteen bit signal and a staggering seventy four minutes of playtime, it’s the sound of the future. […] Pretty soon you won’t be listening to music, you’ll be listening to who you were.”

Stacey grabs her skateboard and hops off into a needlessly long downhill skateboard credits sequence, and thus starts the game. The issues I have with Stacey involve her constant pretentious pontifications, as though she thinks herself clever for being able to explain what a CD player is, or that the player would benefit from some sort of explanation of how she perceives it. The closest these opening lines get to saying something is the middle school thesis that making a playlist changes your relationship to music because of the nostalgia you associate with songs and memories. Fair enough, but the game never complicates this idea any further. Instead, Mixtape keeps naively squeezing the saccharine sponge, expecting the player to feel quenched as a result.

Stacey claims to have a quasi-supernatural gift of picking the perfect song for the perfect moment, hence Mixtape’s narrative conceit. With Stacey as our annoying guide, we work through her carefully arranged combination of songs that she believes accurately captures the feelings and memories that her and her friends are anticipating nostalgically. The trouble with this framing for both the protagonist and narrative is that, if you aren’t a fan of the music on Stacey’s mixtape, and similarly important, if you don’t have the sense of music history to appreciate the collage of artists she wants to showcase, then the proverbial mixtape itself is revealed to be built on popsicle sticks instead of concrete. 

I already struggle to believe some of the hamfisted portrayals of teenage girls in video games, especially those written by older men. Taking my darling Life is Strange as the continual comparison – since Stacey is clearly inspired by Max, at minimum – I think an easy critique of those games is that young people often don’t listen to the music depicted in these stories. Instead, I vicariously felt, as the player, like a child whose parents desperately want them to appreciate the hits from the ‘good old days.’ Surely this critique is somewhat subjective, but Stacey never for a moment feels like a teenager or even a real person. She is a vessel to overexplain how many Wikipedia factoids about music from the 60s-80s that the developers know. It feels as absurd as a class of 2026 graduate crossing the stage, turning to the camera and saying, “You know what would really fit this moment? Limp Bizkit.”

Rockford is also just plain unintelligent and unlikeable, despite the facade of pretentious insight that she clutches to as a facsimile for her identity. She isn’t unlikeable in the sense of the writers wanting her to be perceived as such, like an anti-hero. Rather, the tone of the writing clearly wants us to be impressed by Stacey and view her, as she views herself, as a prodigy beyond her years. She is a walking violation of the “show don’t tell” adage. Stacey turns to the camera to propose her profound vision: a kid fresh out of high school moves to New York to strike up a professional music career. How unique.

When you delve into her plans to start fresh in New York, where Stacey’s older sister lives, this plan quickly falls apart under scrutiny. Rockford’s claim to fame is being able to assemble a mixtape, and she believes this will impress a prominent music executive in New York, one that she claims will offer her a foot in the door, but turns out that Stacey has been, to quote her directly, “stalking,” which Mixtape delivers as though it were a comedic punchline. Stacey thinks this woman will instantly recognize her as a “progidy,” as if that had anything to do with how the music industry functions. Stacey’s ultimate goal is so unrealistic and undefined that she spends an entire chapter explaining what a “music supervisor” is.

One of the things that drives me up the wall about Stacey is that she is not a musician in any sense, and yet she opines with authority of someone who has decades of experience. She takes herself as having “cosmic” taste, despite her friend Slater being an actual musician. At one point, she literally shouts, “the music isn’t in me,” as if to underscore the banality of Stacey’s mixtape endeavor. I don’t think you need to necessarily be a musician to develop sophisticated critical opinions about music in the same way that you don’t have to be a filmmaker to critique a film. That being said, there is a moment towards the second half of Mixtape that addresses this consideration directly.

Throughout Mixtape, Stacey’s friend trio has largely behaved in ways that I recognize from other coming-of-age narrative adventure games like Goodbye Volcano High. Life is about to take a drastic change that will forever tear apart a tightknit friendgroup, often a band, balancing the tension between the future and the past. In this case, Stacey is leaving, cancelling her part in a road trip that her friends Slater and Cassandra have been planning together for years. It’s difficult to relate to Stacey as the protagonist because she quite literally planned this New York trip a week before this road trip; especially once we learn Stacey doesn’t actually know the person she has been “stalking” for a career, it becomes inexcusable that Stacey didn’t schedule her flight for after their journey together. This whiny, melodramatic dynamic is only a few words shy of someone mumbling, “This is going to ruin the tour.”

The problem is that they aren’t actually in a band, but the writing of the game follows the exact playbook of tropes that you’d expect in something along the spectrum of Night in the Woods and Scott Pilgrim. Nothing in this game is original, nor are familiar ideas explored in new ways. Mixtape wants to simultaneously carry the emotional gravitas of the band breakup, the high school friend group breakup, and the coming-of-age sense of self-discovery, but completely fails to accomplish any of these goals.

This failure is best exemplified towards the end of Mixtape, when “Jenny Fucking Goodspeed” is presented as a sort of fill-in for Stacey’s role their friend group. (When she discovers this, Stacey literally yells, “You’re replacing me?”) If the nickname weren’t enough, suffice it to say that Stacey hates Jenny and is quite jealous of her in this moment. Again, the writing has an internal tension that never quite gets resolved where the scene is functionally presented like a band unceremoniously swapping in a new band mate when one is kicked out, but in reality doesn’t have any impact on the trio’s ability to maintain their bond. The fact that Stacey is the one to get upset with her friends in this instance speaks to her self-centeredness as a character, considering she is the one leaving, she is the one who canceled their road trip, and despite this, she is the one trying to keep the friend group exclusive. 

Stacey’s role as the protagonist is so flat that, naturally, as a character, I started looking to the supporting cast for someone compelling to latch onto. But even with three primary characters, the game bears no modicum of personality. You’ve got Slater, the stoner who lives in the attic with his mom, the type of mom who offers you and your underaged friends margaritas during the day. You’ve also got Cass, perfection incarnate: rich, entitled, popular, academic, athletic, but raised by overbearing – you guessed it – Asian parents, one of whom happens to be the cop you run into throughout your adolescent misadventures. Again, I can’t help but mention that if you’re going to copy David straight out of Life is Strange, at least change the name at the top of the paper before turning it in.

Sadly, there’s nothing more to be said about these shallow, frustratingly uninteresting characters, apart from the fact that I may need to schedule a dentist’s appointment after grinding my teeth through dialogue such as the following: “What is coolness is not exclusivity?” “The next year I wanna ride a flaming stallion of delinquency.” “It’s the cheese, the stuffed crust, the quattro formaggio, but this is my only sporting memory, and it feels tonally appropriate.” “You want to protect her, I get it, but as Rush said in their 1982 classic…” followed by Officer Morino, “In 1969, on his second studio album, Canadian artist, Leonard Cohen, said, ‘Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.’” Who on Earth talks like that? This dialogue reeks of insecure name-dropping, groveling towards the audience to validate that the author behind these words is ‘cool enough’ on their internal Bingo card, instead of using art to interrogate themselves.

On the note of abysmally self-congratulatory writing, I would be remiss not to mention the line of dialogue that broke me, delivered enthusiastically by Stacey during a triumphant skateboarding sequence, “I AM THE AYATOLLAH OF ROCK N ROLLA!” I had to take a break after that zinger.

Despite Mixtape’s respectable three-hour runtime, you’d expect the dialogue to be top-notch, but sixteen minutes into my playthrough, Rockford observes, “that’s the thing with strict parents. When their kids finally get out… they go way too hard.” Fair enough, I thought. But not even one hour later – fifty-six minutes in – Rockford turns to the camera and offers, “What these narcs don’t seem to realize is that an overbearing parental style breeds rebellion” as if it were a fresh insight. These two lines of dialogue are functionally identical, with no conceptual evolution between them. It baffles me that moments like this redundancy weren’t trimmed out of Mixtape’s final script.

As committed as the game may be to attempting to sound authentically like the lives of teenagers in the nineties, Mixtape contains anachronisms that feel like a piece of art that’s at war with itself. The first element that caught my attention in this regard takes place in the opening scene, where Stacey dons her wireless headphones. A quick foray into technological history reveals that consumer-facing wireless technology wasn’t present until 2004, with wireless earbuds taking another decade to be introduced to the market. Sure, it’s not impossible that Stacey has wireless over-ear headphones in the 90s, but it immediately breaks immersion for those pedantic enough to notice how she was ahead of Bluetooth.

Anachronism is reflected in other incidental aspects of Mixtape like the fashion and dialogue choices made by some of the characters, the era-placing documents throughout the explorable environments, and so forth. In chapter seven, for example, Slater and Stacey are speaking with all the “shaka brah” level of sophistication that we’ve come to expect from “teenagers” in games, and then out of nowhere in a conversation about Camille Cole, Slater responds, “Huge if true,” which is a phrase that didn’t take into the cultural vernacular until sports journalism popularized the parlance in the 2010s. Slater also is written as the type of airheaded character who literally refers to alcohol as a “heinous stash,” and yet hopes for a “an only slightly expired cask of Debortolini’s premium pinot grigio,” in the same sentence. Slater is the most endearing character in the game and yet he doesn’t feel authentically from the 90s – none of them do.

Outside of the writing itself, Mixtape learns all the wrong design lessons from games in the narrative adventure genre. The aforementioned classics like The Walking Dead and Life is Strange succeed primarily because of their gameplay, not in spite of them. Mixtape, unlike its brethren in the genre, offers no player choice in dialogue or outcome. There are small amounts of interactivity to be found in the mini-game vignettes such as skateboarding, playing baseball, or the most unsettling depiction of pre-teens making out I’ve ever seen. Bespoke as these particular sequences are, many of them fail to be engaging – glorified stimming segments – like pressing X to headbang and sweeping leaves to the perimeter of a circle. 

The game’s pacing grinds to a dramatic halt at awkward intervals where suddenly you’re back in one of the characters’ bedrooms, observing mundane objects like Stacey’s junior class photo where she shares that she smiled in all of her previous school pictures until she met Slater, who “turned [her] metal.” If not for the achievement, “Front to Back,” I would have never voluntarily engaged with the bland environments after these amateur remarks, because engaging with them feels like talking to a roll of duct tape. This particular implication that liking metal music means that you’re unhappy, hate society and your parents, etc., stultifies me because it betrays out-of-touch ignorance of someone who didn’t actually spend their formative years in that scene.

Another beautiful moment of introspection from our dear protagonist: “We’re now crossing Little Mill Creek, perfectly timed to coincide with Deepspace Scan by Curtis Dunn, who released one incredible album then disappeared into the ocean. We listened to Deepspace a lot when we first started hanging out and wasting time, not far from here…”

The worst parts of narrative adventure games, in my opinion, are the actual, well, adventuring sections. Having replayed The Walking Dead and Life is Strange multiple times over, I can’t express to you how insignificant finding batteries for the radio in the pharmacy or shooting bottles in the junkyard are in comparison to the emotional memories that the character relationships and choices brought me. One of the best games in the genre that I’ve played in years, Dispatch, masterfully exchanges these walking simulator observation segments with engaging gameplay while keeping the narrative anchors of choice and characters as its focus. Mixtape took precisely the opposite approach, stripping all choice away, and railroading the interactive sections of the story so as to be no-fail conditions, like when Stacey rushes through the neighborhood to warn Cass that her father is patrolling around Heaven 11 where she’s getting drunk. I replayed this rushing sequence several times, as I was after the related “Well, Take A Look At You” achievement. But out of curiosity, I set the controller down after missing a jump during one of my attempts, and the sequence completed itself.

Character development in Mixtape is virtually nonexistent. The game ends more or less where it starts off, with a few corny cliches sprinkled in for good measure. As someone seeking an emotionally reflective, challenging narrative, Mixtape’s entire story could have simply not happened and it wouldn’t matter one iota. Considering Mixtape is a coming-of-age story, or to paraphrase the director, Johnny Galvatron, a game about building community around art that you connected with, remembering fondly the days when your tastes represented your social identity. Unfortunately Mixtape’s navel-gazing protagonist expects the audience to project their own sense of character growth onto the story itself.

I also found the animation style of Mixtape to be off-putting, which is an unexpected point of detraction because the actual art direction of this game, for all its faults, is generally fantastic. Whereas the environments and character designs themselves are top-notch for this genre and aesthetic, Mixtape decides to render the character animations at a lower framerate than the environments themselves, leading to some questionable moments throughout. A point of favorable comparison for me is Into the Spider-Verse, which plays with frame rates in a way that actually elevates the art form of its storytelling. Mixtape, by its nature as a video game, isn’t fully pre-rendered, and therefore has some stuttery moments where I can’t tell whether the delay in animation on my screen is intentional. Surely it’s unintentional when my character models load in quicker than textures on the cabin they are walking up towards, making me question if this is an artistic decision or a performance-related one, tasteful minimalism or necessity. This inelegance of art presentation distracts from the narrative and, in my experience, detracts from the overall sense of care and polish that surely went into this game.

Games that revolve around music are dear to my heart, having played instruments since middle school. Because of that deep relationship with music during my adolescence and formative adult years, I feel like I am the target market for an artistic narrative game that centers itself at the intersection of bildungsroman and alternative music culture. Sure, the characters aren’t likeable, the plot doesn’t go anywhere other than the abstract notion of teenage rebellion, but this came is called Mixtape, so naturally I expected the integration of music with the narrative to redeem those otherwise underwhelming elements.

A point worthy of note is that Mixtape’s licensed music, of which there are 27 different tracks, is done so under the verbiage, “in perpetuity,” which legally circumvents future concerns that this game may one day be removed from storefronts for copyright reasons. I can’t imagine how much money was poured into Mixtape’s soundtrack, with artists like The Cure, The Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, and Joy Division peppering the tracklist. Keep in mind, that’s the closest this game reaches to its ostensible time period: the 1990s. Not a whiff of Nirvana (the game literally takes place near Washington state, the geographical birthplace of grunge!), Pearl Jam, Green Day, or anything that is iconic to the era Stacey is growing up within. And though this story features an artsy white girl from the Pacific northwest who believes she understands the industry, it might as well be as though Biggie, Tupac, and that golden age of music never existed. She never even mentions a local, small, indie band. What a missed opportunity for a character who prides herself on having authoritative taste as a “visionary.” Imagine if Mixtape had a scene where the trio attend a show and, after some simple moshing and crowdsurfing mini-games, the player is able to choose which band Stacey wants to add into her mixtape. That would be a uniquely rare moment of ludonarrative that actually leverages the medium of video games to amplify the connection between Stacey, the player, and the music itself. But, as far as we can tell by her thrift-store-vinyl tastes, Stacey has built her entire library from her father’s own music collection.

I think, for a certain audience – someone who is not represented by the characters in Mixtape – this soundtrack carries a lot of that nostalgic musical weight that this game wants to explore. For me, and I’d expect many others, this type of music is unrelatable, generic, and completely forgettable. 

I’m a sucker for needle-drops in games. I can think of the first time you arduously trudge up a mountain to Low Roar in Death Stranding, or when “Take Control” kicks in during an epic late-game sequence in Control. Even Life is Strange, taking some similar criticisms about whether a teenage girl would actually be into this type of music exclusively and snobbishly, has some killer needle-drops throughout even its more troubled entries. I couldn’t tell you a single moment in Mixtape that was elevated by its music. For certain achievements, I had to replay sections several times, and looking at the tracklist, you could give me five guesses of which song paired with each sequence and I’d likely still be incorrect. Even visually iconic sequences like Mixtape’s shopping cart chase could just have easily been replaced by any other song and felt indistinguishable, especially because the game strangely doesn’t synchronize gameplay interactions to the tempo in these moments.

In other words, the mission of Mixtape’s protagonist is a comprehensive and dramatic failure. Nothing about the identity of these songs elevates the story or gameplay themselves. This character who has this unique skill to match music to memories and emotions – to nostalgia – might as well have left the 74 minute compact discs that she loves explaining so much blank.

The trouble with writing stories about youth is that, inevitably, the two-sided coin of memory and nostalgia start competing with each other as one wanes into adulthood. Memory tries to capture the moments exactly as they were objectively, whereas nostalgia sands off the corners, leaving us with a glossy rendition that will continue to be polished until there are no edges left to the memories involved. Mixtape directly handles these topics as though its writers were a blacksmith reaching into the coals without tongs, burning itself in the process.

Mixtape is an example of my least favorite type of game, one that gets everything right on paper and yet underdelivers in every aspect in practice. Sure, the game is functional, but it’s never fun. Yes, there are themes and characters driving the story, but you can summarize all of the plot’s nuance in a Netflix description. Every aim this game sets out to accomplish is better achieved by other examples in the medium. It’s a game that’s not “bad,” per se, but worse: boring.

I question whether writing about games in this polemical fashion is even a valuable exercise, because if someone is reading this article having not played Mixtape, I regret that you’ve wasted any time on this game at all. I just sit in disbelief sometimes when credits roll, after hitting all of the achievements, and I feel nothing aside from the relief that it’s over. Worse, when I turn to the critical reception surrounding Mixtape, the discussion is polarized: either laurels or misogynists. Like Pragmata earlier this year, there needs to be a middle path between these extremes in the discourse, because discussing Mixtape is not a dichotomous binary where you’re either a credulous critic or you hate minorities. Like the discourse that reflects it, Mixtape is sadly the most vapid, disappointing piece of media I’ve consumed this year, and I cannot possibly recommend this game to anyone.

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