- Hashem Habibian
- 2026-05-21
- 8:20 am
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Developer: Beethoven & Dinosaur
Release: May 7, 2026
Reviewed on: Xbox Sereis S
For many of us, when we think of coming-of-age games, titles like Life is Strange are the first to come to mind. Mixtape is a story-driven adventure that keeps its eye squarely on that one theme, and in this review we’re going to find out if it’s capable of delivering the same kind of lasting, emotional impact that made Life is Strange such a memorable experience.
Story
The story is about three friends, Stacy, Cassandra, and Slater. It occurs in the last summer of their high school years, a brief moment in time before they all inevitably go their separate ways in life.
Why am I giving a more straight-forward summary of the premise here, unlike most of my reviews? The answer is in the theme the game has picked. Mixtape is really about coming of age. And it’s really about understanding who these three friends are and what they’re going through together in the background of the 1980s, and that’s key to understanding the emotional core of the story.
Another key point that should be considered is the connection of the game to its decade and certain cultural background. Naturally, comprehending all aspects of it often becomes impossible without having some knowledge of this decade.
Being born in the 80s, I understood something about this period; however, because of specific cultural context, certain details seemed a bit remote to me.
Thus, for instance, in my childhood bikes became the main symbols of teenage independence, while in Mixtape the main attention is paid to skating culture. On the contrary, the use of cassette tapes was something extremely familiar and understandable.
Narrative Design
The simplicity of the concept of Mixtape starts from the first scene: have you ever associated a certain memory with a song? A song, that the moment you hear it plays, takes you right into a certain point of your life.
This concept is what Mixtape revolves around. The game’s protagonist, Stacy, together with her friends, re-lives her old memories, and as soon as she enters a new scene, Stacy breaks the fourth wall and looks right into the camera, letting the gamer know which song she has chosen to accompany her flashback.
It’s a technique that you remember for the rest of the experience, but the unique directorial and aesthetic vision of the developers of the game makes you feel it quite rarely.
Instead, Mixtape easily captures your attention and gives you no choice but to become interested in the story told by the characters of the game. And up to this point, Mixtape is genuinely excellent.
However, there is always the flip side of the coin. Being a narrative adventure, Mixtape does not utilize one of the most crucial aspects of interactive storytelling: gameplay itself.
It seems like the developers intentionally avoided any gameplay-related elements and decided to create a story without it.
It is essential to analyze the game’s architecture in order to see the problem. The game has two layers of gameplay, but both of them have their unique features.
The first layer is located in the present and consists of exploration of the environment and interaction with items to recall memories. These events contain no difficulty and do not require players to perform any actions except progressing through the environment.
There are no interesting puzzles to solve, no complex mechanics to deal with, and nothing else.
While the first layer may be concerned more with story than gameplay, the second layer presents a chance for gameplay to actually contribute something to the story design process.
Ludonarrative Dissonance
Ironically, it is precisely during the scenes where flashbacks occur—the main substance of the game—when the gameplay loses all sense of purpose.
In many scenes, you don’t need to participate in the action at all, and the entire experience becomes more like watching a film rather than playing a video game. Mixtape frequently employs such tricks, taking away control from the player again and again.
Perhaps what makes these tricks even more annoying is their ability to mock the participant’s attempts to engage with the process.
For instance, in one part, the participant is required to pass an obstacle course by jumping from left to right. While it might seem like an actual part of the game because you can still jump over barriers and run properly, there is no point to it since you could simply let go of the controller, and the game would still proceed smoothly.
The reality is, you are not even playing Mixtape. The best way to illustrate this sensation is the feeling experienced in childhood when you were fooled into believing that you were playing with your favorite game console when in fact all controllers in your possession had been disconnected.
This was something sometimes, interaction with the game is merely about clicking a button. Due to that, the game continually kicks you out of the narrative, forcing you to sit on the sideline as a spectator of a film instead of being an active participant in the gameplay.
Even more depressing is the fact that some of these interactions do not only lack depth, but at times are unrelated to the game’s 1980s era context or even entirely incorrect. For instance, there was an interaction involving a pen rewinding a cassette tape.
But what was wrong about it? It’s that people did not use pens to rewind their cassette tapes. Tapes were rewound using tape recorders, and pens/pencils were only used when the tape became entangled and needed fixing.
But it gets worse than that – the game even put the pen in the wrong slot on the cassette, and yet it still managed to work.
A similar instance occurs while the characters share a drive, listening to music along the way. Even the interactive sequences at that point come off as detached and highly unrealistic.
It often seemed like the game was created by an individual who had no idea what it is like to form friendships like that during their teen years, someone only dreaming up a romanticized version of those years.
Notice something? Unlike most of the games I review, I barely have anything meaningful to say about Mixtape’s gameplay—and that’s because there’s barely any real gameplay there to discuss in the first place.
The limited elements that can be found are either badly constructed, ineffectual, or totally irrelevant to the overall plot of the game. Rather than reinforcing the central emotion, they seem to serve as merely decorative features that have been included only in order to create an illusion of interaction for its own sake.
Conclusion
Mixtape is an experience that resembles watching a film more than anything else rather than actually participating in a game. Unfortunately, the little interactions you have in Mixtape are not enough to make up for the lack of actual gameplay.
Even in its storytelling, the game occasionally stumbles due to small but noticeable inaccuracies surrounding its 1980s setting—mistakes that weaken the sense of authenticity and make it harder for even the very generation the game is targeting to fully connect with it.
Because of that, Mixtape ultimately becomes an extremely taste-driven experience: one that some players may emotionally resonate with, while others may find themselves completely detached from.
At the end of its three-hour long duration, some will love the game, and others might feel completely indifferent about it. The problem here is that, in general, Mixtape does not possess many features necessary to be considered a fully-fledged video game.
Mixtape Review
For many of us, when we think of coming-of-age games, titles like Life is Strange are the first to come to mind. Mixtape is a story-driven adventure that keeps its eye squarely on that one theme, and in this review we’re going to find out if it’s capable of delivering the same kind of lasting, emotional impact that made Life is Strange such a memorable experience.