{"id":248,"date":"2026-08-14T08:55:47","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T07:55:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/?p=248"},"modified":"2026-08-14T08:55:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T07:55:47","slug":"please-dont-skip-this-musical-coming-of-age-story-mixtape-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/2026\/08\/14\/please-dont-skip-this-musical-coming-of-age-story-mixtape-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Please Don\u2019t Skip This Musical Coming-Of-Age Story | Mixtape Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It was only about a year ago when I learned that not everyone gets goosebumps from listening to music. There\u2019s a French word for it\u2013frisson\u2013which describes the feeling some get when music or other powerful stimuli trigger a physiological response. This rush is felt in only about 50% of people in the world, it turns out. I used to think it was all of us. That\u2019s probably a big part of why music means so much to me, because I\u2019m in the lucky camp that gets to enjoy this positively overwhelming response when the right song hits at just the right time. Mixtape<\/a> is an adventure game that leans into this magical sensation, pairing its heartfelt, often hilarious moments with a sweeping soundtrack to create a coming-of-age story I\u2019ll never forget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mixtape is the second effort from Beethoven & Dinosaur, a small Australian team that includes some former rockstars<\/a> who pivoted to game dev and brought their love for music with them. In it, you play the music-obsessed Stacey Rockford, whose headphones may as well be an organic appendage. Inspired by movies like Superbad and the works of John Hughes, the driving force of the \u201990s-set story is Stacey\u2019s attempt to make it to a killer beach party with her best pals Slater and Cassandra in tow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The morning after this party, Stacey is off to chase her dream as a music supervisor\u2013basically a professional mixtape maker for Hollywood projects\u2013so this is her and her friends\u2019 last hurrah together, whether they\u2019re ready for life to drag them into adulthood and see them go their separate ways or not. While relatively small, these stakes are deeply relatable, revealing a lot of big, honest emotions across the four-hour runtime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The starring trio is incredibly well-written and all three foster empathy and investment from the very start of the game, as they coast down the hills of their town on skateboards, calling out cars to dodge and doing flip tricks over trash cans. As Stacey breaks the fourth wall, announcing to you, the player, the song she picked for the moment, you understand she\u2019s no phony. She knows her stuff when it comes to music, but her decision to leave town for New York has driven a wedge in the friend group, who once made plans for a lengthy west coast road trip that\u2019s now up in the air.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mixtape does so much so well, but one of the things I love most about it is its emotional honesty. Sure, as an adult with the benefit of hindsight, a friend moving away isn\u2019t the end of the world. But when you\u2019re a kid, it\u2019s your whole world blowing up. For Stacey, Slater, and Cassandra, they\u2019re on the verge of so much changing, and their comfortable routines are being thrown out, exchanged for the ambiguous world of growing up. Though the trio often joke around and give off a level of youthful sarcasm, they\u2019re also capable of letting down their emotional barriers and spilling how they feel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"4692158-mixtape_screenshot_05.jpg\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It endears me to each of them and their journeys, whether it be Stacey\u2019s bold career-planning maneuvers, Cassandra\u2019s desperate desire to wiggle out from beneath her cop-dad\u2019s iron fist, or Slater\u2019s somewhat untapped potential as a musician himself. How they stand up for each other, challenge each other, and even just how they, for lack of a better phrase, dick around, feels authentic, and it mesmerized me in each scene. Even then, sometimes it\u2019s the things they don\u2019t speak that affected me the most. Through it all, excellent performances bring these characters and others to vibrant life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The structure of those scenes is another tremendous highlight. As the night unfolds and the friends remain hellbent on hunting down some alcohol and\/or weed for the party, you\u2019ll spend hangout time in each of their bedrooms. There, flashbacks unfold to the tune of Stacey\u2019s carefully curated mixtape, designed with the explicit intent to become the soundtrack to their grand finale in town together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though the game often carries a punky, middle-finger of a spirit, the soundtrack is eclectic, from favorites like Devo and Siouxsie and the Banshees to lesser-known (to me anyway) standouts like Harpers Bizarre and Stan Bush. You won\u2019t be shunned for not knowing them all, as Stacey acts as the studio\u2019s proxy, providing a bit of musical history with each entry when she breaks the fourth wall a la Ferris Bueller. I loved hearing these new-to-me tracks nearly as much as I loved revisiting some all-time favorites, like The Cure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of these flashback moments is given relatively light gameplay mechanics, often bespoke for just a singular sequence and then quickly disposed of. Like the studio\u2019s previous game, The Artful Escape, Mixtape isn\u2019t meant to challenge most players on the sticks. Though occasional fail states exist, like if you crash into a car on your skateboard, there\u2019s no penalty for messing up. It just rewinds instantly and resumes. This is a game that uses the language of games to tell its story, not test you. And thanks to the story perfectly marrying a killer soundtrack and clever mechanics together, it hits just right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"4692159-screenshot2026-05-06093639.png\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In one moment, you may be toilet-papering the principal\u2019s house, then in another, you\u2019ll be stumbling through a video store as the employee calls out to you beyond the fog of your drunken stupor. And this must be the first game to ever let you control a pair of French-kissing tongues, swapping spit and twisting in a fervor of adolescent hormones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one of my favorite sequences, the kids fly high above the town, soaring out of the forest, over the nearby lake, and into town, deriding their high school as they coast over the pool of yellow buses. It\u2019s all set to the tune of Atmosphere by Joy Division\u2013by my estimation, one of the greatest bands there ever was. Of course, the kids didn\u2019t really learn to fly that night, but it sure as hell felt that way to them. How lucky we must be to have had moments in our lives where we felt the same. Mixtape is telling you its story, but it trusts you\u2019ll recall moments of your own that resonate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As great as the game feels and sounds, it also looks exquisite. Built in Unreal, it takes advantage of the engine\u2019s impeccable lighting. Coated in a hyper-stylized cartoonishness, it still manages to give its characters the emotiveness their excellent performances deserve. This puts the game on full display, averting the all-too-common video game problem of a great story and performances let down somewhat by wooden character models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every frame is a rad painting, and like the gameplay controls, the perspective shifts often, giving each scene what it needs. In one scene, for example, in which the kids flee a party crashed by the cops, you\u2019ll seamlessly transition from a traditional third-person perspective to the view from the news helicopter above, watching the runaways take their out-of-control shopping cart onto the interstate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Broadly speaking, Mixtape is an adventure game, if only because that\u2019s often the bucket one might drop a game like this into\u2013a game where the rules of establishing and then iterating on gameplay don\u2019t apply. Not one of these moments frustrates or overstays its welcome, with the minor exception being the time spent in the kids\u2019 bedrooms, when you\u2019re allowed to peruse for a bit and trigger missable dialogue by interacting with objects in each space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collectively, it\u2019s less like you\u2019re playing a game with a great soundtrack and more like someone has turned a soundtrack into an interactive experiment. It had to be a game, and that\u2019s partly what makes it so much more affecting than if this were a movie, but still, the music leads. Mixtape is whatever it needs to be in each moment, and the studio makes a strong case for why it must be that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"4692160-mixtape_screenshot_06.jpg\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By tying each memory or moment to a particular song, Mixtape delivers on its main idea: Music isn\u2019t something we do; it\u2019s something we are. When we work out, we put on the playlist that gets us ready to run through a brick wall. On our wedding day, we play a song that reminds us of when we first met or whose lyrics speak to our journey. When we scream the words to our favorite songs in a venue of 300 sweaty strangers, it bonds us to one another in a way nothing else does or even could do. Music can behave like a time machine, carrying you to a place and time as though you\u2019re there again. Stacey gets this intimately, as does Beethoven & Dinosaur, quite obviously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Music can make us feel incredibly powerful or cathartically vulnerable. And when the right song hits at the right moment, it may just send a happy shiver down your spine, which is how I spent much of my time with Mixtape, and why I\u2019ll never forget it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was only about a year ago when I learned that not everyone gets goosebumps from listening to music. There\u2019s a French word for it\u2013frisson\u2013which describes the feeling some get when music or other powerful stimuli trigger a physiological response. This rush is felt in only about 50% of people in the world, it turns […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":250,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions\/250"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewgamestoplay.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}