Mixtape

Mixtape is a “narrative adventure” about the last night before adulthood, and the games press has been handing it nines like candy. It is nowhere near a nine.

You play as Stacy Rockford, a freshly graduated senior living out her final stretch of adolescence with friends Cassandra and Slater, scored to a playlist she built herself. Stacy wants to be a music supervisor. The game walks you through memories and party-night beats themed to specific tracks: pregame, big summer blowout, then everyone splits onto separate paths. The fracture hits when Stacy admits she leaves in the morning for a New York protégé gig. The trio had planned a California road trip ending with a drop-off at Cassandra’s college. That change splits Stacy and Cassandra, and the falling-out threatens the night and the friendship. Will she save the bond, make the party, land the “hit”? What drama.

Looking back at the end of high school through the songs that played that day is not a bad idea. Diegetic music, scenes that behave like music videos, extra meaning layered under a track: cinema does that well when the writing holds. Mixtape fails the handoff on story and on play.

The conflict boils down to nobody getting their way. Stacy’s night will not match the soundtrack she curated. Cassandra is furious Stacy bailed on the road trip that was supposed to end at her dorm. To the game’s accidental credit, it captures how foolish high-school emergencies feel from the inside: tiny frameworks, tiny lives lived so far. I do not think that was the point. These characters are insufferable, self-entitled idiots. They fight over problems a five-minute conversation would fix, act superior while chasing youthful degeneracy, and never hear a clean “you are wrong.” Their outlooks barely get challenged. The game treats their takes as correct by default. The one time an authority figure tries to intervene, that figure rolls over and lets the night continue.

They suck.

Stacy is a know-it-all who ranks people by music taste and marks anyone who does not obsess at her level as lesser. She uses songs as memory glue, fine, except she often cares more that the scene matches her mixtape than that her friends are hurting. Cassandra gets yelled at and grounded; her father threatens to cancel the trip and force a college change. Stacy’s answer, after hearing it, is to attack Cassandra for wrecking the party and the soundtrack. No sympathy. Her experience. Her tape. When the New York reveal nukes the extensively planned road trip, she downplays the betrayal and, mid-fight with Cassie, literally says Cassie should be happy for her.

Cassandra’s whole deal is doing what she wants. She befriended Stacy and Slater as rebellion against parents who called those two a threat to her future. The parents were not wrong. Because of that trio she TPs the principal’s house into detention, gets drunk enough to need a shopping cart to ditch the cops, and treats property damage like a flex. The game paints her folks as unreasonable jailers. From what we see, they look like people worried about their daughter. Dad is a cop who grounds her to keep her off a citywide youth bender and wonders if she is responsible enough for college or if she will only party. Fair concerns. To Cassandra they are chains. In the final act she tells him that if he will not let her go she will “burn the whole f-ing place down,” with an active fire behind her. She also admits Jenny is taking Stacy’s road-trip seat specifically to hurt Stacy. She lies when it helps, dismisses other people’s plans, and answers grounding with an arson threat.

Slater is the airheaded stoner template: the group’s moderator and “reasonable” one, until he drunkenly knocks over a video store’s VHS wall. He sucks too. They all suck.

High schoolers really do fight over this junk. That does not make these reactions endearing. I dislike all three. Giving us the window where kids think they know everything, without the life check that follows, is not a romance of freedom from responsibility. It is a romance of freedom from accountability.

Gameplay is barely there. You walk, press a button, get a line or a cutscene. Calling it an interactive movie already flatters the interactive part. You steer some headbanging in the car, take pictures, skateboard. Several sequences let you do nothing and still “succeed.” Trying to move often means crashing and restarting. Controls are floaty. With this little to do, the inputs should at least be tight. They are not.

Comparisons to John Hughes coming-of-age films are dishonest. Those stories usually teach the characters something about themselves or the world. Mixtape has no lesson worth keeping. It wants your own childhood nostalgia to do the emotional labor the writing will not. When the kids fail, the soundtrack is supposed to carry the connection. Good music is not a good story.

I will give the game this: it looks good. Plenty of frames feel like people who cared built them. Passion can look like art and still leave you with characters you would cross the street to avoid.

Three out of ten. Skip the critic pile-on and wait for the playlist on its own.