Mixtape is a musical portrait of teenage life

Playing Mixtape is like playing a video game version of a high school movie. Kids banter about the meaning of life and the theme songs that would play when they walk in a room. They’re worried about looking cool at a big party. They’re obsessed with finding booze. But under all of those tropes is a meaningful story about nostalgia, friendship, and teenage angst — and it’s all backed by a great soundtrack packed with classic hits.

Mixtape takes place over the course of a summer day. You play as Stacey Rockford, a music obsessive and recent high school graduate. Rockford is leaving her sleepy California suburb for New York City the next morning on a quest to become a music supervisor, and she and her two best friends — the low-key Van Slater and the rebellious Cassandra Morino — are whiling away the day before a big party in the evening.

Rockford, Slater, and Cassandra really feel like a trio of teenagers. For one thing, a lot of the game is spent hanging out in their bedrooms and lazing around. They bullshit with each other about music and life, their futures and dating, and whatever else is on their minds, all with the inflated self-confidence of teenagers who also know they have no idea what the hell they’re doing. Rockford in particular likes to show off just how much she knows about music, frequently breaking the fourth wall to directly address the camera about the current song choice for her meticulous playlist for the day (which includes tracks from legends like Portishead, Iggy Pop, and The Cure).

The meat of Mixtape is wandering as Rockford and looking at various objects, like a CD or a map of a planned road trip, and listening to the trio’s commentary. Think of nostalgic games with a slower pace like Life is Strange or Gone Home — Mixtape has a similar speed. Sometimes, looking at an object takes you back to a playable scene from their past, and these will have different situations or mechanics. These were so hyper-specific — mixing slushies at a convenience store, stumbling drunkenly around a video rental shop, taking photos with a Game Boy Camera-like gadget while sneaking into a dinosaur-themed amusement park — that they constantly got me to reflect back on my own teenage years in suburbia.

As the story goes on, the game adds thoughtful layers to each character. Rockford, after coaxing Slater to play her one of his own songs, asks him about why he makes music, making me realize that Rockford, for all she knows about music, doesn’t actually play anything. Cassandra grapples with wanting freedom as a way to push back on her overbearing parents. Slater, despite outwardly presenting as something of a deadbeat, proves himself to be an incredibly kind and thoughtful human being. Even Cassandra’s dad, a party-busting cop who serves as the game’s primary antagonist, gets a moment to shine.

So much of Mixtape is, on its face, mundane. At one point, I spent 10 minutes skipping rocks — a not-insignificant amount of time for a game that I finished in about four hours. That mundanity, however, is what made the game feel so real. My high school experience as a nerdy band kid didn’t include any of the kinds of shenanigans that Mixtape’s trio gets up to. But I still related to the story of a bunch of kids hanging out, looking back at their time together, and peering nervously ahead to the future.

^{Mixtape is now available on the Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X / S.}