Mixtape turned me again right into a Millennial teenage dirtbag

Mixtape is the reply to the query, “What if the film High Fidelity was a online game?” It’s not an ideal analogy, however it’s fairly rattling shut, and both method it’s an indication that Mixtape goes to be a wonderful slice of late-Nineties, early-2000s nostalgia, full with a banging soundtrack.

You’ll be able to hear it within the trailers — Mixtape completely nails the basic Moviefone tone, and evidently this vibe extends to the complete sport. I performed roughly half-hour of Mixtape at Summer season Recreation Fest 2025, and in that point I turned enamored with the sport’s lead character, a rebellious and insufferably cool teenager named Rockford who’s about to depart suburbia to pursue her goals of changing into a music supervisor in New York Metropolis. She talks on to the participant as she introduces her two also-very-cool greatest mates and cues up the sport’s music, breaking the fourth wall identical to John Cusack. Many of the sport performs out in a third-person view, following alongside as Rockford and her mates casually skate down tree-lined streets, flee from the cops in a high-speed shopping-cart sequence, and hand around in her bed room, taking a look at Polaroid photos and CDs whereas planning one of the simplest ways to steal liquor from her mother and father’ stash.

Mixtape comes from The Artful Escape studio Beethoven & Dinosaur, and it equally makes use of music as a core storytelling and scene-setting machine. This makes excellent sense, contemplating the studio’s founder, Johnny Galvatron, is a legit rock star based mostly in Melbourne, Australia. Leaning into musicality additionally labored out effectively for The Suave Escape, which earned Beethoven & Dinosaur a BAFTA award in 2022. Mixtape’s soundtrack is populated by the highest teenage-dirtbag bands from the 80s, 90s and barely past, together with DEVO, Roxy Music, The Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Pleasure Division and the Remedy (however not Wheatus, so far as I can inform, simply to be clear).

Visually, Mixtape has a painterly 3D aesthetic with attractive golden mild and purple shadows, paying homage to Life is Unusual or Telltale’s The Strolling Useless collection. In motion, the characters transfer in a windswept, Spider-Verse animation type that doesn’t interrupt the gameplay movement. Even hovering down the snakelike asphalt on a skateboard, Rockford responds instantly to controller enter and her experience isn’t interrupted by stray or late animations. Mixtape appears beautiful and feels nice.

There are additionally shocking little moments with different mechanics within the sport’s first half hour, together with a scene straight out of Wayne’s World the place you make the trio headbang in a automobile, and one other the place you management two tongues making out in a close-up, Ren & Stimpy sort of cartoon realism. When Rockford explains what a music supervisor is, real-world reference photos fill the display in a tongue-in-cheek academic interlude. All through all of this, the music continues to roll, every tune purposefully positioned and given time to shine.

It could be simple for Mixtape to really feel like an affordable nostalgia seize, an exploitation of Millennial gamers’ recollections of skipping CDs and pre-cellphone social gathering planning, however that merely isn’t the case to date. Mixtape seems like a love letter to the early aughts, full of shocking mechanics, lovely graphics and all the best references executed extraordinarily effectively.

Mixtape is because of hit Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence X/S in 2025, revealed by Annapurna Interactive.