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 video game?” It’s not an ideal analogy, but it surely’s fairly rattling shut, and both approach it’s an indication that Mixtape goes to be a superb slice of late-Nineteen Nineties, early-2000s nostalgia, full with a banging soundtrack.

You may hear it within the trailers — Mixtape completely nails the traditional Moviefone tone, and plainly 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 grew to become enamored with the sport’s lead character, a rebellious and insufferably cool teenager named Rockford who’s about to go away suburbia to pursue her desires of turning into a music supervisor in New York Metropolis. She talks on to the participant as she introduces her two also-very-cool finest buddies and cues up the sport’s music, breaking the fourth wall similar to John Cusack. Many of the sport performs out in a third-person view, following alongside as Rockford and her buddies casually skate down tree-lined streets, flee from the cops in a high-speed shopping-cart sequence, and hand around in her bed room, Polaroid photos and CDs whereas planning one of the best ways to steal liquor from her dad and mom’ stash.

Mixtape comes from The Artful Escape studio Beethoven & Dinosaur, and it equally makes use of music as a core storytelling and scene-setting gadget. This makes good sense, contemplating the studio’s founder, Johnny Galvatron, is primarily based 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 beautiful golden gentle and purple shadows, harking back to Life is Unusual or Telltale’s The Strolling Lifeless sequence. In motion, the characters transfer in a windswept, Spider-Verse animation fashion that doesn’t interrupt the gameplay movement. Even hovering down winding asphalt roads on a skateboard, Rockford responds instantly to controller enter and her trip isn’t interrupted by stray or late animations. Mixtape seems 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 automotive, and one other the place you management two tongues making out in a close-up, Ren & Stimpy form of cartoon realism. When Rockford explains what a music supervisor is, real-world reference photographs fill the display screen in a tongue-in-cheek instructional interlude. All through all of this, the music continues to roll, every music purposefully positioned and given time to shine.

It could be straightforward for Mixtape to really feel like an inexpensive nostalgia seize, an exploitation of Millennial gamers’ reminiscences of skipping CDs and pre-cellphone celebration planning, however that merely isn’t the case to date. Mixtape appears like a love letter to the early aughts, crammed with shocking mechanics, lovely graphics and all the best references executed extraordinarily effectively.

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