Captured on Nintendo Switch 2 (Docked)
Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you should always make a soundtrack. That’s the advice of Stacey Rockford, the star of this latest musical adventure from Australian studio Beethoven & Dinosaur. Tie every event to a carefully curated track list and “pretty soon,” she advises in her teenage wisdom, “you won’t be listening to music: you’ll be listening to who you were.”
Presented as a 3D, third-person adventure, what unfurls — soundtrack present and correct — is the story of ’90s high school friends parting ways, and the big blowout on their final night together. Stacey leaves tomorrow to seek fame and fortune as a Hollywood music supervisor. Her two friends, Cassandra and Van, will take an epic road trip down through California from the suburb where they’ve grown up.
So a party is absolutely called for. And a party is going to require alcohol – alcohol they can’t legally get their hands on, being under 21. The quest for the hallowed booze is therefore the backbone of the story for most of the game.
But that’s just what you do. As Stacey would tell you, that matters less than what music you do it to. She wastes no time getting the point across, introducing in her musical know-it-all narrator’s voice That’s Good by Devo. And with those pumping, synthy strains as the accompaniment, you’re off bombing the hill on your skateboards through autumn leaves in the magic light of the low evening sun.
Gameplay in this first section sets the tone: easygoing, simplistic, and with no real fail state. That said, you can pull tricks, dodge oncoming cars (announced by your friends with endearing shouts of “CAR!”), and scatter leaves. None of its racking up points or anything – it’s all just for fun.
Captured on Nintendo Switch 2 (Handheld/Undocked)
And this is a game full of fun, living off pure vibes. It works brilliantly, but just be aware what you’re signing up for. With 25 or so licensed tracks put to use, it’s a substantial series of relaxed vignettes, sometimes thrilling, sometimes hilarious, always chill. This is not a game of teenage angst: for the most part, we seem to have some rather privileged kids on our hands, with peachy lives. What drama arises comes later in the story, and doesn’t seem like too big a deal.
Maybe that’s just my old-headed view, since, as Van observes, for teens, everything’s heavy – “everything’s the end of the world”. It might all be a bit too dreamy to be relatable, but then the whole game does feel like a dream, like a rose-tinted, misremembered youth. Those easy lives and easy gameplay are on-theme, making for a complete, if emotionally soft, picture.
So that’s the fantasy: a teenagerhood of relative ease. Social confidence, no actual school, and big, beautiful bedrooms (for some, anyway) full of the relics of happy exploits over the years. For those of us who were in fact teenagers in the ’90s, there are some blasts from the past: things you’d like to imagine you remember, like a helicopter police chase in a stolen shopping trolley, and things you actually do remember, like rewinding an audio cassette using a pencil.
Captured on Nintendo Switch 2 (Handheld/Undocked)
It would be a spoiler to set out all the gameplay ideas or list all the music, since Stacey has the whole night planned out for you on her ultimate mixtape, but you will be, amongst many more things, skateboarding a fair bit, floating rather a lot, seriously rocking out in the car, and creatively squirting slushie masterpieces. The controls are somewhat varied between these moments, but the real variety comes in the form of the wonderful animations and overall visual design.
The range is impressive. One moment, you’re pinging home runs to The Touch by Stan Bush, the next you’re detonating fireworks from a flying convertible to Roxy Music’s More Than This. Yes, some control schemes are repeated — there really is a lot of floating — but when you consider there’s about 25 songs’ worth of fun to be had, it’s remarkable that the energy is kept up. What’s repeated doesn’t quite outstay its welcome.
Equally impressive is the sense of a single, coherent game. Like a great mixtape, this is not just a run of disjointed snippets – it flows holistically and takes you on a meaningful journey. The worldbuilding is enhanced in slow-paced sections where you need to explore environments, selecting hotspots for a dose of flavour. In a blissful refusal to let any tedium set in, all the hotspots you actually need to hit to progress have been given the yellow paint treatment. These ones are usually objects that trigger a playable flashback or a rewarding cinematic, driving the story along without dawdling.
Captured on Nintendo Switch 2 (Handheld/Undocked)
With progression requirements clearly marked and zero-stakes gameplay, you do need to be ready to buy into the vision here. You need to be up for listening to someone else’s mixtape and accepting their strict curation of your experience. Beethoven & Dinosaur’s last game, The Artful Escape, was another low-friction, music-driven game – a 2D platformer. That game had you “Hold Y to shred” – basically do nothing and watch your character wail on guitar while you run. Mixtape maintains that general attitude, but if holding ‘Y’ to shred wasn’t enough for you, maybe this, with its far greater variety of interactions, will win you over.
A game verging on ‘interactive experience’ territory had better have great production values, and Mixtape definitely delivers here. The characters look a little like they’re carved from wood or cut from clay, and they’re animated at a low frame rate, resembling stop-motion. The world flies past smoothly and feels responsive; it’s just the characters who have a jerky sort of style. Facial expressions and postures bring endearing characters to life with a sense of fun.
The audio design is, critically, wonderful. It must have been tough to finesse effects and barks that don’t just irritate when you’re supposed to be enjoying a great tune, but it’s been achieved. The numerous recordings of “Cheeseburger!” stand out in delivering a brilliantly playable joke (of which there are a few). Original music has to hold its own against the licensed tracks as well, slotting into the interstitial moments. It does so confidently.
Conclusion
Mixtape’s greatest accomplishment is that it more than lives up to its name. This is a thoughtfully curated collection of music, sure, but before that, it’s an exciting, sentimental, funny game. Rather than simply twiddling your thumbs while the licensed music plays, you’re living life with a soundtrack – the only way Stacey Rockford would have you do it.