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, nevertheless it’s fairly rattling shut, and both method it’s an indication that Mixtape goes to be a wonderful slice of late-Nineteen Nineties, early-2000s nostalgia, full with a banging soundtrack.

You possibly can hear it within the trailers — Mixtape completely nails the traditional Moviefone tone, and plainly this vibe extends to the complete recreation. I performed roughly half-hour of Mixtape at Summer time Sport 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 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 finest associates and cues up the sport’s music, breaking the fourth wall similar to John Cusack. A lot of the recreation performs out in a third-person view, following alongside as Rockford and her associates 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 footage 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 machine. This makes excellent 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 attractive golden gentle and purple shadows, harking back 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 circulation. 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 appears to be like beautiful and feels nice.

There are additionally stunning little moments with various mechanics within the recreation’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 form of cartoon realism. When Rockford explains what a music supervisor is, real-world reference photographs fill the display in a tongue-in-cheek academic interlude. All through all of this, the music continues to roll, every music purposefully positioned and given time to shine.

It might be straightforward for Mixtape to really feel like an inexpensive nostalgia seize, an exploitation of Millennial gamers’ recollections of skipping CDs and pre-cellphone occasion planning, however that merely isn’t the case up to now. Mixtape appears like a love letter to the early aughts, stuffed with stunning mechanics, lovely graphics and all the proper references executed extraordinarily effectively.

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