Mixtape Rocks

Mixtape rocks. It slaps. It whips. It fucks. Just go buy it and play it, it’s on like every platform and $20 bucks or something and takes like 3-4 hours to finish.

Anyway, now that you have all played Mixtape, we can all agree it rules, right??

On the off chance you haven’t played yet, Mixtape is a short coming-of-age game where you follow Stacey Rockford, a just-graduated high school senior in a fictional small town in Northern California (that is incredibly Portland-OR-coded) in an indeterminate time in the mid-to-late 90s on the day before she is leaving to go to New York to try and make a break at becoming a music supervisor. You spend this last day with Rockford’s two friends Slater and Cassandra getting up to teenage hijinks in preparation for the big end-of-the-school year cool-kids party you’ve been invited to. The game is primarily composed of cutscenes, explorations of environments (eg people’s rooms or areas around town), and a bunch of different minigames for key moments either in the real time of the story, or in the memories of Rockford and her friends. It’s about youth! It’s about friendship! It’s about art!

I am a fair-weather gamer and a huge lover of immersive theater and immersive design (read: theme parks), and also as best I can tell not a raging misogynist, so it’s probably not surprising that I fall on the “Walking simulators are good, what are you freaks getting mad about?” side of the ledger. I was in the Gone Home was my favorite game of 2013, and that’s when I still paid attention to and played video games pretty significantly1. The Stanley Parable rules, What Remains of Edith Finch rules, and while I’ve never played Firewatch I assume I’d like it.

So anyway, I’m predisposed to enjoy Mixtape’s genre. It is a walking simulator of a sort, but more akin to Edith Finch than Gone Home, in that it is less focused on deep exploration of a particular space and more focused on light exploration triggering sequences and minigames, and using the varied levers of game design to create a variety of said minigames to express different ideas and get across different emotional experiences. Chris Plante on The Besties described it perfectly in that it is a video game that employs the (now-cliched) structural trick of a musical: in a musical, once things get too big or too emotional or too heated for words to be enough, that’s when you start singing. In Mixtape, if you can’t talk it out or think it out, then that’s when you get a minigame and you have to experience it.

Of course, as the name suggests, it’s also deeply musical in a literal sense: Rockford is a music obsessive, in a few years time there is a 100% chance her favorite movie of all time will become High Fidelity. And she is obsessed with the idea of making mixtapes and of having the perfect soundtrack to every moment. As such, the game also has a constant soundtrack, and most moments (and I believe all minigames) have a particular song associated with them and called out in running commentary by Rockford.

Hey guess what my favorite movie was for most of high school! High Fidelity!!!!!!

In fact, this game makes me think about something Dan Harmon once said regarding how he created the core study group characters in Community. Each person was one particular (often negative) aspect of his personality, blown up and exaggerated into a full character, and then the show arises out of the conflicts that you would get if you had the Dan-Harmon-brain version of Inside Out all hanging out with each other.

I feel very strongly that the writers of Mixtape managed to do the same for me!!!!! I am none of these three characters, but I kinda am all of them? Especially me as a high schooler!!!

Rockford obviously shares my high-school love of not just music, and of musical eclecticism and hipsterdom, but mixtapes and soundtracks. The idea that if somehow you can curate the perfect thing or make the right connection or describe things correctly, you will have the ability to control the fundamentally uncontrollable world around you. I dreamed of being a music supervisor one day. My arguable greatest achievement is curating the soundtrack to one of my college theater group’s plays. That and she probably also is the most aesthetically similar to high-school me, what with the jackets and jeans.

Slater is the guy who’s mostly friends with girls, the guy who goes along with the flow as opposed to leading the friend group, and (unlike Rockford) the guy who likes actually creating art and making things as opposed to just curating and commenting.

Cassandra is the academic, the high-achiever, the goody-two-shoes who is enjoying mild rebellion, and is the one who can bridge friendship group gaps between preppier groups and more counter-cultural groups.

None though are perfect matches! I think I found myself relating most to Cassandra and Rockford, but while my parents were protective they were never anywhere near as strict as Cassandra’s, and therefore there was never really direct conflict (and obviously: the explicit textual racial element to her dad’s overprotectiveness was uhhh not present in the Whipple household!!!) and Rockford I think is just…. too mean! I would like to think I was at least a little more of a sweetheart and less rage filled and judgmental!! And all three of them are wayyyyy more rebellious than I or most of my friend groups ever were.

But that’s I suppose what makes it so engaging for me: I would be less interested in a story that literally was just me, or just three me-s. These characters all feel very real, flaws and all, and all feel like an organic friend group with organic conflicts! And the vocal performances of all three are exceptional, including being (appropriately) exceptionally annoying when needed!

This also hit me at this specific time in my life, as things like 10-year high school and college reunions, or weddings, or even moving to a new (old) city has me thinking a lot about old friendships, and specifically what I could have done (or could be doing) to keep those relationships more present and active. I have a very strong memory of the summer after graduating high school going with one of my best friends to see the Dark Knight Rises premiere as part of a marathon 9-hour “watch Batman Begins, then The Dark Knight, then at midnight Dark Knight Rises” thing at a local theater, and us getting out at 3 in the morning and just talking for a full hour out in the theater parking lot. This game brought me back to that moment, and myriad others like it, over and over and over again.

This is not a unique experience by any stretch, I think basically everyone has this or some version of this (especially me and my friend cohorts being self-selected among people who are more likely to move to cities that they didn’t grow up in!) but thinking about high school and college friendships it’s sad to eg: not be invited to weddings of people who you would’ve considered in your imaginary future wedding party a decade+ ago. And most crushingly, for it to be correct that you were not invited.

Obviously intentional on the part of the game designers, but I felt that both in seeing teenaged friendship and activities that reminded of my own teenaged friendships, but also in seeing that disconnect happening in real time to Rockford and Slater and Cassandra over the course of this game. That’s not subtext, that’s in fact (later on) the literal text of the game, but still it made me quite emotional! Throughout much of the game I was playing Rina Sawayama’s “Bad Friend” in a loop in my head both at seeing what Rockford is doing to her friends and thinking about how poor I’ve been about communicating and how sort of debilitating my social anxiety has gotten (especially post-pandemic.) I don’t believe, or at least hope, that I’ve been as specifically cruel as Rockford gets2, but the similarity still stung!

Anyway, as I mentioned above, for being Northern California this really felt very Portland-coded, and to a lesser extent Seattle-coded. Well, as someone who 1) grew up first in Portland, then 2) went to middle school and high school in Seattle, then 3) went to college in Northern California (though Bay Area, not like this right-on-the-Oregon-border NorCal) this once again hit me quite directly!!!!

Now that said, this game was made by an Australian development team, and allegedly they self-consciously set it in a bit of a pastiche of their understanding of America and America at this point in time. I have not spent a ton of time in the parts of NorCal that this game sets itself in, so maybe the replication is quite meticulous…… but it is also possible that this may be more of a fictitious west-coast pastiche. And perhaps I am relating to it because what was my life from ages 3-22 if not a west-coast pastiche?

I am also so struck by the degree to which this 90s version of teenagerdom felt so similar to my own in the late 2000s-early 2010s, albeit as mentioned the kids in this are much more rebellious. Despite the technological and societal changes, this did not feel foreign at all!!

Some of that is I think genuine similarity: yes iPods are different than Walkmans, but I was still making mix CDs and mix playlists; yes DVDs are different from VHSes, but I was still renting them from Blockbuster; streaming is different from cable but I was still watching a tv show or movie on the couch or on a laptop in the library with friends; phones existed, but for high schoolers they were mostly flip phones and Sidekicks, not smartphones.

Some of this I think is from the focus of the game: while cell phones, the internet, and social media all existed through my whole high school career, their existence didn’t mean there wasn’t also a lot of time of just hanging out with friends and getting up to shenanigans offline. This game shows a only snippets and shows the deliberately offline snippets (a single last day together, and flashbacks to the most important memories) and maybe if the game covered four full years of Rockford’s life in full detail the “wait why didn’t you google that” or “why aren’t you checking Facebook?” or “you could just text them?” gaps would be more stark.

And also a huge part is definitely that the late 2000s-early 2010s in Seattle was a deliberately backwards-looking time! I went on high school dates to buy vinyl and cassettes from music stores! It’s not an accident that noted Seattle artist Macklemore released “Thrift Shop” in 2012!! And a huge amount of that nostalgia and cultural remix was directed specifically at the 90s and the 90s Seattle aesthetics that Rockford chooses.

But I also hope, perhaps foolishly, that a good chunk of this experience is still fairly universal and that an 18-year-old of now would see some significant similarities to their experience, even in a tiktokified world. Who knows; maybe this is just locking in to my specific relationships to the PNW and to these characters and their worldviews, and maybe it’s all just a fiction as constructed by a group of Australians doing a pastiche. It feels very very real to me, but it is almost certain that there are people my own age who probably look at this like an unrelatable John Hughes fantasy!

Gameplay-wise, again I like a walking simulator, so I am beyond unconcerned with the fact that “there’s no fail state” or “there’s no challenge” or whatever. It’s totally fine to not prefer that and not want to play that kind of game, but shut up this is a valid genre!!

But through the combo of the when-the-song-would-happen-in-a-musical emotional placements, the sheer variety of the minigames, and the deliberate magical realism of what you do in the minigames, this more strongly than almost any game I can remember made me think consciously about how individual game design choices, specifically individual verbs3 and individual affordances you get from “you are fully controlling things rendered in a fictional 3d space” impact your emotional experience. I could feel things like “Oh if the pacing of the character’s movement was faster I wouldn’t be feeling what I’m feeling now” or “Oh by making the ball easier to hit with this character than it is with another you get the feeling of their skill and of realizing your own lack of skill” or “oh this disconnect between my input and my movement gives me this feeling of drunkenness” etc. The variety makes what would otherwise be invisible design choices visible, at least for me. It should 1000% be taught in game design classes.

Everyone is talking about the early minigame where you are (spoilers) experiencing the memory of Rockford’s first kiss and you zoom into the inside of her and the boy’s mouth and you control each tongue with a different joystick. It’s so gross and silly and wacky and fun, and is early enough in the game to give you a great “ah okay I see what we’re doing here” impression. But my favorites, other than the ending, are the (again spoilers I suppose) running through the fields, Rockford sadly floating away in black and white, Slater drunkenly trying to rent movies, and the sequence at the abandoned Dinosaur theme park. But the whole game is great!! It also paces well, blending silly games (the kissing, the video store) with calmer ones (the baseball, the skipping stones) with adrenaline (all the skateboarding or running from cops ones) with emotion (the black and white one, the flying). And the ending is very on the nose, but given all of the things I wrote above especially uhhhhhhh about my personal emotional state in 2026, it worked and it worked so devastatingly well!!!!

Finally, the music: this game would completely fall apart if the music wasn’t not just exceptional, but exceptional and surprising. Rockford’s whole bit, High Fidelity style, is her notion that she’s destined to be a great music supervisor, meaning you are giving your music supervisor a hell of a job! But it knocks it out of the park. I have been listening to the soundtrack in the days since, it’s so good. “Yesterday’s Hero” and “Witchi Tai To” in particular have made it onto my 2026 Obsessions list.

Anyway, that’s Mixtape: a game that makes me specifically nostalgic for my own high school experience and who I was then, while also making me think very critically about the life I’ve led in the intervening 14 years, and delivers it through exquisite and carefully considered game design, characters, performances, and musical choices. It’s both a masterpiece game on its own merits, and a gut punch designed in a lab for me, and for me right now. Very good!!!!