Mixtape review: "A nostalgic, vibes-based experience set to a shockingly solid soundtrack"

Stacy Rockford is right; music is magic. The main protagonist of Mixtape, Rockford posits that the right piece of music is both a path to where we're going as well as a record of where we've been. The soundtrack of our lives goes forward and backwards, playing and rewinding. The coming-of-age title, which sees three friends look back on their high school years together while preparing for what comes next in the form of one last greatest hit, drums this beat again and again.

Not that Mixtape ever really repeats itself. The game plays out over a series of memory vignettes inspired by objects or people in rooms or topics of conversation or songs. Remember that one time where that thing happened? Now you're doing it. What about that party where we almost got caught? Smash cut to actually playing through that scenario. Next up in our soundtrack is this particular song, which evokes a certain memory.

You could look at Mixtape as a series of interconnected dreamlike minigames as recollected by the three friends over the course of trying to have one last big blowout before they split forever (or at least for what feels like forever) with Stacy off to New York, Cassandra going to college, and Slater just sort of… sticking around, man. They are on the cusp of adulthood, the very precipice of their lives up until this point, and what lies beyond is big and unknown and terrifying and heady.

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All of this in service to make it feel like you, too, are leaving something behind to embark past the horizon. Taken on its own, the small scene of your first kiss complete with tongue-twisting minigame isn't meaningful, but add that to the next 15 or so that are similarly small but impactful and suddenly you've lived a life. I chuckled my way through many of these early on, and yet despite my first impulse to paint a giant dick when given the chance to decorate something on my own, I instead painted in big, blocky letters ALL IS LOVE.

All told, the five or so hours it took to "beat" Mixtape – not exactly an EP by any stretch of the term, I'd argue – went by in a blur, though not a Blur song. While not an exact recreation of my own teenage years, which happened roughly 10 to 15 years after the '90s of Mixtape, it's easy enough to recognize the similarities: deep thoughts happening for the first time punctuated by rebellion, inherent desires to both stand out and belong, and the melancholic ennui of worrying whether you're saying too much or too little.

Pairing that with, for example, little prompts hovering over pictures on the wall, tapes on a desk, and empty beer bottles to hit makes for a fairly chill experience. Want to make sure you're moving forward? Interact with the prompts highlighted in yellow. Want to just hang out? You can do that too; I couldn't tell you how long I actually spent just skipping rocks in one particular scene.

If you're looking strictly for interactive mechanics, Mixtape will likely disappoint you. If you are, instead, looking for an experience, the vibes are immaculate here even if you've never heard the term "shoegaze" before in your life. It doesn't hurt to have some familiarity, however, and I suspect being someone that engages with music beyond "it's nice" will probably enhance your time with Mixtape.

In fact, I'm probably something of a mark for what Mixtape is trying to do. Setting the entirety of the game to a carefully curated soundtrack is basically like offering me digital catnip. While I'm not a musician by any means despite my brief stint at middle school trumpet, I've long obsessed over the perfect playlist or perfect song for a given moment.

I'm not being hyperbolic, either. I worked the radio station through high school, curated a tabletop RPG playlist for an audience of five over an entire decade where I added five new songs per session, and own well over 400 CDs, dozens of cassette tapes, and an unquantifiable amount of vinyl. If there's someone who "music is magic, actually," might work on, it's me.

Because it is. Magic, that is. Music can let you travel through time and space, transporting you to where you've been or want to be, but never in the same way. Mixtape understands this and does its best to recreate that in the form of stumbling drunk through a video rental store and banging your head to the beat on a drive to nowhere or figuratively flying through the air while literally simply walking across a forest clearing. Stacy Rockford is right.

Mixtape was reviewed on PS5, with a code provided by the publisher.