A couple of years ago, The Artful Escape devs Beethoven & Dinosaur announced their next game, Mixtape. It caught my eye at the time in no small part to having an art style that actually looks like Something as opposed to the vast sea of realism simulators out there. In particular, I was fond of its choppy, post-Into-the-Spiderverse animation, and the licensed music soundtrack, despite being very dad-core (maybe even grandad-core for some of you, at this point), did it some favours for me too. Now, it’s out! And brings up a pertinent point about genre.
Bear in mind, I’ve not played the thing yet, but in thinking about Mixtape the thing I keep coming back to is what its genre is: a coming of age story. “En route to their final party together, a perfectly curated playlist draws three friends into dreamlike reenactments of their formative memories,” the game’s Steam page explains. “It’s the greatest hits of the teenage experience, from the first kiss to the last dance.” None of this feels particularly novel if you’ve seen literally any coming of age film from the ’90s.
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When was the last time you saw this in a game, is what I’m left wondering. Life is Strange, surely a source of inspiration for Mixtape, comes to mind, as does Night in the Woods. These games are few and far between and certainly lean in the indie direction, and it makes me wonder why games so often limit themselves to very particular genres. I mean I know why, shooty shooty bang bang makes more money because of the culture that’s developed around those types of games over the past two decades. It’s just somehow refreshing to see someone left from a different type of film for once.
Ultimately, the game may not be for me! I’m still glad it exists for the sake of tapping into an under utilised genre in the medium. I’m also happy to see the studio’s commitment to not making a DMCA-safe streaming mode of the game; “Mixtape is about music,” a Dwitter post explains. “It’s about Devo. It’s about the Smashing Pumpkins, and Lush and Alice Coltrane. It’s about how you feel when you listen to Iggy Pop. The characters talk about the songs. The levels are designed around the songs. We couldn’t change the songs. We couldn’t replace them. We just couldn’t.”
Yeah, certainly some dad-core language there, but hey, sometimes that’s what music does to you. You can pick up Mixtape on Steam now.
