Mixtape is art, even if it’s not perfect

Mixtape is a work of art. I’m not sure I particularly loved the game, but I wish more games would try to capture a feeling the way this game does.

For anyone out of the loop, Mixtape is a linear, story-based game in a similar genre to something like What Remains of Edith Finch. You listen to conversations, wander around looking at items that trigger new voice lines, and then every few minutes, there’s a minigame with a fun little twist to give you something new to do. The whole thing is over in three hours or less and there’s no real way to be better at it or to fail. You just experience it.

That’s the magic of Mixtape, that it is an experience. It’s structured a little like the High Fidelity movie (possibly my favourite film of all time), with the protagonist breaking the fourth wall to talk directly to the camera about the music that’s playing, as if they’ve curated a mixtape for their day for you to experience. It doesn’t make any sense and I think that’s my favourite thing about the game. It doesn’t try to make sense to you, it just lets you peek into its world and enjoy the ride.

That world is very much 90s suburban USA and will speak to any millennial that grew up with an interest in rock and pop music. The actual mixtape is a burned CD, there’s skateboards and house parties and kids running away from the cops as their opportunity to rebel. The soundtrack is peppered with Smashing Pumpkins and Joy Division and every character is a cliché from the ‘coming-of-age’ movies we watched as kids.

What Mixtape manages to do so well is evoke a very specific feeling that I had as a teenager and I’m not sure exists anymore. Long summers out in the world with your friends, feeling rebellious and mature while having that safety net of parents and suburban security. An obsession with getting to the coolest parties and find ways to get alcohol. The slow realisation that your friendship group might not survive your diverging path into adulthood. Using music as your whole identity to mask your insecurity about not really knowing who you are yet. The persistent feeling that the ‘cool kids’ are having a better time than you thanks to their privilege and the angst that goes along with being left out. 

For me, all of that happened when I was sixteen. Here in the UK we do our GCSEs then, our first ‘proper’ exams, and once they’re finished in June, schools would generally let you leave for an early Summer. What entailed was the longest Summer of your life, two or three months with nothing to do at the hottest time of the year. It was the first time I had a job so had some disposable income, I went to my first music festival (Reading Festival 2002, what a year), and I spent far too much time getting drunk in parks, on riverbanks and at houseparties, to the point where I never drank that much again for the rest of my life. It’s a time that felt important and formative, and Mixtape manages to capture that feeling, that vibe, better than anything else I’ve experienced.

It does this by focusing on that vibe more than realism or logic. Sometimes in the game you’ll be in incredibly grounded, realistic, mundane situations like listening to music in a friend’s bedroom. A few minutes later you’ll be literally flying across fields or leading incredible police chases or destroying the neighbourhood with the power of teen angst. It’s not relatable in terms of things you’ve done, but it’s relatable in terms of how you felt, and the feelings those memories still evoke. I’m not sure anyone younger or older than me would feel the same about it without those memories, and while that might limit the audience dramatically, it makes it feel special.

There’s a moment in the game that really hit this idea home for me. You’re exploring an abandoned dinosaur theme park at one point, and there’s no real barriers to block you. In reality it’d be closed off and everything would be completely shut down, but in the game it just takes a couple of switches to bring the whole thing to life, rides and all. One character walks past a dinosaur model and casually remarks, “I remember when that thing was 20 stories tall”. Not, “I remember thinking it was that tall,” but remembering when it actually was because your perception of a thing is often more important and powerful than the reality. I love it when a game makes me stop and think about something so profound, and Mixtape even manages to do it with irrelevant little snippets of background dialogue.

That’s not to say I particularly loved the game. Some of the minigames are misses and the music choices aren’t what I would have picked. The protagonist is exactly the kind of self-centred know-it-all I’ve always been terrified of becoming and I couldn’t stand her through the entire story. The structure of the game maybe leans a little too hard on 80s kids movies with too many neat bows wrapped on things rather than dipping into real heartbreak or failure. I wanted a little more ‘The Kids Aren’t Alright’ by the Offspring, but instead I got ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ by Cyndi Lauper. 

But I wish more games were like Mixtape. Instead of desperately trying to make sense and immerse us in a believable world, I wish they’d chase a feeling, an experience. I think Alien Isolation managed to do an incredible job of that, and Disco Elysium. Games that forget about realism and use sometimes surrealist ideas to evoke something more important. That’s art, and Mixtape is most definitely art.