Mixtape Review – An unforgettable blend of music, magic and memories

Go watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off right now. Go on. I’ll wait. OK, now I need you to binge The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink. All done? Now you’re ready for Mixtape.

Mixtape is the latest title from Annapurna Interactive, the art indie house publisher du jour, with developers Beethoven & Dinosaur riffing hard on the 80s vibes of John Hughes movies. That means teen coming-of-age, rebellion, hanging out, talking to the camera, quips and sarcasm, and a genuine eye for what makes that time of your life so definitive. Oh, and it’s got a killer soundtrack too. Obviously.

The trio you’re about to get to know – quite intimately in some cases – are the driven and downbeat Sophie, rebellious Cassandra, and loveable slacker Slater. They’re just three American teens in mid-90s rural America, doing what cool, counter-culture kids in America did back then: listen to music, get drunk at parties, kiss the wrong person, skateboard dangerously down the main road, and break into abandoned theme parks. They’re attempting to make the most of their last night together before Sophie jets off to New York to become the music supervisor they’ve always dreamt of, leaving her friends and her hometown behind.

While that last day together frames the events of Mixtape, you’re treated to a series of flashbacks and memories at various points, exploring their homes and hangouts that trigger journeys into core events and moments in their friendship. You’ll see Sophie and Slater hanging out before Cass came along, a bittersweet view of their own friendship without a third person being there, you’ll play softball with Cassandra, as she explains just how detached she feels, and that she has no clue what she’s supposed to be doing with her life, before you see Cassandra betraying Sophie by hanging out with someone else. It’s perfectly weighted and exceptionally relatable – this is the end of childhood, the end of teenage freedom, and it’s smart, pointed, poignant and utterly joyful at the same time.

Every moment is presented as a track on Sophie’s mixtape – well, mix CD on the Discman she has constantly attached to her belt. Beethoven and Dinosaur have done a great job of channelling Ferris Bueller, or John Cusack in High Fidelity, in these moments, with Sophie explaining the origin of the track, what it means to her, and then letting it play out as you careen down the streets on your skateboard, or as the spine of the core memory you’re reminiscing about.

It swings from introspective acoustic courtesy of BJ Thomas, through iconic 80s with Devo, to grunge and alternative with Silverchair and The Jesus & Mary Chain. To say much more would ruin the surprise. There are some seriously deep cuts here, with at least two of the tracks on my all-time favourite list, causing my jaw to hit the floor and the widest grin to crease itself across my face when they started to play. It’s not a mainstream soundtrack, but it is, as you’d hope, pure class.

The narrative is often played out in a Telltale or DontNod style, checking out points of interest in each area to understand the characters’ ideas, hopes, desires, likes and dislikes. Sophie sure has a lot of dislikes; her tough, judgmental outlook colouring the entirety of Mixtape with an enjoyably world-weary attitude, but one tempered by her focused and hopeful plans for the future.

At times you’ll explore, in the next moment you’ll play minigames, like skipping stones across a lake, painting a door, or changing the batteries in an old-school handheld. Mixtape often feels like an interactive music video, and these dream-like sequences are hugely engaging, whether floating and bouncing across the meadows or rewinding in black and white after suffering a painful blow to a friendship. There’s no real goals other than to play out each moment while the music plays or the characters talk – apart from, perhaps, an unforgettable visit to a video store – but the narrative drive, and the level of interest the devs have generated in these characters will pull you along spectacularly.

I love the indie animation house stop-motion aesthetic that the team have created. It feels very much like a more grounded sibling to South of Midnight, and you might find a spot of Wes Anderson at work too, especially in the game’s deadpan, more surreal moments. It has a real tactility that is incredibly hard to generate in a video game, and it adds to the reality of this pocket of suburbia. It’s probably little surprise that the visual design and music are off the chart when Beethoven & Dinosaur’s last game, The Artful Escape, married the two so well. The difference here is how personal Mixtape feels, built on emotional foundations that everyone can find some truth in.

Sophie, like Ferris before her, is something of a natural philosopher. Amongst all of her wisdoms through Mixtape, the one that feels truest remains, “Nobody remembers the suck”. Teenage life might feel like a catastrophe at the time, punctuated by moments of glorious abandon, but we blur out the negative parts. Mixtape is a game that highlights all of those glories, revels in them, turns them around, and finds beauty, joy and comedy there amongst the painful ones. These ‘greatest hits’ are what they’re putting together through Mixtape, cataloguing the highlights – with Sophie’s musical selection holding it all together – and like any great album, each supports and feeds into the next.