It’s rare to find a game with as much personality as Mixtape displays in its opening moments. This coming-of-age story from the developer behind The Artful Escape is stylish and nostalgic, earnest and whimsical, and probably my favorite game I played at Summer Game Fest this year. As I begin the opening moments of the demo, I have the realization every gamer craves: I’ve never played anything like this before.
Set in the ‘90s, Mixtape is about a teenager named Stacy Rockford, who has dreams of becoming a Music Supervisor in Hollywood, thanks to her passion for creating carefully curated mixtapes. She addresses the camera Ferris Bueller-style, setting up the game’s events and openly breaking the fourth wall. Before you’re even playing, characters introduce themselves with bold text on the screen and music propelling the story forward. Cutscenes are built from in-game footage and old stock clips, blurring the line between cinema and game.
The experience itself is a fusion of a narrative-driven adventure game and playable music videos. Stacy walks around the environment and observes her surroundings in the quieter moments of the game, but whenever the action kicks in, so does the soundtrack. Before each musical sequence, of which there are many, Stacy names the song, the band, and the year it came out, teeing things up perfectly. Like many of the game’s stylistic choices, it’s just cheesy enough that it works.
The musical sequences I play are all varied and interesting. In the intro, Stacy and her friends ride down a hill on skateboards, and there are buttons to jump and do tricks, but that’s just for fun – there are no points involved. As you ride, “That’s Good” by DEVO plays through Stacy’s headphones, and all the characters clap along with the claps in the song.
A later song has the three protagonists rocking out in a car, and you can press a button to make them nod their heads or play an air guitar. As the montage follows their road trip, there are more little ways for them to dance along, like honking the horn, slapping the side of the car, or flashing the lights on and off. It’s just one example of how Mixtape is a masterclass in tone, setting such a specific, fun vibe that I can’t help but dance along.
Another sequence is much shorter than the others, and has Stacy reminisce about a kiss she shared with a boy from her past. It starts slow and romantic, but then cuts to a hilarious, bizarre minigame where you control each teen’s tongue in the make-out session with one of the joysticks. After about 30 seconds, I’m relieved when a button labeled “That’s Enough!” pops up, and I don’t have to stress about how weird it looks to the other passersby at SGF.
They can also be much more involved, like an intense chase sequence where you avoid police cars by racing down hills in a shopping cart. It starts out as a classic teen adventure where they flee a party to avoid getting busted and turns into a full-on manhunt, complete with helicopters and a live news feed. After an epic, slow-mo jump off the docks and into the water, we cut back to Stacy’s friend Slater, who says, “At least, that’s how I remember it.”
What’s perhaps most impressive about my time with Mixtape is that narrative adventure games are hard to make into demos. I typically enjoy them the most towards their endings when the story pays off, and it’s hard to get an introduction that doesn’t just feel like flat exposition. The fact that Mixtape impressed me so thoroughly in just half an hour is impressive in and of itself, and it’s become one of my most anticipated games of the year.
For more of our Summer Game Fest coverage, check out what we had to say about Resident Evil Requiem, Sword of the Sea, Ninja Gaiden 4, Pragmata, and more.