Mixtape

Mixtape is a narrative adventure game, following the character of teenager Stacey Rockford and her friends, Van Slater and Cassandra "Cass" Morino. Besides cutscenes, the player follows events as well as learns the backstories of these characters through playable vignettes throughout the game, such as skateboarding down a hilly road, slinging rocks across a pond, or exploring a run-down dinosaur park.

Stacey, Slater, and Cassandra live in the fictional northern California town of Blue Moon Lagoon in the 1990s; Stacey and Van have known each other since they were kids, while Cassandra—the daughter of the local police chief—joined them during high school, seeking to be rebellious against her strict parents. Following the last days of high school, Stacey, an aspiring music supervisor, has arranged to fly to New York City to catch a break for her dream job that she just learned about, cancelling a planned road trip she was going to take with her friends. Believing she will never return to Blue Moon Lagoon, Stacey has planned to spend the last day before the morning flight with Slater and Cassandra in preparing for a large party to be thrown by Camille Cole that night. Stacey frequently breaks the fourth wall to explain to the player that she has chosen the perfect track list for this day and introduces each song as it starts.

Melbourne-based studio Beethoven & Dinosaur had previously developed a music-themed platforming title The Artful Escape, also published by Annapurna Interactive and released in 2021. Johnny Galvatron, the game's director, had been the lead of the band The Galvatrons until 2017, when he left to form Beethoven & Dinosaur. After The Artful Escape, Galvatron had the idea of basing a game on Devo's "That's Good", which led to expanding to creating a mixtape of Galvatron's "greatest hits of all time". Galvatron described the feel of the game as "sorta like channel-surfing [old-school] MTV at 3 AM".

Galvatron wanted to take a more narrative approach for Mixtape compared to The Artful Escape; the studio listed out his favourite songs and "arrange them in different ways" to "see what story it can tell" based on musical crescendos and lulls to form a narrative. After creating a horizontal slice of the game to roughly map out how Mixtape's story outline, the studio searched for new songs to add to moments lacking emotional weight or designed moments around a certain song choice. They also wanted to make sure that the interactive sequences set to each song paid tribute to that song, rather than just background music.

Mixtape received "generally favorable" reviews for the Nintendo Switch 2, Windows, and PlayStation 5 versions while the Xbox Series X/S version received "critical acclaim" according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that the game received "Mighty" approval, being recommended by 97% of critics.

Simon Cardy of IGN gave the game a perfect score of 10/10, writing that the game "sets a new standard for coming-of-age stories in video games and does so with a masterful sense of style". The editorial team of IGN France gave the game a score of 7/10, saying Mixtape's strengths were its narrative and references to 1990s American culture as reflected in its musical and visual style, but its biggest flaws was being too linear, often lacking any player interaction and feeling more like an "anecdotal" experience.