‘Mixtape’ is three hours of white noise

I was honestly a little hopeful for Mixtape. After all, it pulled on the right strings to seem compelling, promising a story in the era I grew up in, even in the general region* I grew up in. So, I tried to approach it with an open mind even though coming-of-age stories aren't really my thing. An adolescence with a tidy three-act structure and bittersweet step into adulthood isn't an experience I really recognize.

Right out of the gate, Mixtape falls into that familiar trap. Coming-of-age media as a genre overwhelmingly centers heteronormative, white, and affluent stories in a way that always feels deliberate. These stories belong to people buffered enough by class, race, gender conformity, or family stability to experience adolescence as a period of relatively safe self-discovery. It’s safe for the characters because stakes are ultimately low, and safe for the audience because it’s not challenging. That's exactly the kind of story Mixtape tells. Choosing to tell stories about this kind of adolescence is a judgment on what kinds of youth are acceptable to narrativize. Which kids are worth telling stories about.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t need Mixtape to be gritty or representative of exactly my teenage experience for me to enjoy it. I didn’t install this game expecting to see anyone bloody their knees sucking dick on a gravel parking lot outside a punk bar. There doesn’t need to be violence and sex and trauma for it to be real. I just wish it had some kind of presence. Specificity. Risk. The sense that someone actually metabolized an experience into a meaningful story instead of reproducing the aesthetics of experiences they saw in reruns of John Hughes movies. That’s my biggest problem with this game. Mixtape isn’t authored. It’s assembled.

But I’m A (Heterosexual) Cheerleader

There’s something cowardly about that. The way it gestures at meaning without actually saying anything. For instance, we’re told these characters are delinquents, or at least they’re seen that way by local cops. They drink. They sneak out. They do acts of petty vandalism. We’re even told they smoke weed. The characters make a few references to weed, but we never see anyone smoke on-screen. Every time Mixtape comes close to risky behavior, it pulls back.

There’s an easy, if cynical, explanation for that: depicting teens drinking is one thing, but depicting them doing drugs becomes complicated when you’re marketing a game to a worldwide audience – or relying on content creators to be a part of the marketing engine for your game. On-screen drug use is a good way to get your channel a community guidelines violation, or at the very least de-monetized.

Through that lens, it makes sense that Mixtape leaves the sexuality of its characters pointedly undeclared. We get a few hints that Cassandra and Rockford might have feelings for each other, but the game never dares anything but implication. We get a minigame where Rockford tongue-kisses a boy she doesn’t really like, but the story bends over backwards to avoid on-screen confirmation that she’s queer. She shares longing gazes with her girl-best-friend, they hold hands, they’re physically affectionate, and even have interpersonal conflict that feels romantic in nature — jealousy about Cassandra’s friendship with another girl. But right when you might expect that story to confirm those feelings and give some kind of meaning to the last two hours and fifty five minutes, Cassandra is swept out of the narrative. In 2026, that feels like a calculated choice.

Stand By Me While We Don’t Go Look At A Dead Body

There’s more to say about Mixtape’s music choices, the overwhelming whiteness of its eponymous playlist, how the gameplay itself is lackluster and uninteresting, but it’s not really worth further discussion. It was never specific enough to matter. At its heart, Mixtape is an empty experience. It says nothing, it ventures nothing, it has no opinions. It does nothing unique or new or thought-provoking with its medium. We’re only talking about it because it was carefully calibrated with just the right kind of prestige-nostalgia that games criticism is structurally predisposed to reward. There’s no conspiracy there. It’s just narrative SEO. And that’s all this game is. It could’ve been more, but at every opportunity it chose not to be.

*I will now and always contend that Northern California is not the Pacific Northwest, an assertion I see repeated over and over again in reviews of this game.

P.S.: No Bikini Kill? Not one song from the Cramps? No Tracy Chapman or Hole? Come the fuck on.