Mixtape
A narrative adventure built around 1990s American nostalgia and a licensed alt-rock soundtrack (The Smashing Pumpkins, Joy Division, The Cure), released to a genuinely unusual gap between glowing critic scores and a more divided player reception at launch.
- //Features a licensed soundtrack including The Smashing Pumpkins, Joy Division, The Cure, Devo, Iggy Pop, and Alice Coltrane -- an unusually expensive licensing budget for the game's scale.
- //Scored 91-95 on Metacritic across platforms at launch, among the year's highest-reviewed narrative games by critics.
- //Generated real controversy over an unusually large gap between English-language Steam reviews (~66% positive at launch) and the overall aggregate (~79%), driven by high positive rates from Russian, Chinese, and Brazilian reviewers.
- //Published by Annapurna Interactive, backed by Megan Ellison (daughter of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison), giving the game a marketing and licensing budget well beyond a typical small studio's reach.
- //Developed by Beethoven and Dinosaur, a small independent studio based in Melbourne, Australia.
Mixtape is a short, atmospheric narrative adventure set in suburban 1990s America, built around a licensed alt-rock soundtrack featuring The Smashing Pumpkins, Joy Division, The Cure, Devo, Iggy Pop, and Alice Coltrane. Critics were overwhelmingly positive at launch -- IGN gave it a perfect 10, GameSpot and Nintendo Life both gave 9s -- but the game generated a genuinely notable controversy over its Steam review score, where English-language reviewers rated it noticeably lower (around 66% positive) than the overall aggregate (around 79% at the time), driven by unusually strong positive rates from non-English-speaking regions. That gap has narrowed since launch, and the game currently sits at a healthy Very Positive rating overall.
Barely a game. Two to four hours of walking through corridors while a genuinely good licensed soundtrack plays over the top, and that soundtrack is doing every ounce of the work. Strip the music out and there's nothing here: no mechanics worth the name, no interactivity beyond moving forward, nothing that couldn't have been a playlist with a slideshow attached. Charging full price for that is taking the piss.