Mixtape turned me back into a Millennial teenage dirtbag

Mixtape is the answer to the question: “And if the film High fidelity Was a video game? It is not a perfect analogy, but it is damn close, and anyway it is a sign that Mixtape Will be a fabulous edge of the late 1990s, the early 2000s, with a soundtrack.

You can hear it in the trailers – Mixtape Absolutely tie the classic movable tone, and it seems that this atmosphere extends to the full game. I played about 30 minutes of Mixtape At the Summer Game Fest 2025, and at that time, I became in love with the main character of the game, a rebellious and unbearably cool teenager named Rockford who is about to leave the suburbs to continue her dreams of becoming a supervisor of music in New York. She speaks directly to the player as she presents her two best friends as cool and invokes the music of the game, breaking the fourth wall like John Cusack. Most of the game takes place in a third -person view, after Rockford and his friends dirty with the streets lined with trees, flee the cops in a high -speed ticket sequence and drag in his room, looking at Polaroid and CD photos while planning the best way to steal liqueurs from the stash of his parents.

Mixtape comes from Clever escape Studio Beethoven & Dinosaur, and he also uses music as a narrative and staging device. This is perfectly logical, given the founder of the studio, Johnny Galvatron, is A legitimate rock star Based in Melbourne, Australia. Leaning on musicality has also worked well to Clever escapewhich Has won Beethoven & Dinosaur a Bafta Prize in 2022. MixtapeThe soundtrack of the soundtrack is populated by the best groups of adolescent bags of the 80s, 90s and slightly beyond, in particular Devo, Roxy Music, The Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and Les Banshees, Joy Division and The Cure (but not Wheele, as far as I know, just to be clear).

Visually, Mixtape Has a pictorial 3D aesthetic with magnificent shadows of golden light and purple, recalling Life is strange Or the Teltale series The Walking Dead. In action, the characters move in a wind of wind, Spider Animation style that does not interrupt the gameplay flow. Even soaring on Snakelike asphalt on a roller board, Rockford immediately responds to the controller’s contribution and his conduct is not interrupted by wandering or late animations. Mixtape looks charming and feels good.

There are also surprising little moments with an alternative mechanism in the first half hour of the game, including a scene straight out of Wayne’s world where you do the headbang trio in a car, and another where you control two languages ​​in a close -up, Ren and Stimpy kind of cartoon realism. When Rockford explains what a music supervisor is, real reference images fill the screen in an ironic educational interlude. Throughout all this, music continues to ride, each song has deliberately placed and had time to shine.

It would be easy for Mixtape To feel like a inexpensive seizure of nostalgia, an exploitation of memories of generation Y players by jumping CDs and party planning before cells, but this is simply not the case so far. Mixtape Feel like a love letter to the first aughts, filled with surprising mechanisms, beautiful graphs and all the good references that have executed very well.

Mixtape is due to hit SteamPlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X / S in 2025, published by Annapurna Interactive.