Some games tell you a story. Mixtape makes you feel one. Released today on PC, the second game from small Australian studio Beethoven & Dinosaur arrived quietly, but it deserves a lot more noise than that.
Why a four-hour adventure is punching above its weight
Mixtape follows Stacey Rockford, a music-obsessed teenager spending her final night in town before heading to New York to chase a career as a music supervisor. Think professional mixtape curator for Hollywood, which is exactly as cool as it sounds. She drags her best friends Slater and Cassandra along for one last hurrah: make it to a killer beach party before adulthood officially swallows them whole.
The stakes are small on paper. A party. A goodbye. A friend group on the verge of splitting up. But the writing treats those stakes with the same weight they carry when you're actually living them, and that honesty is what separates Mixtape from the pile of narrative games that gesture at emotion without earning it.
The whole thing runs about four hours. That's not a knock. Every scene earns its place.
The soundtrack isn't decoration, it's the architecture
Here's the thing: Beethoven & Dinosaur didn't just license a bunch of recognizable tracks and call it atmosphere. The music in Mixtape carries actual narrative weight. Stacey breaks the fourth wall throughout, announcing each song she's selected for the moment and briefly explaining its significance, like a Ferris Bueller who also happens to have impeccable taste.
The tracklist runs from Devo and Siouxsie and the Banshees to deeper cuts like Harpers Bizarre and Stan Bush, with The Cure and Joy Division making appearances that land exactly as hard as you'd hope. One sequence has the kids soaring over their town to Joy Division's Atmosphere, and it's the kind of moment that sticks with you long after the credits roll.
The studio's previous game, The Artful Escape, leaned heavily on music too, but Mixtape feels like a more confident execution of that same instinct. The music doesn't accompany the story. The story exists to give the music somewhere to live.
Beethoven & Dinosaur includes former musicians among its team members, which explains a lot about how thoughtfully the soundtrack is woven into the game's structure.
Gameplay that serves the story instead of fighting it
Mixtape is broadly an adventure game, though that label barely covers it. Each scene introduces its own bespoke mechanic, uses it for exactly as long as it needs to, and then moves on. You'll skateboard through town, toilet-paper a principal's house, stumble through a video store in a drunken haze, and yes, control a pair of French-kissing tongues in what is almost certainly a gaming first.
None of these mechanics are meant to test you. Fail states exist but carry no real penalty. Crash your skateboard and the game rewinds instantly. The design philosophy is clear: the language of games is being used to tell a story, not to create friction between you and it.
The one area where pacing drags slightly is the bedroom sequences, where you're free to explore and trigger missable dialogue by interacting with objects. The freedom is appreciated, but these moments feel a little looser compared to the tight scene-to-scene momentum everywhere else.
What Beethoven & Dinosaur get right about growing up
The trio at the center of Mixtape are genuinely well-written characters. Stacey's ambition, Cassandra's suffocating home life under her cop father's watch, Slater's quietly untapped potential as a musician himself. They joke around, they deflect, and then at the right moments they let their guards down completely. The performances back all of it up.
What most players miss in games like this is that the emotional beats only work if the characters feel like real people first. Mixtape earns its gut-punch moments because it spends time letting you understand who these three actually are before asking you to feel something for them.
The art direction helps too. Built in Unreal Engine, the game uses hyper-stylized character designs that still manage to convey genuine emotion through performance. Every scene is composed with real intention, including a standout helicopter-view sequence during a police chase that transitions from third-person to aerial perspective without missing a beat.
For more on narrative games worth your time, check out our game reviews for the latest coverage, and if you want to get more out of adventure titles, our gaming guides have you covered.
Mixtape is available now on PC. If you've ever had a song carry you back to a specific moment in your life, this one was made for you.
