Annapurna scores a hit with Beethoven & Dinosaurs coming-of-age tale Mixtape | review

Annapurna Interactive and award-winning Australian studio Beethoven & Dinosaur have a hit on their hands with Mixtape[/url], a narrative game that looks back with nostalgia at the music of the 1990s and how it wove itself into our identities.

I played the game in one evening in a few hours and I agree with the critical acclaim. In fact, I’ll happily give it a 4.99 out of 5 score. It’s not perfect as I have a small little nitpick with the graphics. But it does an amazing job with its teen angst story and how it matches the emotion of songs to its scenes. It shows once again that a small game from a talented studio can still outscore triple-A games that are built with hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds or sometimes thousands of game developers.

The game currently has a rating of 94 out of 100 on OpenCritic and it received perfect scores from IGN, DualShockers, Insider Gaming, WellPlayed, VGC and GamingTrend.

The title is an homage to the era when friends made mixtapes for each other to share their taste in music. Back in the day, mixtapes were our lives, Galvatron told me. I can believe it, as I gave a Mixtape to one of my friends as I left high school. It was a labor of love and it took time to record the 25 or so songs onto an audio cassette. Mixtape captures the emotion that it took to feel those songs and make the tapes for friends.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/aQoEd5rnxiQ?feature=oembed Honestly, I recognized only one song on the game’s soundtrack — Roxy Music’s More than This — from my teen memories. But the developers did a great job setting the mood of each scene in the narrative-driven adventure game to the track that accompanied it. They also turn the formative memories into dreamlike sequences that are full of video game fancy, like flying through the air while fireworks are going off around you.

The story follows the last night together for high school friends Stacey Rockford (played by Bella DeLong), Cassandra Morino (Jessica Ma) and Van Slater (Max Corman), before Rockford leaves their suburban town for a music job in New York. They’re misfits who don’t fit in in their high school and town, and by night they’re rebels seeking adventures that can seal their “teenage experience.” But too often their dreams are crushed by reality and reined in by the rules of Cassandra’s strict cop father (JB Tadena). While they’re out to just do mischief like throwing toilet paper at the principal’s house, the father sees the behavior as criminal and delinquent.

Mixtape is out from Annapurna and Beethoven and Dinosaur. The story’s structure reminds me of James Joyce’s Ulysses — a day in the life. From scene to scene and song to song, the emotional highs take you into fantasy-like video game scenes where the teens go flying through the air, delivering emotional highs. Those fluctuate with lows that inspire resistance to the norms that trap the teens in their small town.

What distinguishes the game is its witty dialogue, which doesn’t rely on jokes related to brands from the 90s. And there’s a constant flipping between cinematic scenes like the opening scene of skateboarding down a mountain road and purely video game scenes, like when two teens kiss and you have to take control of their tongues and make sure they are appropriately mixing together. That part was hilarious. But it also carries the bittersweet angst brought about by growth, transformation, and moving on in life.

Mixtape reminds us how mixtapes defined us. I’ve played the full game and it has the signature humor of Galvatron, founder of the studio Beethoven & Dinosaur. I’ve interviewed him about the teen angst game here and here. We’ll have a couple of speakers from Annapurna at our GamesBeat Summit event.

Annapurna previously published Galvatron’s previous game, The Artful Escape, which debuted after six years of development in 2021. As a musician himself, Galvatron told me that one of the things he does first in conceiving a game is come up with the music first and works it into the gameplay, and then he comes up with other elements like story and further gameplay to fit the music. In fact, at each major transition in the song, there’s a transition in the game that gives an emotional take-off for the music.

Mixtape features licensed music from Devo, Roxy Music, Lush, The Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, the Cure and many more.

The joy of listening to parents in Mixtape. Source: Annapurna The game is scoring pretty high with the critics. The game currently has a rating of 85 out of 100 on Metacritic (with 21 reviews) and it received perfect scores from IGN, DualShockers, Insider Gaming, WellPlayed, VGC and GamingTrend. The game has a 94 out of 100 on OpenCritic. But not everyone is rating it perfect. The New York Times gave it a 75.

The game is available for $19.99 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam (also Steam Deck verified) and Epic Games Store. It is also available through Xbox Game Pass (Series X|S, Windows).

Why didn’t I give the game a perfect score? There are moments when the stylized graphics of the characters blend well with the accompanying realistic scenery. It’s especially great when the trio skateboards through scenery. But as the trio runs through forests, you can really tell that it’s more like 2D characters pasted into backgrounds. It was noticeable.

Others will criticize it for being a “walking simulator,” but that didn’t bother me at all because I was really there for the continous story, rather than constant challenges of video game skill. And the story didn’t disappoint, and it reminded me of my own years of teen angst so long ago. Give it a try.

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