Guilty_AI
Gold Member
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Mixtape Review Thread (Potential Reddit's Game of The Year)
Vampire On Titus
Member
Played the game w/ some friends a few days ago. I was expecting some cringe writing and a mostly decent coming of age story. Turns out the game was utterly incompetent from top to bottom in all aspects other than visuals. No cohesion, characters are both underdeveloped and unlikable, an insane amount of time wasting slow-mo scenes, completely unearned "emotional" endless runner/auto-scroll scenes. Wherein you're meant to "soak in the vibes" or lavish in some feeling you as the player aren't actually experiencing, because the game didn't take nearly enough time to make the characters or the stakes meaningful.
Worse still, they front-load the game with scenes like that before there's even a chance for it to make sense. Then, by the end of the game, where it could stand a chance to be appropriate, there's no way it will land because they've drawn from that well like 6 times already. The game is so desperate for a transcendent moment that it'll do seemingly anything for one, besides give the characters enough depth to care about.
Mixtape is also a coming of age story where the main character doesn't come of age. Her level of maturity is the exact same by the end of the game compared to the beginning. It's arguably worse because Rockford's delusional notion that she has the perfect taste in music, and should therefore be responsible for all its curation, isn't exposed for being as juvenile and arrogant as it is. The story actually validates it.
In the 30 minutes stretched to 4 hours of story there is, Rockford is consistently a shitty person. Even her passion for music seems to be less an appreciation of art and more of a way to flex presumed superior taste/obscure knowledge (constantly drops surface lvl band trivia and steers conversations to musical topics only she is interested in), judge people harshly for arbitrary reasons (she writes several people off solely due to their musical opinions), and micro manage her friends lives (obsessed w/ things going according to her playlists).
That's mostly fine for a coming of age story, the character needs to start out flawed so they can grow (I'd argue they got the balance wrong. You want "flawed but likable" not insufferable PoS, but w/e). So you would assume she's meant realize she's a very self absorbed person by the end, right? No, not at all. She barely apologizes for exactly one of the numerous shitty things she's done and then the story keeps on truckin'. It's almost as if the writers weren't aware Rockford has a shit personality, and that's a bit frightening.
But I'd be here all day if I detailed all the ways Mixtape's characters are annoying. Like I said before, the real shock for me was how incompetently structured this was on a basic story telling level. Mixtape is truly not worth anyone's time, let alone a perfect score. Even if you like bitch-made indie narrative games, which I do. Even if you like tear-jerker coming of age stories, which I do...
Do NOT play Mixtape. Play Life is Strange, if you're a king play Perfect Tides, if you're a true god-king play the original Wii version of Another Code: R - A Journey into Lost Memories. Hell, I haven't played it yet but OPUS: Prism Peak looks about 100x better than this. Even Lost Records: Bloom & Rage was better than this, and that game sucked. If you want your video game YA fix go anywhere else but Mixtape. We have to do better, people.
Worse still, they front-load the game with scenes like that before there's even a chance for it to make sense. Then, by the end of the game, where it could stand a chance to be appropriate, there's no way it will land because they've drawn from that well like 6 times already. The game is so desperate for a transcendent moment that it'll do seemingly anything for one, besides give the characters enough depth to care about.
Mixtape is also a coming of age story where the main character doesn't come of age. Her level of maturity is the exact same by the end of the game compared to the beginning. It's arguably worse because Rockford's delusional notion that she has the perfect taste in music, and should therefore be responsible for all its curation, isn't exposed for being as juvenile and arrogant as it is. The story actually validates it.
In the 30 minutes stretched to 4 hours of story there is, Rockford is consistently a shitty person. Even her passion for music seems to be less an appreciation of art and more of a way to flex presumed superior taste/obscure knowledge (constantly drops surface lvl band trivia and steers conversations to musical topics only she is interested in), judge people harshly for arbitrary reasons (she writes several people off solely due to their musical opinions), and micro manage her friends lives (obsessed w/ things going according to her playlists).
That's mostly fine for a coming of age story, the character needs to start out flawed so they can grow (I'd argue they got the balance wrong. You want "flawed but likable" not insufferable PoS, but w/e). So you would assume she's meant realize she's a very self absorbed person by the end, right? No, not at all. She barely apologizes for exactly one of the numerous shitty things she's done and then the story keeps on truckin'. It's almost as if the writers weren't aware Rockford has a shit personality, and that's a bit frightening.
But I'd be here all day if I detailed all the ways Mixtape's characters are annoying. Like I said before, the real shock for me was how incompetently structured this was on a basic story telling level. Mixtape is truly not worth anyone's time, let alone a perfect score. Even if you like bitch-made indie narrative games, which I do. Even if you like tear-jerker coming of age stories, which I do...
Do NOT play Mixtape. Play Life is Strange, if you're a king play Perfect Tides, if you're a true god-king play the original Wii version of Another Code: R - A Journey into Lost Memories. Hell, I haven't played it yet but OPUS: Prism Peak looks about 100x better than this. Even Lost Records: Bloom & Rage was better than this, and that game sucked. If you want your video game YA fix go anywhere else but Mixtape. We have to do better, people.