Music as Time: On Mixtape and What Songs Keep

True nostalgia isn’t the replication of a specific place or time. It’s those flashes of emotion that transport us back into memories that have long sat dormant. Beethoven & Dinosaur understand this, and their second game, Mixtape, is built around that understanding. The question the game is interested in is what music actually does when it matters to us — not as background, not as atmosphere, but as the thing that holds a moment in place. It is an unusual, affecting, and hard-to-categorize experience, and it also happens to be sitting at the center of one of gaming’s most reliably tedious arguments. But we’ll get there.

Music in video games has always been good at telling you where you are or when you are. Period-appropriate soundtracks are everywhere — GTA, Mafia, L.A. Noire all use era-specific music to make a time and place feel lived in and authentic. What Mixtape is doing is narrower and more specific than that. It isn’t trying to evoke the 1990s as a historical moment. It’s trying to evoke a developmental one — the particular experience of being young and defining yourself through the music you loved, when the songs you listened to felt like the most important things in the world. The difference between those two things is the difference between a costume and a feeling.

What Other Games Have Done With Music

To understand what makes that interesting, it helps to look at what other games have done with music, because the medium has found some remarkable approaches over the years. Life is Strange is one of my favorite games, and part of why it works as well as it does is the way its soundtrack locates you. Syd Matters, José González, Alt-J — those songs are inseparable from Arcadia Bay, from the specific Pacific Northwest light coming through Max Caulfield’s dorm window, from the texture of that world at that moment. Hear “Obstacles” now and you aren’t just reminded of a feeling, you’re put back in a place. The music is geography, and the emotional power of that game is inseparable from the way those songs become coordinates for a specific somewhere. It’s worth noting that Max’s power is photography — freezing moments in time — and the music works the same way. The mechanic and the soundtrack are saying the same thing.

Hi-Fi Rush does something else entirely, and it’s a shame we won’t get more of it given how Xbox treated Tango Gameworks after such a well-received release. That game makes music the literal physics of its world. Enemies attack on the beat, platforms pulse to the tempo, and your combos have to sync with the track or they don’t reach their full potential. Playing it feels like the world has been designed around the music rather than the other way around, and there’s a particular joy in that once it clicks. The mechanic and the soundtrack are unified there too — you don’t just hear the music, you have to submit to it. Strip it out and the game ceases to function.

Then there’s Beethoven & Dinosaur’s own debut, The Artful Escape, which uses music as identity. It reminded me of a sci-fi rock odyssey more than anything else, and that’s mostly a compliment — it’s a fun ride through psychedelic set pieces built around the idea that Francis Vendetti is becoming who he is through performance. He doesn’t know who he is at the start and does by the end, and the cosmos he traverses feels as expansive as that internal journey. The music constructs his self rather than describing it, and the scale of the game matches the scale of the transformation.

Mixtape is the same studio asking a related but different question. Where The Artful Escape was about what music makes you, Mixtape is about what music keeps. The answer the game arrives at, bittersweet and clear, is that it keeps who you were becoming — those years when your taste in music felt like a declaration of identity, when liking the right band or knowing the deeper cuts actually meant something about who you were. A mixtape isn’t something you make at the beginning of something. You make it when you’re trying to hold onto something that’s already ending or already gone, and the game knows this.

A Story That Begins at the End

When the first trailer for Mixtape dropped a few years ago, I read it as something closer to Life is Strange — a coming of age story about a girl who discovers some kind of mysterious power tied to music, the way Max’s photography let her manipulate time. What the game actually is turns out to be quieter and stranger than that, and I think a fair amount of the backlash it received at launch came from people carrying a similar expectation into it. The gap between what the trailer seemed to promise and what the game delivers is real, and worth naming.

What Mixtape actually is, is a story that begins at the end of an arc. Set in the fictional northern California town of Blue Moon Lagoon sometime in a deliberately vague stretch of the 1990s, it follows teenager Stacey Rockford and her two closest friends on their last night together before life pulls them apart. Van Slater is a laid-back skater type content to find magic in wherever he already is. Cassandra Morino is a sharp-tongued rebel straining against her police chief father’s grip on her life. The growth these characters have done has already happened before the game starts. Their plans are already made. What’s left is coming to terms with the fact that life is about to take them in different directions, and that the last thing they have together is this one night. This isn’t a story about transformation. It’s a story about acceptance, and those are harder to dramatize because there’s no clear before and after to point at.

Stacey narrates the whole thing, breaking the fourth wall constantly, introducing each song on the playlist she’s curated for this final day. What makes these moments more than just scene-setting is that she doesn’t just name the songs — she annotates them. She’ll tell you something about the history of the recording, why a particular production choice worked, what emotional core the song was reaching for. It’s the kind of thing a person does when they’re trying to make a memory permanent, to give it context and weight so it doesn’t just become another blur. She talks to the player the way someone talks when they’re already narrating their own life in their head, already composing the story they’ll tell later. She has already decided to leave before the game begins. She’s curating. She’s turning the day into a memory while it’s still happening, arranging a soundtrack for a moment she’s half-checked out of.

She’s also a particular kind of narrator — opinionated, funny, not reliably self-aware, and kind of a lot. She’s a teenage music snob in full bloom, the kind of person who tells you that someone’s life has no meaning because they think Devo only has one good song. Some players have found her unlikable and that’s a fair read. She’s selfish and possessive and condescending in ways the game doesn’t really soften. But this is characterization, not a failure of writing. Stacey uses music, and the meticulous curation of it, as a way of insisting that if she can arrange the right soundtrack she can hold the moment still. The game is about the slow realization that she can’t, and that the friends she’s been half-ignoring while composing her exit have noticed.

The gameplay unfolds as a series of vignettes triggered by keepsakes found across three hub environments — Stacey’s house, Cassandra’s house, and a run-down shack in the woods the characters call the Ritz. Each object unlocks a memory, and each memory becomes a short playable sequence, pulling you out of the present night and into the past where these friendships were actually built. You skateboard down a hilly road to Devo’s “That’s Good.” You skim stones across a pond. You navigate an extraordinarily awkward first kiss via analog sticks, one per tongue, until a button mercifully appears that says “That’s enough.” You escape a police raid in a runaway shopping cart. The licensed soundtrack spans decades and intentionally avoids the most obvious choices — these are a music obsessive’s deeper cuts, which makes them feel like real curation rather than a licensed hits package. Visually, the game uses a stop-motion inspired animation style that I hadn’t seen applied quite this way in a game before. It isn’t pioneering exactly, but it was the right call — something about the slightly jerky, handcrafted quality of it suits a story told mostly through memory, as if the recollections themselves aren’t quite smooth. The whole thing runs about three to four hours, and most of it takes place in flashback rather than the present night, which feels appropriate. The present is just three locations and one evening. The past is where everything that made these friendships real actually lives.

What the Music Is Actually Doing

This is what separates Mixtape’s relationship with music from the games above. Life is Strange uses music to place you. Hi-Fi Rush uses it to govern you. The Artful Escape uses it to define you. Mixtape uses it to preserve who you were at a specific point in your development — that window when your taste felt like your identity, and losing the people who shared it felt like losing part of yourself. A rewind motif runs throughout the game to underscore this — the fail state after a wipeout on a skateboard, the physical rewinding of a cassette tape in Stacey’s bedroom, a sequence where she floats backward through town set to a BJ Thomas song after realizing what her selfishness has cost her. The game is always pulling back, catching you before the moment is gone. And then, at the end, it takes that away.

The final scene — Slater walking Stacey to her car, neither of them sure what to say — ends with one last prompt: hold a button to keep holding Slater’s hand. The text shifts from “hold on” to “don’t let go,” and then, quietly, the “don’t” disappears. You are going to let go. Stacey can’t stop it and neither can you, and the game makes you do it consciously rather than cutting to a cutscene. She reaches for her headphones and then stops herself. She lets the moment be what it is. It only works because you’re the one who had to release the button, and it’s the best thing in the game.

On Whether It’s a Game

Mixtape has had a noisy few weeks since launch. A clip of one of its more passive sections went viral — millions of views, people pointing at it as evidence of something fraudulent. The clip shows a character moment that plays almost entirely without player input, and it sparked the usual wave of accusations: the critics were paid off, Annapurna had gamed the review cycle, the game wasn’t really a game at all. Some of that is bad-faith culture war noise, and commentators have noted as much. But the underlying question about what Mixtape actually is as an interactive experience is worth taking seriously, partly because it connects to what the game is trying to do. A story about acceptance, about coming to terms with something rather than overcoming it, needs you to be inside the moment rather than observing it. The interactivity, light as it is, is doing real work.

The “is it a game” discourse is one of gaming’s most reliably tedious fights, not because the people making the argument are wrong about what these games are, but because they treat “not much of a game” as a self-evident criticism rather than a description that needs further examination. Dear Esther is not much of a game. Neither is Her Story, or Flower, or most of Kentucky Route Zero. These are works that use the interactive medium in ways that don’t prioritize traditional gameplay, and the medium is richer for their existence. Mixtape sits in this lineage. At its most passive it is, fairly described, an interactive story. At its most gamey it is a collection of odd little mechanics designed to generate emotion rather than challenge. The kiss sequence isn’t there because Beethoven & Dinosaur wanted to design a good kissing mechanic. It’s there because being asked to navigate a set of braces with two analog sticks produces a specific kind of embarrassed recognition that a cutscene of the same moment couldn’t. The headbanging sequence set to Silverchair’s “Freak” isn’t a rhythm test. It’s an invitation to be in the car with these people rather than watching them through a window. Participation changes the experience. The “don’t let go” moment lands the way it does because you’re the one releasing the button. A film could stage the same scene and you’d feel it differently, because you wouldn’t have done it.

What the Scores Got Wrong

The perfect scores some critics awarded Mixtape are probably more enthusiasm than the game has earned. A 10/10 implies a kind of completeness it doesn’t quite achieve, and part of what it’s missing is easier to name now that you understand what the game is actually going for. Slater is underwritten relative to how central he is to the emotional core — he’s warm and easy to like, but the game keeps him at arm’s length in a way that costs the ending some of its weight, which matters because he’s the one you have to let go of. A story that begins at the end of an arc asks you to feel something diffuse rather than pointing at a clear transformation, and diffuse things are harder to call perfect. The critical enthusiasm around launch was understandable, but it set expectations the game was never quite built to meet.

What’s more interesting than whether Mixtape deserves a 10 is what the conversation around it reveals. Works that get this kind of pushback tend to be the ones pressing against the edges of what the medium can do. Dear Esther got it. Gone Home got it. Whether Mixtape belongs in that company is hard to know this close to its release, but the heat of the argument suggests the game has done something worth paying attention to even for the people who didn’t like it.

This Is the Part That’s Ending

The game doesn’t require you to have grown up in the 1990s, or in suburban California, or to have any particular relationship to its cultural touchstones. Johnny Galvatron, the game’s director, is an Australian who left a career fronting a punk band to start an indie studio in Melbourne. The game’s soundtrack refuses to be pinned to any single year. The three main characters feel like they’re from slightly different eras assembled into a friendship that shouldn’t quite make chronological sense but does, because the feelings underneath are familiar even when the specifics aren’t. This is, ultimately, how nostalgia works — it doesn’t require you to have been there. It just requires that you recognize the feeling of somewhere you can’t go back to.

That said, nostalgia is also personal in ways that are hard to account for, and Mixtape is leaning on a very specific set of cultural references — the music, the aesthetic, the particular texture of that decade — that will mean more to some players than others. Someone who grew up with these songs, or with older siblings who did, is going to get something out of this that someone with no frame of reference for the era might not. The game is trying to evoke something universal, but it’s doing it through material that isn’t, and that’s a real limitation worth knowing about before you sit down with it.

Stacey Rockford’s arc is not a dramatic transformation, and she isn’t an easy protagonist to spend time with. But she learns, in the end, to put the headphones down. To stop curating her way out of a moment she doesn’t want to leave and instead just be in it. The songs don’t say “remember when.” They say “this is the part you’re going to remember,” and then they say “this is the part that’s ending.” If any of that sounds like something you need right now, three hours is a reasonable ask. If the 1990s feel like ancient history to you and the music means nothing, it might be a harder sell than the review scores suggest.