I don’t understand this level of hate towards Mixtape
I know it’s a bit late but I finally had time to play through Mixtape over the weekend.
Of course I saw the perfect scores, and the controversy before I played it, and to a degree I get what everyone is saying, I get a lot of it, whatever you wanna say about Annapurna, how much you disagree with the games perfect scores, I’m not saying that there’s no part of this game that’s above criticism, or that I don’t understand that criticism or think it’s misplaced.
But I don’t get the hate for the game itself. Yeah, there’s not a lot of gameplay, but the gameplay we get is mostly excellent, and the gameplay itself is fairly comparable to other games in this genre - just that it's interspersed with cutscenes and not walking/exploring.
There’s so many moments I enjoyed the hell out of. This isn’t a period I’m especially nostalgic for, and it wasn’t music I’m really at all familiar with, but that didn’t matter when it all came together so well.
I personally liked the characters and the story, and I loved the hell out of the presentation, I loved zipping around memories and being taken to different places and moments with the three of them. It did such a good job of showing kids holding on to those important memories before saying goodbye. Sometimes it was too cringey, it definitely strayed into too self-aware.
This always was going to be a game I like and I 100% admit my personal take on this game is way more glowing than it objectively deserves, but who cares, I loved it.
The game was short enough that I never minded the movie-feel of it. Everything about that was also always good and enjoyable and fun and gratifying. If it had been longer, and if the cutscenes had been longer, I could see it being a problem, but no portion of it lingered for long enough to feel intrusive.
It achieved what it set out to, to read like a cringey moment between friends who aren’t equipped to say goodbye and leave, pushing for a moment of significance and to find a rite of passage to encapsulate all of those feelings. And I think the gameplay expressed all of that too, and expressed it so damn well, at least enough of the gameplay to carry the game.
I’m not nostalgic for that period or that music, but I am nostalgic for that time in my life, because I remember headbanging with friends in the car, I remember stealing booze from my parents and getting drunk, and smoking weed in the woods. I love coming-of-age stories, so I was always going to love this.
I’m not trying to change anyone’s opinion, because no one’s wrong for disliking this game. It’s fine if you want more interactivity in your games, I personally think this nailed it. It’s fine if you want games to feel less like movies, those are valid takes and I’m not dismissing them. But I don’t know that those takes really approach what Mixtape is trying to do and where it succeeds.