I should mention that I played this with a few friends, on their computer. I did not buy this game for myself, and honestly I'm glad I didn't.

There's a lot of discourse surrounding this game currently, but the only thing I really wanted to know is if it was good or not. I admit that I came in with a small bias against it based on what I had heard, but I was really willing to go into it with an open mind and give it credit where it was due. Unfortunately, this game found a new way to disappoint me at every turn.

To start with, this should not have been a game. It's obvious that this story was inspired by the John Hughes movies of the 80s and 90s (think "Ferris Bueler's Day Off" or "The Breakfast Club"), and that's problem number one. I love those movies, but they do not work well as games, and I would not want to play them. When you do that, you end up killing the pacing of the story by inserting these gameplay segments that add nothing, and don't challenge the player in anyway. All of the gameplay here feels artificial and fake, none of it immerses me in the world at all. It is all very basic, and impossible to fail. There were so many times where I wouldn't realize that the game wanted me to take control, and I'd find out that all the game wants me to do is move forward. At least most walking simulators let you walk wherever you want to, this railroads you all the time. The only time I had fun was with the rock throwing segment, it's the only part that feels really interactive and fun. Every other gameplay segment left me scratching my head, if you aren't going to make the player engage with the gameplay, then what is the point of having it? It just detracts from the storytelling.

I could forgive that if the story was good, but it just isn't. If you're going to make a narrative game with almost no gameplay, then the story and characters have to be good. I feel that is a fair request, and it's one that the game did not want to satisfy.

I don't like most of these characters, not as people or as interesting characters to study. The main character, Rockford, is so annoying, and her motivation for leaving her town is incredibly stupid. Never once did I really understand her, or why I should want to feel for her. She is such a one-note character, all she does is talk about music the whole game, and by that I mean she reads a Wikipedia summary of a song before she plays it, and ruins the flow or tone of every scene. She does it so often, and by the 10th time I just wanted her to be quiet. Cassandra could have been a better character if I really understood her. She just doesn't have a good reason to act like she does, not to me at least. She just seems so privileged, and I'm sorry but I can't relate to anything she does in this game. That wouldn't be a problem if I could empathize with her, but there are many times where she is just as annoying and shallow as the MC, and I didn't really want to understand her on a deeper level. Her dad doesn't even seem that bad, I needed more reason to side with her. The only character I really liked was Slater, he's funny (sometimes), I liked the segment where you go find movies with him, and he seems like the only person here who actually cares about everyone. He has a self-awareness that makes him more mature than his friends, but it doesn't seem to rub off on any of them. His moments were some of my favorite parts of the game, but they were mostly at the end, and they were too little too late. Even with that little bit of depth, that doesn't stop him from feeling as flat as his two counterparts. All of the main characters just feel so two dimensional: Rockford is super into music, Cassandra is a REBEL, and Slater is kind of a pot-head. I never felt like they developed much beyond that, even though the game seems to believe otherwise. You spend so much time with these characters, and yet I never ended up caring about them or their problems. I would not like to hang out with most of these guys in high school, not only because they are losers, but also because they are boring.

As for the story itself, I just think it was very poorly done. The main story structure is that you go to a place, press a button, and you get to experience a flashback. It's a whole game centered around nostalgia, and that would be cool if I found any of the memories fun or noteworthy. It just gets so repetitive, you do the same things over and over and over again, and the repetitive gameplay makes you feel so disengaged from all of it. It gets worse when the characters start talking about events happening in the present, only for Rockford to go "You 'member when......", and drag you into another flashback. Imagine if you were trying to play a game, you were getting invested in the story, and then you get dragged into a Family Guy style cutaway gag, that's how a lot of this game feels (obviously the flashbacks aren't nearly as ridiculous, but they are just as abrupt and pointless). The actual present events that occur are also not interesting. I don't care about the characters, and in some cases I was so annoyed by them that I wasn't sure I actually wanted them to succeed. There are a lot of set piece moments that looked cool (putting aside the lackluster gameplay), that I might have enjoyed if I liked any of these people. I don't care about Rockford's dumb dream to abandon everybody to chase down a job that I'm not even sure exists. I don't care about the lame party that they want to go to (which should have totally burned down that forest, I might add), I don't care about Cassandra and her lame, cringe speech at the end, and I don't care about the search for booze. I just wasn't given a good reason to care, nothing seemed to matter that much. By the time the game was over, I felt nothing. The ending was so lame, and it made everything that happened feel a little inconsequential. It took Rockford a whole game to realize that her friends matter, and for what? I just don't care.

To the game's credit, I think that there are a few fun moments (such as the kissing scene and the video store scene with Slater, those were funny), and I like the art style. I like a lot of the songs on the soundtrack, but it's hard not to with such iconic songs in here (Rockford has good music taste, I'll give her that). I think that some of the dialogue is well written, but those moments are too few and far between all the other stuff. Other than that, I struggle to find any other good things to say. I'm sorry, but I just can't.

This should not have been a game, plain and simple. Some stories are meant for certain mediums, and this was not the correct one for this type of story. I've seen people complain that the reason games aren't taken seriously is because games like this aren't allowed to push the medium forward, but how does this push anything forward? There's nothing wrong with the medium of video games, it is simply a matter of pairing them with the right stories, and a John Hughes-esque story just doesn't work here. "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" works best as a song, "The Sopranos" works best as a show, and most Shakespeare plays work best on the stage. Sometimes, it isn't the medium that is the issue, it's the story. Mixtape never properly utilized the medium it was a part of, and because of that I just wasn't convinced that it should have been a game. Perhaps this would have been better as an animated movie on Netflix.

Still, that wouldn't fix the boring characters, pointless story, lame dialogue, and bad story structure. Maybe I'd be willing to forgive all of Mixtape's shortcomings when it comes to gameplay if it had a worthwhile story, but instead I feel as though I just wasted nearly 4 hours. At least I had my friends who laughed and yelled with me, I couldn't imagine paying full price and playing this alone. I don't mind a walking sim, or a narrative adventure, as long as the story is good. I can see the vision that writer & director Johnny Galvatron had (awesome name by the way), I can see the effort the team put into it, but I can't deny how I feel: this game is just kind of bad. It's not the worst thing ever, It's just kind of lame, and once I've written this review I'm sure that I'll forget about it in a few days.

4.45/10