An Honest Review
Beethoven & Dinosaur / Annapurna Interactive
Xbox Series X/S, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, PC
3.5 / 5
I played this game in small bursts, over several days, giving myself joy when I needed it.
Something that keeps you smiling for three hours costs something. It costs something to let your
guard down that far.
‘Mixtape’ let me.
From Beethoven & Dinosaur/Annapurna,
‘Mixtape’ follows Stacey Rockford on the last night of high school before she leaves for New York, and everything rearranges itself for good. Her two best friends, Slater, who has been hers since childhood, and Cassandra, the police chief’s daughter, who joined them looking for a way out, come along. The game structures itself around a mixtape Rockford made to score the night, each song launching a playable vignette: skateboarding down a hill, flying above the town doing barrel rolls, racing through fields in zero gravity, directing fireworks, and stumbling through a video store while someone is intoxicated.
The soundtrack, Smashing Pumpkins, Joy Division, The Cure, songs that reward people who know the records and give something real to those who don’t, gets into your body before your brain has an opinion about it. Songs ended up in my actual playlist.
I didn’t have a high school experience like this. I watched most of it through the glass. Playing ‘Mixtape’ felt like being handed something I missed, racing toward something long since gone. Rockford needs music to set the mood of every moment, wearing headphones the way some of us wear our whole nervous systems on the outside, as armor and as antennae both. The game never names this. For those it resonated with, the headphone line was quiet and validating. Cassandra wants to escape home. Her father is the antagonist of the night’s specific chaos, and she exists in direct opposition to everything he represents. I recognized her grief in mine: the lack of independence, the outbursts from carrying too much too quietly, and the particular ache of being left by people who decided they couldn’t stay, not loss, something closer to resentment, like a burning fire of a totally different type of disappointment, as I left them behind when I came out and they didn’t show up.
The game gives her grief room, but not enough. It saves the space that should have held Cassandra for the slow-motion hand-release cliché with Slater.
This game queerbaits.
The trailer implied a queerness that the game never delivers. Rockford’s demeanor, aesthetic, and the way she carried herself signaled queerness from the first minutes. Cassandra’s devastation at being left, not “we are being abandoned” but “I am being abandoned,” felt like something more than friendship, and the game knew it. There is a jealousy scene involving JulieGoodspeed, who starts occupying Cassandra’s time. That jealousy is the specific ache of watching someone you have never been able to name your feelings for start belonging to someone else. The pinkies interlocked. The way they spoke. None of it was ever named. And then Cassandra faded while Slater got the real goodbye.
It would have cost so little: a kiss on the cheek that makes Cassandra blush, a hidden love note, Slater commenting on the chemistry, the option to choose the relationship depending on who holds the controller. The only physical intimacy: a gross, awkward first kiss between Rockford and a boy, played for laughs. This was a business decision. It is cowardly to play it this safe. It felt validating until it wasn’t.
The ending comes faster than you hope. You see it coming, and it still gets you. I cried thinking about every person who meant the world to me before we became complete strangers. Real, raw, human.
‘Mixtape’ is a bread sandwich with lettuce, tomato, onion, and sauce: everything is there, but it is lacking density, lacking something that leaves you feeling full, feeling whole as a game. It deserves to exist. The smiling was worth it, even alongside the careless erasure by the developers.
The queerness being hinted at is the only hope they have at redemption for the audience they failed. In 2026, the distinction always matters.
By Gemma Flora Ortwerth
Originally Published by HankyCode Magazine
https://www.hankycodemagazine.com/stories/mixtape%3A-validating-till-it-wasn’t
Gemma Ortwerth 
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