Review: Mixtape is this year's Dispatch
Virtuoso writing and production packed into a 4 hour runtime
I’m on vacation in California this week, introducing my new baby to old stomping grounds. Mixtape — a pithy slice-of-life adventure starring three delinquents in the 1990s Pacific Northwest — could not have hit me at a more nostalgic time. I quaffed the whole thing down in between trips to the beach and my childhood library. I wasn’t a rebellious high schooler, but I’ve hung out with plenty of kids like these: creative oddballs tumbling towards adulthood with fervor and trepidation.
In less experienced hands, Mixtape could have come off as smug or twee, but it masterfully balances naturalistic dialogue, meta self-commentary, and bravura flights of fancy. Developer Beethoven & Dinosaur’s previous game, The Artful Escape, also has plenty of killer music and visual whimsy, but Mixtape boasts an even more cinematic aesthetic — landing somewhere between John Hughes’ Ferris Bueller and Wes Anderson’s Rushmore.
Put simply, Mixtape is about trying to preserve life’s most precious moments even as they pass you by. Protagonist Stacey Rockford has the perfect playlist for the last day she’ll spend with friends Cassandra and Slater before she flies to New York to throw herself at a Hollywood music supervisor she hopes to work for. Rockford’s choreographed the day down to the minute. She confidently turns to camera to introduce each song as the trio skates from house to house, searches for booze, evades the cops, and reminisces on the “greatest hits” of their friendship. Even when her plan gets derailed, Rockford will find a tune to get her back on track.
Like Dispatch, Mixtape’s blessed with film-worthy animation and voice acting. But while Dispatch features a branching story, Mixtape’s distinguished by frequent minigames. Each captures the feeling of an experience more than its literal truth — from careening downhill in a shopping cart away from pursuing police, to gliding through a meadow, to riding a dinosaur as a comet slams into the horizon. These varied gameplay textures put you into the characters’ high-top shoes and invite you to coauthor a narrative that’s otherwise quite linear.
Mixtape wastes nothing. It packs more emotional scenes and character development into its four hours than many games ten times its length. Heartfelt, hilarious, and often profane, Mixtape has already cemented itself as one of 2026’s unskippable tracks.