Adventure Corner ~ Mixtape
Welcome to Adventure Corner, a column where members of the RPGamer staff can give their thoughts, impressions, and pseudo-reviews for various adventure titles that don’t come under our usual coverage. Adventure Corner is aimed at delivering opinions on a wide range of titles including visual novels, point-and-click adventures, investigative mysteries, and so forth.
In this edition of the column we take a look at Beethoven & Dinosaur’s Mixtape, where three friends embark on one final adventure together.
Mixtape
The ’90s were well before my time, and I didn’t become a teenager until the 2010s, yet there’s something painfully relatable about Mixtape. Through skateboarding trips, reckless decisions, awkward conversations, first loves, and memories that blur together like scenes from an old music video, the game captures all the emotional chaos of adolescence. Developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur and published by Annapurna Interactive, Mixtape follows three friends spending one final night together before their lives begin moving in different directions. Its structure moves through memories and imagined moments with the loose, dreamlike flow of an old home video or a faded mixtape being replayed years later.
What Mixtape taps into can best be described as anemoia, a kind of nostalgia for a time one’s never actually experienced. The game centers on Stacey Rockford, a music-obsessed teenager who has ambitions of becoming a music supervisor, and her two closest friends, Van Slater and Cassandra Morino, as they spend their final night together before Stacey has to move out of town. Stacey is preparing to move to New York to pursue her dream, while Van and Cassandra remain tied to the life she is about to outgrow. That setup gives their friendship a clear endpoint from the start, and everything that follows unfolds against that sense of time running out.
Everything in Mixtape revolves around music. The game is divided into tracks, with each chapter revisiting different memories tied to songs, emotions, and fleeting moments from Stacey, Van, and Cassandra’s teenage years. Stacey’s dream of becoming a music supervisor shapes the entire structure of the game, with songs acting almost like emotional timestamps attached to different parts of her life. When things stop going according to plan, her carefully curated soundtrack begins to fracture alongside her. The mixtape itself becomes a metaphor for change.
Even the smallest memories can last forever.
That structure gives Mixtape the freedom to constantly jump between grounded conversations and wildly exaggerated memories without losing its emotional core. Some tracks focus on quieter moments between friends, while others lean fully into the chaotic imagination of adolescence. One of the game’s best scenes follows the group escaping from the police in a shopping cart after a party gets out of hand. What starts as a reckless teenage story quickly escalates into something absurd, with police cars flooding the streets, helicopters circling overhead, and the entire sequence eventually turning into a ridiculous televised manhunt. The longer the scene goes on, the more exaggerated it becomes, perfectly capturing the way nostalgia reshapes memories over time. Small moments turn into legendary stories, and emotions grow larger than reality itself.
The same idea carries through the game’s quieter moments as well. One sequence centered around skipping stones across a lake gradually transforms into something increasingly bizarre, with obstacles collapsing and the environment becoming more chaotic with every successful throw. Even though the scene itself is simple, the game frames it with the same emotional intensity as the larger set pieces. Mixtape understands that the memories people hold onto most are often the small, seemingly meaningless moments that only become important years later. A late-night drive, rocking out with friends, or wasting time near a lake can end up feeling just as important as the dramatic stories that get repeated over and over. More than anything else, Mixtape captures the imagination of being a teenager. The game constantly taps into that feeling of turning boredom into adventure and treating ordinary nights like they could become life-changing memories. There is a restless energy running throughout the entire experience, mixed with the quiet understanding that this version of life is already starting to disappear.
The writing plays a huge role in making that work. Conversations feel natural and loose, shifting between dumb jokes, awkward pauses, casual teasing, and more vulnerable moments without sounding overly scripted. Stacey, Van, and Cassandra genuinely feel like lifelong friends who have spent years building their own rhythms and inside jokes together. Because of that, the emotional moments land naturally without the game needing to constantly underline them. Mixtape never forces sentimentality onto the player. Instead, it immerses itself completely in these characters, their memories, and their fears about growing apart, trusting the atmosphere and performances to carry the emotional weight on their own.
The best nights usually start with terrible ideas.
Mixtape leaves a strong impression through its presentation. The game mixes vibrant lighting, exaggerated animation, and a deliberately choppy frame style that feels reminiscent of old MTV music videos and VHS recordings from the ’90s. Characters almost move like stop-motion figures at times, giving the entire experience a hazy, dreamlike quality that fits perfectly with the game’s themes of distorted memory and nostalgia. The soundtrack itself is also very strong. Featuring artists like Devo, Joy Division, The Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, and Silverchair, every track feels carefully chosen to match the emotions tied to each scene.
The game’s entire structure depends on the connection between music and memory, and it consistently understands how powerful that relationship can be. Mixtape’s gameplay is fairly simple, and that feels entirely intentional. Much of the experience revolves around exploration, dialogue, light interaction, and smaller gameplay sequences built around individual memories. At times, it feels closer to an interactive film than a traditional game, but that approach works because the focus remains firmly on the characters.
Beneath the surreal humor, exaggerated memories, and carefully curated soundtrack is a story about realizing certain moments are already gone while still living through them. The game understands that nostalgia is not always about accuracy. Memories become warped over time, growing messier, funnier, more dramatic, and more beautiful than they probably ever were in reality. Mixtape embraces that idea completely, turning one final night between friends into something chaotic, heartfelt, awkward, and deeply human. Even for those who never lived through the era it recreates, the emotions behind those memories feel impossible not to recognize. With a brief three-to-four-hour runtime, RPGamers seeking a concise, story-focused experience will find plenty to enjoy in Mixtape.
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