I played through and finished Mixtape at the beginning of the weekend. I really enjoyed it; it is obviously aimed at the generation who as kids were lugging CD players around everywhere they went, though as someone who had access to a CD burner at 13 I’m likely a bit younger than the characters in the game. Even so, I can’t resist a good coming-of-age story and I feel like the game’s heavy shot of surreality helped accentuate adolescent intensity in the right way.

I also know this is a type of game that gets a whole heap of unfair criticism mostly due to its length; it’s hard to market something that’s meant to be a self-contained one or two sitting experience against, I don’t know, Skyrim or Cyberpunk or any other mainline title promising a minimum of five dozen hours of playtime. Fact is, I tend to like interactive narratives better than movies at this point, be that the non-linear worldbuilding or the relative creativity of the presentation or the often better writing. And, when you consider a short game costing 20 bucks, movie tickets cost more than that, don’t offer rewatching, and both the game and the movie get cheaper over time. Oh well. I thought it was worth it, and people with ‘video game opinions’ online usually suck anyway.

To get more to the substance of the game, I think the over-glamorized view of adolescence is kind of the point in a lot of ways, and when comparing the events of the game to, say, events in your own adolescence, the point is not to directly compare the obviously over-the-top storyline to your own life but rather to see the intensity of it all. I was absolutely not a Pacific Northwest stoner/skater stereotype in high school, but I can relate to the freedom depicted by the skateboarding sequences, you know, the ones which suspiciously are always downhill throughout the entire game. That’s arguably more subtle than the flying sequences or the explosions, but damn if they didn’t encapsulate how it felt to be seventeen and vibrating yourself apart as you tried to get out of your small town.

I wasn’t the sort of teenager who was running around town trying to score booze or getting into fights with overbearing parents; I was a quiet, pretty obedient kid who also spent much of high school with very few friends. Some of that does lead to a kind of vicarious satisfaction with a lot of coming of age stories, especially ones about friends who feel like each others’ entire universe. That said, I also had my moments of rebellion in high school, though in my case they were directed at my friends more than my parents or other authority figures. By senior year I had developed into a bit more of a social butterfly than I had been when younger, but the group of friends I spent the most time with were those I played D&D and other RPGs with (an absolutely shocking development for me, I know). Nerds in the early aughts…were not cool, but it was high school for me when my views on popularity and dating and all those intensely important adolescent topics began to evolve a bit from “I am part of a group being discriminated against” to “I think I understand why no one would want to date my friends”. I ended up “breaking up” with my high school gaming group in a fairly dramatic way (because when you’re 18 how can you not do everything in a fairly dramatic way?) and then spending the summer having my own Mixtape moments with my best friend and girlfriend.

I call these Mixtape moments because not only were they these isolated moments that live on in my head (like most of the vignettes in the game) but also because they’re all tied to music. The first one that link is obvious, it was going to my first concert on my own with my best friend. He didn’t have a driver’s license, so the bouncer at Avalon (a venue in Boston that has since been converted into the House of Blues) didn’t let him in. In what I call “the only persuasion check I’ve ever made in my life”, I told the bouncer that we were only 18, we weren’t going to drink or otherwise get him in trouble, and that we just wanted to see the show. He relented, we both got into the venue, and the concert was amazing. The song of that moment? Tribulations, by LCD Soundsystem. LCD Soundsystem was the concert headliner; the opener was MIA, before ‘Paper Planes’ and therefore obviously before her personal politics kind of went to shit. The show was great even before you factor in the ‘awe’ lens of being 18 and doing something like that for the first time, but when you include the teenage wonder it turns into the sort of concert experience I didn’t really repeat until my experiences seeing the World/Inferno Friendship Society in my late 20s.

The next Mixtape moment of that summer came much later, as a result of scheming between myself, my best friend, my girlfriend, and a mutual friend of ours that had been hooking up with my best friend. Our plan, roughly speaking, was that the four of us were going to go down to Rhode Island to hang out at said mutual friend’s parent’s summer home. This plan involved some amount of sexcapades, because we were 18, and those did not really happen as imagined, also because we were 18. However, the trip did happen, and what made this as memorable as it was was the fact that my parents did not really approve of me hanging out with the abovementioned mutual friend, and spending the weekend at her place in another state was not something they’d have allowed. So, we lied. This sounds obvious, but once again, I was a quiet and pretty obedient kid in high school; my parents also tended to think I was a terrible liar. This worked out in my favor, and I picked up my best friend and girlfriend in my little Toyota Celica and we started driving south to Rhode Island.

Then we got lost. This was the MapQuest era; I had printed out paper directions to get us to Bristol and missed that the exit numbers started and restarted as 95 and 195 split in Providence, meaning I exited into downtown Providence and not anywhere near 114 which would have taken us down to Bristol. I drove around town helplessly until my best friend navigated us towards Newport (which he knew how to do as he had cousins there). We got to Newport, very late at this point, reoriented, and after getting directions from best friend’s uncle, we got back in the car and headed back north to get to Bristol where we were supposed to have gotten to in the first place. This last stretch of drive triggered the second Mixtape moment, when we put on some Sufjan Stevens and Casimir Pulaski Day came on. Now, the actual lyrics of the song are significantly more mournful than the moment we had, but it still resonated with me. This was our last adventure, the last time we’d all really have time together before each going our separate ways: I was going to college, my girlfriend had moved and would be attending a private school in the fall, and my best friend was taking a gap year and figuring out where to go next. Even if the music didn’t provide a literal parallel, it still set the mood as I drove up the coast, finally finding the place in Bristol just as the sun was setting.

In thinking back to Mixtape I realize that one reason I fell into the story, even if I wasn’t a Pacific Northwest skater as a teenager, is that I too had the experience of leaving everything behind to move on to whatever life was in store for me. When you meet Stacey Rockford and hear of her grand plan to go become a Music Supervisor in New York, it sounds…insane. If you’re playing this as an adult it sounds like a very teenager plan that wasn’t thought through, that this impulsive plan could have easily been done a week later and not ruined her friends’ roadtrip plans. As you play through the game, though, you can’t help but think that with everything that is and has been going on around her, there is some logic to ripping off the band-aid. Without giving anything away, the thematic undercurrent of the game is about going with the flow; the soundtrack of your life isn’t something you can plan, it only becomes apparent in retrospect. As you look at these characters you can both feel an appreciation for the time in your life when everything felt so incredibly intense while also seeing that, at least at a certain level, a lot of it can be really dumb.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’ve been speaking a lot about the past, recently; a lot of my fiction is couched in my past, and I’ve learned to feel less weird about that. A question we keep asking ourselves over and over again throughout life is ‘who are you?’ and trying to come to terms with who we were in the past is an important part of that. It’s easy to get stuck in reliving the ‘glory days’ of few responsibilities (and likely a little less fiscal inflation), but there are generally more important stories underneath about discovering your values and figuring out what’s actually important to you as the cloud of hormones very slowly starts to clear. While I don’t make it a point to hang around with people who clearly want to still be in college (or worse, high school), being completely dismissive of how you grow and change in those parts of your life isn’t a great look, either.

I enjoyed Mixtape, and frankly hope that we get more interactive narrative experiences like it. While there are some truly good disruptions going on in non-fiction video content (like Nebula), narrative/fictional content is still being strangled by the streaming giants on one side and the hidebound studio system on the other. Weirdly, video games are likely going to be the medium for ‘indie film’ going into the future; I just haven’t seen fictional content break the distribution mold in video yet (though I’d love to be proven wrong). If it were me, though, I’d be more than happy to take in my narrative media in video game format from here on out; when I compare the narrative video games I’ve played in 2026 to the movies I’ve seen, the video games win decisively.