Mixtape gives you shivers from the start, but it’s an Annapurna Interactive game, so that’s no huge surprise. It’s also the follow-up to The Artful Escape , which is as brilliant as indie games have been in the last five years.

Still, I didn’t expect Mixtape to hit me in the way it did. If anything, I expected to be let down. The Artful Escape was almost too different; a weird anomaly that tapped into my psyche with the most batshit ideas and execution, becoming the best indie game of 2021 in the process.

Mixtape somehow carries that torch, despite reversing its predecessor’s approach: rather than relying on a fantastical universe to transform an introvert, it uses introverts to transform a perfectly normal town into a weird and wonderful experience, with immaculate direction, excellent voice acting, meaningful emotions, and the perfect soundtrack.

The single biggest problem I have with Mixtape is having to review it without giving anything away — this is the one you can’t spoil for yourself, to the degree that it needs to go to the top of your backlog of shame.

Mixtape focuses on three friends reminiscing about their shared past as they enter their final days of high school senior year in Blue Moon Lagoon, on the Northern California coast. As everyone plans to go their separate ways, one last huge party is planned to celebrate.

You play the role of Stacey Rockford, a slightly insufferable but largely benign audiophile rebel who’s leaving for New York City to try for a dream job as a music supervisor. Alongside her is Van Slater, an aspiring synth musician and kind-hearted stoner with an accent straight out of The Californians , and Cassandra Morino, an only child in a strict family and the star softball player for the delightfully named Blue Moon Lagoon Maroons.

The quality of voice acting is superb — a mixture of playful joking, believable disagreements, self-aggrandizement, and fantastic one-liners that come out of nowhere (“I want to ride a flaming stallion of delinquency”). Each major player has palpable character flaws, just like you’d expect from any teenager; they’re not meant to be likable, but they manage to be through their sheer plausibility.

As with any friendship group around that age, there are big emotions, personalities, and micro-politics which underpin everything that came before, and what’s to follow. You explore bedrooms full of memories, relive old days out and experiences, and throw yourself into the joy of the banal, as Mixtape wastes no time in creating spectacular scenes out of the simplest scenarios.

Mixtape is as linear as they come, but it doesn’t waste any chances to elevate, gamify, or reward you along the way. It all starts with skateboarding around your neighborhood to set the scene, complete with simplified yet familiar Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater controls, before things switch up a gear.

All it takes is an early and particularly gruesome coming-of-age moment (and a shopping cart) to prove that Beethoven & Dinosaur will explore every opportunity to keep you a part of the action, even as the camera changes, attention shifts, and emotions and feelings become metaphorical, then literal, as the soundtrack takes center stage.

Mixtape ’s visual style isn’t for everyone. It has a case of the Harold Halibuts , using a stop-motion approach overlaid onto an otherwise smooth world, while adding a deliberate slowness to your movement across core sections. It somehow feels like you’re walking slower than your body lets on, or that your console is struggling to keep up with an intended frame rate, but you adjust.

Blue Moon Lagoon and its end-of-summer ambiance are on point. The small-town vibe is nicely balanced, throwing in a couple of semi-believable points of interest into an otherwise normal community, making it the type of place you want to live in and explore.

Still, you could be in Milton Keynes for all that matters, because the soundtrack could lift any setting to new heights. The narrated playlist is Stacey’s design: her perfect mixtape to capture the experience (“ Oh, it’s a donkey. ”). It’s heavily influenced by 80s and 90s songs that match the era, with 25 main tracks (plus another for the credits), which are repeatedly announced by Stacey and effortlessly shift Mixtape ’s story scenes and moods.

It was never in doubt that Mixtape director and long-time musician Johnny Galvatron would put together such a strong line-up, but the game also wastes no time showing even further depth, with mentions of Kraftwerk, Grandmaster Flash, Talking Heads, and Depeche Mode.

While Iggy Pop, Joy Division, Devo, and Roxy Music are the headline grabbers, the most powerful moments tend to come from niche tastes, like BJ Thomas, Stan Bush, Bertrand Dolby, or John Paul Young. You may not know a band, but that doesn’t mean you won’t connect with their music — Stacey knows best, especially in her own Very Important Opinion — and it makes you really appreciate her fourth-wall-breaking dual role as MC and lead actor, as she shows off her clear knowledge about the one thing she loves above everything else.

If you really had to nitpick at Mixtape ’s drawbacks, the biggest is perhaps its length. At around three to four hours (depending on how well you examine your surroundings), it’s not that it’s too short or long, but its pacing really lends itself to a single playthrough. It also slightly suffers in the final third, but perhaps as a victim of its own success, as it replicates some of the high-concept ideas that surprised you so early — there are only so many directions it can go.

It’s also a little inconsistent with its setting in time. The soundtrack places it in the mid-to-late 90s, as does the bedroom decor, limited technology, and video store. Still, minor phrases (“huge if true!”) and gestures (the hand heart) are straight out of the 2010s, as is one licensed song on the OST, “Remember When” by Mitch Murder (even if it sounds like it’s from the 80s). These are far from dealbreakers, but given how much time was invested in getting everything else just right, they can break the immersion.

When you strip it back to its basic story, Mixtape has one of the most popular narratives in film and TV: one of friendship, old experiences meeting new beginnings, the desire for an endless summer, and a thirst for individuality. You’ll know a Stacey, a Van, and a Cassandra. You’ll guess how a lot of the tale plays out.

Yet it’s the journey that matters, and this is what makes Mixtape so special: it’s a fundamentally accessible, easy-to-understand story, punctuated in some of the most adventurous and jaw-dropping ways. These dreamlike sections, which are perfectly paired with a top-drawer soundtrack, let you focus on its core emotions, rewarding you every time you make your own small decisions and putting you even more firmly in Stacey’s sneakers.

Mixtape knows how important life’s moments feel when you’re young, but also how we remember and falsely magnify the most normal childhood experiences, like sports practice, heartbreak, rediscovering something hidden, developing “your” thing, or just running across a field with your friends. It’s also a reminder that some of the best pleasures in life are the simplest — even if Mixtape proves this in some of the weirdest ways possible.