A new indie hit game was released on 7 May. Mixtape, developed by Beethoven and Dinosaur and published by Annapurna Interactive is a story-oriented game covering the last night of three teenagers together. The game offers around three hours of gameplay with a price tag of 17,09€ on Steam—reasonable for an indie title.
Considering its mostly positive reviews on Steam, and a staggering 10/10 rating from IGN, one would except that it’s a great game worth buying, and leave it at that. So where does the controversy come from?
Mixtape received attacks from many avenues after its initial release. Responding to the high scores by journalist, the internet started to speculate that most of these journalist had to be bribed to give such a game very high scores. In the case of IGN for example, journalists gave Mouse: P.I. for Hire a 6/10 because it has too many references to cheese, in a video game about a private detective mouse, but awarded Mixtape a 10/10.
Video game reviewers and journalist have been ridiculed for quite some time, as most of them do not play through the games they review and then decide to give them bad scores. Either because they did not reach the point where it would be good, or to put it bluntly, they are bad at it. That being said—this is not a review, I have not played Mixtape.
I hate to be the guy to bring up the infamous Cuphead run, but I feel it has to be mentioned if we’re discussing video game reviewers. In 2017 a certain lead writer for GamesBeat uploaded a video of himself ‘playing’ Cuphead. In the 26-minute video, he could not beat the tutorial of the game. At first, many thought it was a joke—it wasn’t.
Of course, the issue with reviews is rooted in many different factors. Personally, I believe that no reviewer can be fully consistent, as individual experiences with video games differ immensely. These differences may stem from childhood influences, the genres of games they grew up playing, or simply varying skill sets. It is generally understood that some people are better at certain games than others, much like with mathematics or linguistics, for example.
Do I believe that games should be beaten before writing about them? Certainly at least attempted. If you don’t believe that you could beat the game, and if you’re not certain that you saw everything that warrants an opinion, you should not attempt to convince others to pick up a title. I wouldn’t write a review of a game I’ve only played for 3 hours for example.
And this is where Mixtape comes in. It can be completed in just three hours. Well, I say that, but it practically completes itself in three hours. The game largely plays itself—perhaps that is why some reviewers rated it so highly. There is nothing wrong with narrative-driven games that focus primarily on storytelling and give the player very little to do, but at some point, that approach can go too far. Mixtape includes a few minigames that you ultimately cannot fail; otherwise, it really does play itself.
A couple months ago NVIDIA announced that they are working on an AI tool that plays a video game instead of the actual player. Why? Imagine you buy a title for 70 dollars and then watch as someone else plays it. Gaming is about agency, it’s about decision-making and figuring out how to beat obstacles that come your way. If you remove these aspects, you’re essentially watching a movie for 20 bucks at home on your monitor.
That being said, I don’t hate what we now refer to as ‘cozy’ games that are mostly linear with good storytelling. I believe that the Mixtape’s issue is not rooted in the game itself. It is well developed with a great soundtrack, after all.
The issue is that while it is considered an indie game, the rights for the licensed soundtrack probably cost more than the development budget of other indie titles. The issue is that reviewers went all-out with insane scores from the start, only deepening the community’s distrust of journalist—giving a 10/10 for any game is unprecedented and not good for the industry—I doubt that GTA VI will receive such ratings upon release.
‘The issue is that reviewers went all-out with insane scores from the start, only deepening the community’s distrust of journalist’
The backlash got so bad by now that the official Xbox account addressed it on X: ‘Reminder: just because you’re not personally into a game, doesn’t mean it’s a bad game’.
Of course, they are right. I personally would probably not touch any of the EA FC titles, or one of the millionth editions of Call of Duty: Black Ops. This doesn’t mean that they are bad games, it just means that I do not care for them. Similarly, with Mixtape, I do love narrative games, I adore anything from Telltale Games. But in The Wolf Among Us for example, you get to make decisions that impact your story. If I buy and play a game, I want to actually play it. If I don’t, I’ll watch someone upload a walkthrough of it.
However, I do believe that Mixtape is a great game for casual players. It can serve as an excellent gateway for introducing someone unfamiliar with gaming to the medium, especially those who might struggle with more demanding titles. I would argue that the real source of the controversy and backlash was simply the exceptionally high review scores from journalists. If the game had flown under the radar with scores in the 6–8 range, it likely would not have received this level of criticism. I do not even think complaints about the costly soundtrack for an indie game would have surfaced.
The real issue, in my opinion, is that once journalists gave the game such high ratings, the wider community began actively searching for flaws. When those flaws proved relatively easy to find, players called them out, which in turn made some journalists look rather silly.
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