Mixtape Review

Johnny Galvatron followed The Artful Escape by writing a story to a playlist instead of the other way round. Mixtape covers one night in the early nineties, three friends who are about to be separated, and a run of scenes each designed around a song the studio licensed first and built second. It works. The stop motion influenced animation has the loose, hand made quality of the Spider-Verse films, the needle drops land where a good film would put them, and the dialogue is written by somebody who remembers how sixteen year olds actually talk rather than how films usually have them talk. Nearly every track on the original wish list was cleared, Pink Floyd being the notable exception.

The complaint is not hard to see coming. There is very little to do. Scenes are skated, ridden and walked through, the choices are light, and the whole thing is over in a single evening, which led one reviewer to call it a good film rather than a game and led a lot of players to agree loudly. Review scores ran from a perfect ten down to a middling three depending almost entirely on how much the critic minded that. The writing and the music are worth the time. The interaction is a delivery mechanism and never pretends otherwise.