Nostalgic indie game from publisher Annapurna is a "respite from the current cursed reality" inspired by real-life, dev says: "Ended about as well as you can expect, including a nice scar, and cow s***"

While it may be set to the '80s alt-rock fuzz of bands like Lush and Roxy Music, upcoming narrative adventure game Mixtape impressed us at both Summer Game Fest and Tribeca Film Festival this year with how its demo plays out like a timeless dream – which developer Beethoven and Dinosaur's producer Woody suggests is part of the point.

"We don't have an ideal player," Woody says, "we don't make our games with a target player or audience in mind. We make our weird little games and hope people can find some escape and enjoyment, maybe some respite from the current cursed reality we find ourselves in."

"After The Artful Escape, we knew we wanted to do another music adjacent game, but weren't really set on anything," he continues. Beethoven and Dinosaur's last game from 2021, The Artful Escape, similarly followed a teenager with rock star aspirations, and the game was also published by Annapurna, like Mixtape will be; in our The Artful Escape review, we think the platformer game offers "up an entrancing psychedelic world that is somehow still half-dormant, waiting for a few chords to help burst it open at the seams in explosions of colors and lasers."

Mixtape, set among the mowed lawns and identical driveways of an American suburb, is visually more restrained than that, but its protagonists nonetheless continue to prove Beethoven and Dinosaur's point: good music is transformative. So, Mixtape's best friends let songs like "Just Like Honey" supercharge their shopping cart joyrides on the night of their last high school party together.

I wonder how true Mixtape's mischief is to its developers' experiences, and Woody answers that, "I mean, I have ridden in a shopping cart that was tied to the back of a dirt bike and was getting towed around a cow paddock. Ended about as well as you can expect, including a nice scar and cow shit."

Anyway, also on the topic of shit, some aspects of young adulthood are universal – regardless of whether you experience them from Ronald Reagan's suburbs or, I guess, an iPhone 1 Million in a few decades.

Like, most kids feel "that whirlpool of feelings that is wanting to be something so bad, but you don't know what that something is yet," Woody says.

"Every band you hear, every film you see – grabbing onto those [things] so tightly, as a way to define and anchor yourself, to be able to say this, this, is who I am," Woody continues.

"Everything always feels like it's the most important thing that's ever happened to you. It's a wild time."

Mixtape will be out some time this year on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.

Mixtape sent a sherpa up a mountain to get the rights to use a song, and Grand Theft Auto has "nothing on our toilet paper tech."