The Transcendent Vibes Of Mixtape

I walked out of my Summer Game Fest 2025 demo for Mixtape beaming like an idiot, a smile stuck on my face. I can't think of a game that has ever vibed as hard as Mixtape does. Beethoven & Dinosaur's debut, The Artful Escape, was a vibes game, too. Light on traditional gameplay mechanics and basically lacking any fail states, it instead leaned into aesthetics, mood, and tone. It was more of a feeling than a traditional game, but I loved it for that.

There are lots of vibes games, like Unpacking, Night in the Woods, and Firewatch, to name a few. I love a good vibes game, and Mixtape, the next game from the team behind The Artful Escape, feels like it could be the ultimate example. I played about 30 minutes of Mixtape and saw what you might call a few levels of the game, which plays like a '90s-set coming-of-age story but is meant to feel "sorta like channel-surfing [old-school] MTV at 3 AM," developer Johnny Galvatron told me.

In Mixtape, you play a group of three high-school pals on the cusp of graduating and looking to make it to a party on the beach to cap off their childhood. The party is going to rule if they can just get there, and each figurative step toward that end goal is played out to a different song that collectively makes up one of the best licensed soundtracks I've ever heard in a video game. Joy Division, The Cure, The Smashing Pumpkins, and many more bring so much life to this game. Something about the joining of gaming and music has always been incredibly powerful to me, and Mixtape's way of bringing these things together sincerely blew my mind.