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.

It’s not that the gameplay side of Mixtape is especially intricate. But it’s always changing. The main mechanic seems like it’ll be what you may have seen in the trailer: coasting downhill in a skateboard, dodging cars, flipping off cops, and stopping to sneak a couple of beers out of your house. But the game toys with not just this format–like a later level in which I led the police on a high-speed chase in a careening shopping cart–but also cleverly gamifies the group’s friendship and experiences in other ways. I laughed out loud when I was hit with a French-kissing minigame, where each joystick controlled one tongue, and I was free to mash and swirl the tongues together in what is sure to become a viral moment.

In a later scene, the teens were driving to a fast food restaurant and blasting music along the way, turning the moment into an interactive headbanging mechanic in which you’d move to the music and rock out with your buddies. There’s no penalty for doing it poorly, and seemingly no demand you do it at all. Mixtape is largely on rails in a sense, in that it’s paced to play out nearly the same no matter how much you toy with the world in these fleeting but emotionally impactful ways. For instance, you do need to French kiss for a bit, but even then, you can keep it going much longer if you want to, long after the prompt tells you “that’s enough.”

Mixtape is a hard game to describe. If you’re not one to find music especially moving or important, you surely won’t find the gameplay moments carry you through to having the same euphoric experience I and many others had at SGF–I’ve been hearing a lot of people call it their game of the show. However, if you’re like me, and you have some mushy nostalgia for the ’90s, a romantic view of bands like The Cure, and a willingness to let an experience be something quite unlike a traditional video game, you’ll likely come to the same conclusion I have: Mixtape is transcendent.

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