I played Artful Escape for 10 minutes on a PAX show floor years ago and knew that game was not for me, so I expected Mixtape to also not be for me. I have access to it via Steam family share, and I figured I may as well play it, given its runtime. This is better than Artful Escape; I’m about halfway through it and will finish it tonight. I can at least sort of dig the characters and story, and I’m definitely into the presentation, but I’m not getting anything out of any of the interactive bits of it. So far, I think I would have enjoyed it better as a movie.

“Is Mixtape a game?” I remember Telltale discussions years ago, so we’ve got younger folks re-litigating this. I figure it doesn’t matter. It’s a “video game”, because we’ve got nothing better to describe it, and people who play/review other products built with the same technology that run on the same machines are best equipped to partake and enjoy it. I’ve seen many examples where, outside of accomplishing an objective or trying to “win”, the interactivity was used to great effect to convey the story. There’s a famous example at the end of Metal Gear Solid 3 where the game won’t move forward until you do something as simple as press the square button on the PS controller, but the context around that made it extremely emotionally effective in a way that movies can’t do. In the first half of Mixtape, I haven’t seen anything close to that, and that’s where it’s not blowing my mind.