Mixtape Review: Why This Nostalgic 1990s Game Misses Its Target Audience

Mixtape is marketed as an exploration of adolescent love and friendship, examining how these bonds survive the transition into adulthood and what it means to come of age in a place you don’t want to stay in. Set in the 1990s, the game leans heavily into nostalgia—a word you can’t avoid when discussing it. The title itself, along with its narrative structure, revolves around a curated collection of music from the era.

Yet, after playing Mixtape, I’m left questioning: who exactly is this game trying to reach? As a white middle-class games critic who spent my teenage years in the 1990s and had an intense love for music, I should be the ideal audience. Instead, the game feels like a distorted reflection of the decade—more like a courtroom sketch drawn by someone observing the 90s from behind their head or an AI-generated summary of stories written about the era by someone born in 2002.

The game’s attempt to capture the spirit of the 1990s falls short. From the fashion and language to the characters’ interactions with technology, nothing evokes the raw, lived-in nostalgia of the decade. As someone who was the same age as the game’s characters at the same time, I expected a deeper, more authentic connection.

Music Choices Feel Inauthentic

Mixtape frames itself as a musical expedition through a teenager’s emotions, with each chapter centered around a licensed song. The soundtrack ranges from Mondo Rock to Silverchair to Stan Bush, but the main character, Stacey, has a music collection that feels impossible for a 1990s teenager. Her tastes align more with someone shaped by the internet than a real 90s teen. While I don’t expect a game to simply play the hits, I do expect it to at least resemble the music a 90s teenager would have actually listened to. Stacey doesn’t feel like a 90s teenager; she feels like a creation of a team of white male developers in 2026 trying to imagine what a 90s teenager was like.

Ambiguity Undermines Nostalgia

Mixtape never specifies the exact year it’s set in, and the town it takes place in is fictional. This ambiguity weakens the game’s attempt at nostalgia because, without a clear time and place, the story lacks the grounding needed to evoke a genuine sense of the era. As critic Cameron Kunzelman points out, nostalgia often becomes a convenient shorthand—a way to collapse time and space into an aesthetic package that can be easily consumed and marketed.

"It’s like someone telling you how it was 'back in the day' or gesturing to an 'Victorian attitude' — it is convenient cultural shorthand for us to collapse all of time and space into an aesthetic package so that we can name it, corral it, and put it on the open market."

That’s exactly what Mixtape does. It packages nostalgia into a digestible, marketable form, but in doing so, it loses the authenticity that could have made it resonate with its audience.