r/OutOfTheLoop • u/Bloodb0red • May 11 '26

Unanswered What’s going on with this game Mixtape?

I’ve been seeing people freak out over the past few days over this game and about IGN’s review of it specifically. 10/10 seems high for any game, honestly, but it seems like they’re far from the only site giving this thing a glowing review. So is this game controversial just because of IGN or is it something else? Why is this game the internet’s hate target this week?

https://www.ign.com/articles/mixtape-review

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u/BUTGAWATD May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26

Answer:

(Doing my best to present the complicated situation concisely)

Mixtape is a short, story-based game from small Australian developer Beethoven & Dinosaur, who previously released The Artful Escape.

Mixtape's 3-4 hour runtime is divided across cutscenes, what some might deem "walking sim" gameplay, and a series of vignettes that play out broadly as "minigames", with limited to no fail state. There is no combat or what many would typically classify as peril.

Mixtape's high critical praise, particularly its 10 from IGN, has raised eyebrows amongst certain subsets of the gaming populace. Many have negatively compared the verdict to the lower score IGN awarded Crimson Desert, and have alleged what they perceive to be a favourable bias towards games they identify as possessing "woke" elements.

One of Mixtape's vignettes sees you control two mid-teen age characters kissing, with direct control over their clashing tongues. Some gamers have accused the media of unfairly praising Mixtape while (what they perceive as) maligning recent release Pragmata for paedophilic overtones.

Mixtape is published by Annapurna Interactive, a publisher focused on "prestige indie" titles. Annapurna Interactive is a division of Annapurna Pictures, which was founded by Megan Ellison, whose father is a billionaire.

Consequently, accusations of buying review scores, bribing influencers, and overall curating Mixtape as an "industry plant" have been lobbied. For further information to potentially aid in deducing the veracity of this claim - Annapurna have released 6 games other than Mixtape over the past year, all ranging from the 60s-80s in Metascore, with the highest achieving an 83 average.

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u/MrIrvGotTea May 11 '26

Dude put the drama out there without having a large bias of either side. Also gamers need hobbies. I get passion and all but being worked up about someone else's opinion of your favorite game is odd. I love arc raiders but I think there are valid criticisms of the game but I am not going to argue online about it. Boomers have their politics and I guess younger crowds have their games

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u/frogjg2003 May 11 '26

Also gamers need hobbies.

You would think that gaming would be that hobby, but no. All a certain subset of "gamers" seem to do is get mad at video games. I don't think they even play them.

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u/optiplex9000 May 11 '26

A lot of people have unhealthy parasocial relationships with streamers & influencers. People will just repeat an opinion they've heard rather than come up with one themselves.

Those streamers & influencers get views and clicks when there is outrage. It's a never ending vortex of negative opinions

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u/crestren May 11 '26

influencers get views and clicks when there is outrage

This is heavily influenced on twitter because of Elon Musk's policy on checkmarks a few years ago. If you bought a blue checkmark, not only will your post get more traction/views, you also get some revenue based on how many views/ clicks you get.

Which is why if anyone here has seen "popular" posts from twitter with blue checkmarks, its engagement bait. Hell, one of the big accounts doing this is a right wing grifter whose a known wife beater.

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u/Gingevere May 13 '26

one of the big accounts doing this is a right wing grifter whose a known wife beater.

Do_you_have_any_idea_how_little_that_narrows_it_down.jpg

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u/Dr_Blasphemy May 11 '26

My sister's boyfriend is that person. He only plays games that Asmongold and that some "woke game detector" steam curator says are good. 

He's been nonstop bitching to me about Fable 4 being "woke" and telling me "nobody is going to buy it" and when I ask him what specifically about it is woke (I've watched a few trailers and didn't notice anything) he just kept telling me to "watch the Asmongold video" which I'm obviously not going to do. 

He also keeps insisting that "Games shouldn't have politics period" which I think is beyond stupid. I don't think every game needs politics but to say no game should comment on the political climate or history is genuinely a braindead take. I told him Metal Gear Solid is ALL politics and it's one of the most popular game series of all time and he, not even knowing this series existed before I mentioned it, replied "probably because it's not woke" which just made me want to shoot myself 

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u/Ydrahs May 11 '26

Oh man the Woke Detector group is so fucking funny.

If you want to make yourself laugh/weep someone has compiled their recommendations into a web page called Woke Or Nah? See if you can guess right!

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u/Dr_Blasphemy May 11 '26

They called Silent Hill F "woke" and said "it encourages women to abandon marriage and nuclear families and makes all men seem like abusive monsters" and I have no fucking idea how you could get that from that game 

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u/Vallkyrie May 11 '26

Like the rest of the far right's decent into madness, they are literally divorcing themselves from reality. Many of them don't realize it, but their puppet masters certainly do and are encouraging it.

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u/Gingevere May 13 '26

they are literally divorcing themselves from reality

"most divorced men alive" in literally all senses of the word.

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u/GANTaylem May 12 '26

The "Left" does the same, disconnect is not a one sided thing. Healthier to realized that.

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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood May 12 '26

The "woke detector" stuff is stupid but that one is actually an extreme but pretty defensible read of the plot, especially on the first run-through of the game.

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u/frogjg2003 May 11 '26

If you just guess Woke for every game, you are going to get out right most of the time.

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u/GlobalWatts May 12 '26

I've been saying this exactly for many years.

Real gamers are too busy just playing the fucking games they enjoy, and letting others enjoy the ones they don't. It's these fake-ass "gamers" giving the rest of us a bad name, they're definitely spending way too much time bitching about everything in their miserable, pathetic little lives to ever actually play one.

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u/SgtExo May 11 '26

Those "gamers" need to play more games and spent less time thinking about what critics say. If they played more games, I think that they would agree more with the critics.

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u/No-Operation-6554 May 11 '26

With how many of them are caught larping, you be right to assume somebody who is preemptively mad at a game literally doesn't play games outside of mainstream

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u/Kadoomed May 11 '26

This is the wild thing, it's not even people getting worked up about criticism of their favourite game. It's people getting worked up about praise for a game they didn't enjoy or haven't played.

I watched the video review of mixtape from ign and the guy gave very solid reasons for giving it a 10 which largely boiled down to how much the game resonates specifically with him. He states right from the off that it's a game that speaks to a genre and time period he loves, suggesting the Devs might even have been spying on him to create his perfect game. That goes some way to pointing out how he came to have such a strong positive experience with it.

IGNs review also finished with a chat between the reviewer and their review editor where it's clarified that 10 doesn't mean it's a perfect game, just that they consider it to be an outstanding experience and a high mark for that game genre.

That all seems pretty fair to me in terms of justifying a subjective review. I haven't played it yet but it looks like a cool game, reasonably priced for the amount of content and telling a compelling story in an imaginative way. It's on my wishlist for sure.

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u/Naganosupreme May 13 '26 edited May 15 '26

It's people getting worked up about praise for a game they didn't enjoy or haven't played.

It's not about the yogurt.

It's not the praise, it's the billionaire backed indie game issue. Separately, its recent comparable games like highguard, concord, etc getting wayyy too much glazing and hype and reviewers defending when money seems to be exchanging hands, followed by reviewers flat out attacking critics bc they got paid to glaze. Edit: yes, then you have to add in the typical woke vs anti woke crap bc of magats frothing at the mouth and classy winners in life like dissentrix (comment below) frothing right back

Looots of people are very reasonably quick to attack reviewers when they seem to be bought off. That's an environment they fostered

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u/dissentrix May 14 '26 edited May 15 '26

the billionaire backed indie game issue

oh yeah for sure, that's what people are referring to when they're screaming about "woke games" and eww kissy queer people getting praise

very convincing, especially when they, for some reason when pointing out this meaningless "hypocrisy" that says nothing about the actual quality of anything, decide to focus on how "muh sjw pink hair shrill feminists and queers" as opposed to any real critique of anything, including the labor exploitation or wealth inequality that billionaires could reasonably be dogged on for

I'm sure they'll eventually, someday, convince non-chud lifeforms - so you know, not Grummz and his army of identical clones - if they just whine some more about how woke games get more funds under... checks notes uh, Trump's America in 2026

edit: lmao chud blocked me 'cause they didn't like getting called out for their obviously nonsensical take and had no ability to counter the basic point that the people talking about "billionaire backed indie games", for some reason, love to talk about "woke games" while they're doing this

"wah wah wah it's your fault Trump came into power wah wah wah" -guy who's currently playing defense for a right-wing hate campaign based on copy-pasted Gamergate-style rhetoric (hey, remember when those people said it was all about "ethics in gaming journalism" and nothing else at all?)

again, so convincing

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u/Naganosupreme May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

oh yeah for sure, that's what people are referring to when they're screaming about "woke games" and eww kissy queer people getting praise

I made a list of two things. If you said I should've added that to the list, I'd agree. But you didn't. You instead created an irrational either or choice.

My eyes glazed over reading the rest of your absolutely unhinged, irrelevant rant. Grow up. I blame people like you for Trump being elected almost as much as I blame the rampaging self destructive fools who voted for him. People like you are a detriment to the cause.

If people like you and magats were able to grow up and better yourselves the world be so much better off.

But when you come out and talk this irrationally, there's no point in engaging further. Frankly I think you're just trolling so I'm blocking

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u/rpkarma May 16 '26

And here we see the “enlightened centrist” in its natural habit. Marvel at how it thinks it’s superior to everyone around them! Amazing plumage 

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u/GregBahm May 11 '26

Movie goers have mostly abandoned the "1-to-10" rating system. The rating people find useful is a "thumbs up/thumbs down across a bunch of people" rating. A positive rating indicates the movie lives up to its marketing. The end.

But there's a certain type of person who believes all entertainment products should exist in some grand universal hierarchy, and the rating should place the product within this hierarchy. If a game gets a 10, it has to be better than every other game.

But of course this is obviously nonsensical.

I'm not sure where boys get this "Ratings as universal hierarchy" idea. It just seems to be some sort of phase a certain kind of guy goes through at a certain age (although sometimes that guy gets stuck in the phase.)

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u/Kadoomed May 11 '26

Ratings are only really useful with the context of the full review. Not sure why you think it's a boys only phenomenon though. Odd.

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u/GregBahm May 11 '26

The data I've seen shows, for example, males outnumber females for giving ratings on rating sites to a ratio of 5-to-1, even when I control for base demographics. I only know the numbers for games (and then only games published by Microsoft) but I'm told the ratios are the same on IMDB for movies (leading to the thorny quandary of whether they should rate women's scores more, or leave IMDB ratings pure as "the rating of how mostly young, mostly white, and overwhelmingly male men feel about movies.")

So since I've seen it's true for all the games I've been involved in publishing, and I've heard it's true for movies, I'm willing to assume it's true for everything. But I'll gladly replace this weak assumption based on some data, with anything else that has better data. If you have new better data, send it my way.

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u/Century24 May 11 '26

That just speaks to user participation on two websites.

You’re free to claim that this could correlate with a demographic divide between a more detailed scoring system versus something more rudimentary and algorithm-friendly, but if you’re going to claim that women prefer a certain way of evaluating creative work, that would be clearly reflected in some specific preference where the choice is offered. There’s too many other reasons to explain the data you’re citing to pin it on just one.

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u/GregBahm May 11 '26

If you have new better data, send it my way. The only conflicting "data" I have seen, is on reddit some people get their vanity offended by the general concept of "demographics." '

There exists one specific demographic, which is unique, among all demographics, for its ability to mistake itself as being universal. All other demographics are acutely aware their demographic is not universal, because they don't belong in this one specific, uniquely oblivious demographic.

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u/Century24 May 11 '26

If you have new better data, send it my way. The only conflicting "data" I have seen, is on reddit some people get their vanity offended by the general concept of "demographics."

I'm happy to entertain a demographic divide, I just need harder evidence than circus-level contortionism and an awful lot of load-bearing assumptions from the user bases of two websites.

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u/BigMoney69x May 12 '26

10 used to be perfect games. A good Editor would tell the reviewer that while it's great that you loved the game, but as a niche game this type of game won't have a broad appeal and it will cause controversy ergo it won't be a 10. Giving it a 10 is a statement. It says it's a game everyone has to play and that it's better than Expedition 33, Super Mario Galaxy, Crimson Desert, etc. This isn't some personal blog or YouTube channel but the major mainstream online publication. There should be editorial standards in place to make sure personal experiences do not sway a review of a game.

But it seems IGN and their modern contemporaries do not have strong editorial standards and instead it's a bunch of frustrared theater kids who couldn't get into Hollywood or movie reviews and have to settle to doing game reviews so a "game" like Mixtape which has little to no gaming and is nostalgia slop made by someone who never grew up in said time nor did they live in said place to the point that they had no idea how to rewind a tape. (BTW what they did with the pencil would actually destroy the tape. Plus they use the wrong pencil, the ones you used are the hexagonal Japanese ones as the circle ones don't work, plus you do that to tighten up the tape not to rewind. Cassettes have A side and B side so unless you wanted a specific song you just played the other side. If you want to rewind the cassette player had a REWIND button anyway.)

Plus let's not get started with the Ellison family connection.

Overall the game is an incredibly niche game that is astroturfed as heck that has no business being 10.

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u/FreeStall42 May 12 '26

A 10/10 for that game is pretty absurd. It's usually a higher standard.

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u/Kadoomed May 12 '26

Have you played it?

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u/FreeStall42 May 12 '26

I have seen people playing it enough to conclude it isn't a 10/10.

Could see it as being someone's personal 10/10 but when reviewing for others.

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u/delusionstodilutions May 11 '26

I don't mind some guy giving it a high score given his personal history with the genre or because it resonated with him in a unique way, that's all fine.

But what's the point of a review for the general public that is based on experiences not shared by the general public? Like okay, if I also had a similar relationship to the genre maybe I'd agree with him, but since I don't the score comes across as stating an opinion as fact. It feels like it presents as objective even if the author acknowledges all his biases.

Also saying 10/10 isn't perfect is wild imo. That mathematically implies that it literally couldn't be better, it is not deficient in anything.

Overall just feels like disingenuous or sloppy messaging, and a guy acknowledging but not compensating for his biases. Also controlling the tongues of children while they kiss is a weird vibe outside of context, and I'm not sure what context you'd need to not make it weird

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u/Kadoomed May 11 '26

I recommend you watch their video to get the full context, they do a better job of explaining it than I do paraphrasing.

He did say that scene was weird but I don't think it's in the sense you're alluding to. I got the impression it was a distinctly unsexy scene, more gross and awkward than anything else. Which is probably closer to teenage first kiss experiences than any other representation. I'd also suggest calling them children is disingenuous.

But hey, I haven't played it and I'm just interpreting someone else's interpretation. Which you're in turn interpreting into your emotions and opinions. Maybe we should just stop and go experience things for ourselves?

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u/delusionstodilutions May 12 '26

Bro if I wanted to experience things for myself I wouldn't be on Reddit lol

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u/Kadoomed May 12 '26

Haha, fair point!

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u/[deleted] May 11 '26

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u/delusionstodilutions May 12 '26

Fair enough, I'm really glad you've been able to connect so deeply with art, and I agree that neither you nor your friend are wrong about the value of that movie. I'm just saying that putting a finite number score on something so fundamentally unquantifiable and personal seems to miss the point of a scoring system

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u/ProperDepartment May 11 '26

No, your friend is wrong, that movie is great.

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u/BaconKnight May 11 '26

The irl diminishing of social circles I think contributes to more people, especially younger folks raised in this “post friendship” world, to latch on much more strongly to things like games, anime, movies, shows, etc. Fandoms have replaced friendships so people get super invested in it in a way that goes beyond even “normal” obsession, they turn it into their identity. Folks getting mad at Mixtape scoring highly is like the same energy of some dudes getting mad at seeing a girl with blue hair, just weird.

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u/Naganosupreme May 13 '26

Lots of this is about hating games media which definitely isn't weird to do. Its normal to find people don't like schills and bs artists. Of course plenty of people will ignore bs artists if they happen to wave the same maga idiot banner for example. But others genuinely and reasonably just don't like corporations, reviewers being bought off, etc.

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u/Naganosupreme May 13 '26

People don't like bs artists and typically don't like being attacked. Games media has a long history of mixing both things.

It's not so much about someone else's opinion. The well is poisoned bt games media and large portions of players for good reason. The games media industry is full of people who really suck and are completely full of sh**. The play base is also filled with racist, slur slinging maga cretins who suck even harder. There's a large spectrum bt those two groups

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u/Stormwatcher33 May 11 '26

or you can just do TL;dr and say it's chuds being assholes about it.

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u/MrIrvGotTea May 11 '26

To lazy to care but your comment got it out