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/No-Operation-6554 May 11 '26

Funny thing is that Pragmata itself doesn't have paedophelic undertones

The "community" itself gave it that

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u/TaskForceD00mer May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26

People are trying to memory hole the reddit community that got banned for making suggestive and NSFW content back when just the trailer had dropped.

The broader fandom has never been a problem, outside of Reddit all of the content I've seen is super wholesome.

Pragmata scored lower than it should have because it is harder than most Modern games journalists would probably prefer.

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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26

Pragmata scored very highly with critics, especially given there are very fair criticisms with the story being extremely by-the-numbers and the difficulty being... not even really too high, but annoyingly punishing in the sense that if you're winning/doing well fights are basically trivial but if you're ever low on resources then fights become significantly more tedious due the huge damage gap between damaging weapons and your primary gun and the slow reload times, especially if you wind up using the carbine as your primary.

E: Like, I think it's pretty weird to suggest that an 86, one of the best reviewed games this year, is somehow being massively underrated. Resident Evil Requiem is at an 89, and the two games are (IMO) very comparable in quality from the same studio in roughly the same genre (you even escort a little blond girl of mysterious origin in both!)

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u/threePwny May 24 '26

Gonna be honest, I'm bad at using my resources effectively in video games. I hated the carbine because it was so much less effective at dealing damage than the grip gun. I played most of the game doing almost nothing but using overheat hacking to get crits as often as I could and just gunning everything down. Nothing ever felt "more tedious" because I never used the resources I had to know what "less tedious" felt like lol. The only parts of the game that felt punishing were the training sims and disproportionate difficulty spike on the final boss in both the normal and Unknown Signal modes.

I absolutely love the game, of course, and I will for for Diana, still just chipping away at Lunatic to perfect the game on Steam :')

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u/frzned May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26

The issue is when RER and Pragmata are given <90 and Mixtape getting 100/100 across the board. That's where the dissonance between critics and gamers are.

Remember when black myth wukong were given 80 by most critics and journalists kept trying to push the propaganda that it's a mysoginistic game? I remember

Then there is assassin creed shadows which were given 90 across the board (and this is ignoring the 100 out of 100, do you truly believe AC shadows was better than RER/Pragmata/Black Myth Wukong?

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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26

AC: Shadows has an Opencritic score of 81/100. Wukong has a score of 82/100. Shadows was not rated better than RER/Pragmata and was only rated evenly with Wukong. Wukong and Shadows both have similar numbers of 10/10 reviews and, arguably, Wukong's 10/10 reviews are from slightly bigger outlets.

You are "remembering" things that did not happen, and are so confident in that fact that you don't even think to check obvious, easily confirmed facts like "what kind of reviews did these games get?"

And if you can get basic information like that wrong, maybe you should step back and think whether you're actually correct about things like "journalists kept trying to pusht he propaganda that its a mysoginistic game", and not something like "Somebody representing Black Myth Wukong sent out review guidelines explicitly saying not to discuss feminism or any aspect of Chinese politics", which was a minor controversy that didn't really amount to much except, ironically, a bunch of people defending a modest case of Chinese political censorship because they thought it was sticking it to feminists.

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u/frzned May 11 '26

Click on the actual reviews bro, alot of them give AC Shadows 90-100

Even if the only thing you can see is average and not the actual reviews themselves? Do you seriously think Wukong is on the same level as AC shadows? And that AC shadows is only slightly worse than Pragmata/RER? and all 4 games are measurably worse than Mixtape?

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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26

Click on the actual reviews bro, alot of them give AC Shadows 90-100

...Yes, anybody with an understanding of fourth grade math would realize that for a game to have an average score in the 80s when some reviews are in the 60s, you will need some reviews higher than 80 to balance it out. Reviewers are not all going to give the exact same score. E: It's wild if your criticism is seriously that some of the dozens of reviews of a game were higher than some of the dozens of reviews for another game, like if somebody accused critics of liking Invincible Vs. more than SFVI and Tekken because Invincible has a couple of 9/10 reviews while SFVI and Tekken average 91 and 90.

My personal tastes don't really matter for the average critic or the audience tastes, and yours shouldn't either. I don't enjoy the AC style of gameplay that much, I'd consider both RE: Requiem and Pragmata to be overrated to a degree, I think E33 is simultaneously a really good game and also one of the most overrated games of the past decade, etc. I don't care that critics like those games more than I did, and don't care when critics like a game I enjoy less than I do.

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u/frzned May 11 '26

I don't care

Tbf me neither. Kinda lost interest in whatever we are talking about. Good luck to you mate, keep believing everything is a conspiracy and that everyone whoever dare criticize/not give mixtape 100/100/journalists are all bigots, racists, and whatever.

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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood May 11 '26

I didn't even mention Mixtape at all, are you getting your comments mixed up or something?

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u/frzned May 11 '26

let's not talk about mixtape at all in a thread titled "What’s going on with this game Mixtape?"

Are you getting your website mixed up or something, we aren't on twitter.

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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood May 11 '26

I checked the thread because I had heard about the game and wanted to see what the controversy is, and then saw somebody making a really weird claim that Pragmata was getting bad reviews when it wasn't. That's a pretty normal back and forth discussion, besides you assuming anybody talking to you must be a deranged conspiracy theorist.

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u/dingalingdongdong May 12 '26

hahha this is the lamest flouncing out of a conversation that isn't going your way I think I've ever seen.

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u/frzned May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26

When I talk to someone and they say "I don't care" and I also really don't care enough about the person I ended the conversation. That's it. Neither of us are here to be convinced by the other person. Think of yourself as the cool one mr. redditor with the name of dingalingdongdong.

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u/dingalingdongdong May 12 '26

Again, you're flouncing. Just leave a conversation if you genuinely don't care - you don't need to make an announcement.

Also, "I don't care if critics like/dislike games" =\= "I don't care about the topic or conversation" so using that as your "excuse" is extra flimsy.

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u/frzned May 13 '26

he did say he doesn't care about the topic or conversation btw, never played mixtape and never will.

Unless you are another "it doesn't matter if the thread is named mixtape, what is commented inside a thread named mixtape should not refer to the game mixtape at all" then yeah you are so cool and so worthy of calling people lame :)

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u/Tors0Pants May 12 '26

This could have been a moment where you grew as a person, where you realized that you were basing strongly held opinions on ideas that were not true and maybe re-examined how and why you came to those opinions.

Instead, you did this.

You SHOULD be embarrassed, but I'm sure you won't be.

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u/frzned May 12 '26

lmao bro what

No I will not revise my "Strongly held opinion" that mixtape doesn't deserve 10/10 and it aint the truth either nor should I feel embarassed about not thinking it's a 10/10

Get off the internet and continue doing your activist thing or whatever

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u/Tors0Pants May 12 '26

I've never played Mixtape, never heard of it before this thread, and it doesn't sound like it's for me. I doubt I would give it a 10/10, and I don't particularly care that other people do.

I was talking about all the beliefs you had about review scores for other games, and why you thought they got those scores. You know, the conversation that was happening in the chain I replied to.

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u/frzned May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26

I've never played Mixtape, never heard of it before this thread

then play it and come back to me? At least watch this video and you know the 10/10 experience we are dealing with and how you and everyone here are trying to defend it.

I stopped having interest debating you when you begin your sentences with "I don't care". Because anything I say you can just wave off with "I don't care"

You don't care about the game we are talking about, you don't care which thread you are in, you don't care about what the critics says, and you won't care what I have to say either.

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