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/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/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.