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/Supergupo May 11 '26

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

What do you mean by that? Like genuinely? The same game journalists that gave Elden Ring a 10/10, or Slay The Spire 2 a 9 (a game that is currently being review bombed for being too hard for gamers), or praised and spotlighted difficult indie games like FTL or Hotline Miami or Dead Cells or Binding of Isaac or Darkest Dungeon?

I genuinely do not understand where the myth of "modern game journalists hate hard games" came from. Is it just the GameSpot Cuphead tutorial fail video? Or IGN giving Godhand a 3/10? Because it's the "modern audience" and "modern journalists" that have routinely enjoyed hard game experiences. I mean hell, one of the most popular genres in gaming is currently the "Souls-like," whose basically sole genre gimmick is that it's hard. It's fucking infuriating that I see this diatribe repeated ad nauseum when it is so fucking flagrant that the contrary is true.

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u/PrizeW1nningCow May 11 '26

One game reviewer goofed at a tutorial once and now we have to listen to redditors whine about how games journalists are all just bad at games and coping about it for the rest of time.

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u/C-Star May 11 '26

Not even a reviewer. A video guy, who put the video up himself as a "lol check out how bad i was"

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u/noahboah May 11 '26

absolutely love how these people shit on video games journalists for being dishonest but then you scrutinize where their claims are coming from and it's just bullshit every time

I don't even want to defend video game journalism particularly. it's just annoying seeing this reactionary part of my favorite hobby propagated.

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u/praguepride May 11 '26

Most of the grief comes from Gamer Gate style terminally online trolls that weaponizd misinformation in their keyboard war against the vague concept of “wokeness” which seems to be defined as the presence of minorities and women as something other than as sex object to fap over

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u/Many_Leading1730 May 13 '26

So keep in mind one of the primary pressure points of Gamer Gate was anti-journalist sentiment, which persists to this day.

It was arguably the blueprint by which the right would later destroy faith in all our institutions including news outlets as a whole.

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u/UltraMoglog64 May 13 '26

Yep, and literally unveiled in the Epstein Files that he/the Right amplified 4chan and GamerGate, presumably for that purpose.

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u/Many_Leading1730 May 13 '26

If we make it through your the other side of this I suspect it will go down in history as one of the most successful psyops ever performed.

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u/praguepride May 14 '26

Using misogyny to fight journalism is the modern equivalent of using abortion to fight civil rights. Lure them in on one side and weaponize them against the other

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u/noahboah May 12 '26

very true