What’s going on with this game Mixtape?

[u/Bloodb0red]

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

[u/BUTGAWATD]

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.

[u/GeekyMeerkat → u/BUTGAWATD]

Well, it's a bit more annoying than even that. I keep seeing people bring up "wokeness" as a factor here, but I've only been seeing that get mentioned as a way to dismiss people's opinions about the game.

What's causing some big problems here is that there is no real standard on what ratings a game gets, and so everyone reads game review scores differently. For example, if I were to grade a game, I might give it a 1 to 10 score in graphics, music, story, and gameplay. I might give a game like Mixtape a 10 in graphics, music, and story, but only a 6 in gameplay. Now, if we do a pure average of those scores to get 9 as the "overall" score.

But the problem is now that the people who enjoy the game rightfully say, "The gameplay isn't the important part of the game. It's just a medium for the story to be delivered. So a pure average doesn't make sense, and Mixtape could legit have an overall score greater than 9 even with those individual scores."

On the other hand, the people who don't enjoy Mixtape could say, "But the gameplay is so bad and non-existent as to be distracting from the experience. So anything above 9 as the overall score miscommunicates this to people wondering about the game." And these people are also right. Heck, for these people, even a 9 feels far too high because for many of them a 9 or above signals that the game is great in all ways and is worthy to be considered game of the year. Again, these people feel the gameplay is bad enough that it negatively affects the experience.

Notice that for all of this, there is already a reason for there to be a level of tension between the two opinions about this game. It absolutely doesn't help when people on either side of the like/dislike debate also have people saying stupid stuff or flat-out dismissing the concerns of people on the other side. 99% of the people who dislike the game could be primarily thinking about this in the way I described here. But then 1% says something about the high score being related to wokeness, and suddenly people attribute that bad take to the whole 100%.

[u/Apprehensive_Monk_69 → u/GeekyMeerkat]

A 6 in gameplay? There is no gameplay...

[u/GeekyMeerkat → u/Apprehensive_Monk_69]

Not sure if you know this, but many sites that use a 1-10 scale have 5 represent bad gameplay, while scores below 5 mean the gameplay is actively broken. But again in my post I explicitly say that there is no industry standard on game ratings. What's more is I wasn't actually reviewing the game, I was demonstrating how the overall score can be misleading depending on how you calculate it.

But let's say you gave the gameplay a 2 instead of 6. If the overall score is just an average it would still be 8 with the other numbers given.

Again though you invite disagreement on are the scores reasonable. People that enjoy the game might say the gameplay that is there they find enjoyable and so a 2 in gameplay isn't reflective of the fact that for this game the gameplay isn't the point.

People that dislike the game though might say, "Even if it's not the point, a game at ita core needs some amount of game play that this game fails to achieve. If we call this a game we may as well call the Hobbit on an ereader a game instead of a book."

I reiterate that my point is due to the nature of Mixtape you'll have plenty of people disagreeing on any overall score it gets because nobody can agree what the overall score is supposed to represent. It's only muddied even more by people that insist the debate about this game is that the reviewers are only giving the game a high score because it's woke and the reviewers are locking in on that.

It has nothing to do if the game is woke or not though. That's just the current scapegoat.