Welcome back to another edition of The Riot Retort. This time around we’re headed over to TheGamer, where Lead Features Editor Jade King has written what she clearly believes is a definitive takedown of everyone who had the audacity to question whether Mixtape, a three-hour animated walking simulator published by Annapurna Interactive, deserves the string of perfect scores and potential game of the year conversation it has received from the gaming media. Jade loves it. Her friends watched her play it like a movie. Several outlets gave it perfect scores. And anyone who has a problem with any of that is, naturally, an unpleasant culture warrior who doesn’t understand how games are made.

Let’s get into it.

Here at TheGamer, whenever something has a specific aesthetic or an engrossing narrative that pulls at your heartstrings, it will swiftly be labelled as a ‘Jade game.’

Sounds like a weird way of saying “shit game.”

Mamoru Hosoda is my favourite anime director, The Bear fuels my creativity like nothing else out there, and I have Porter Robinson on loop pretty much all the time.

I take great joy in, and I’m thankful that, I don’t know who or what any of these are.

To the surprise of nobody, I absolutely loved it. It’s one of my favourite games of the year. An endlessly creative joy with so much whimsy, heart, and understanding of how the world of video games can be used to tell stories like no other medium can.

I cut out the paragraph before this, but she’s talking about Mixtape. I think it’s okay to like Mixtape for what it is, but find it sad that someone who gets paid to write about games considers it one of their “favorite games of the year.” It’s not a game.

Mixtape doesn’t demonstrate an understanding of how video games can be used to tell stories like no other medium can. It’s a poorly constructed narrative adventure that has practically no gameplay. A literal walking simulator with cringe narration. Red Dead Redemption, The Last of Us, and plenty more show an understanding of how video games can tell stories like no other medium can. That’s through a well crafted story, with characters you care about, that accompanies actual gameplay.

But what I didn’t expect to happen was for Mixtape to become another victim of a ceaseless online culture war.

I don’t think that’s the case, at least not in the way these “culture war” things usually go. Just people rightfully calling it out for not being a game and taking issue with media overpraising it as a possible “game” of the year.

I wasn’t the only person to love Mixtape, with several outlets awarding it perfect scores and making it one of the highest rated games of the year on OpenCritic.

These same outlets loved Dragon Age: The Veilguard, defended Concord, and didn’t score Crimson Desert highly. No one cares what these people think, and making this animated novel one of the highest-rated games of the year is a huge mark against them.

It sets out to tell a story in a very specific way and does so in spectacular fashion…

And that’s perfectly fine.

 but unpleasant parts of the internet are using this positive reception as an excuse to question its status as a game

“Unpleasant parts.” Your kind loves to label everyone who doesn’t agree with your takes as unpleasant or outdated. It’s not a game by the very definition of a game. You don’t do anything in this story.

fail to understand how games are made in the first place

Based on what exactly? How about actual developers who don’t think this is a game? Is this more of a game than Crimson Desert?

It’s exhausting, so let’s get into it already.

It’s so exhausting that you’re going to write a thousand words screeching about people not liking it?

Games like Mixtape have existed for decades now. Sometimes described uncharitably as ‘walking simulators’, they are narrative-driven experiences with a smaller focus on what we have come to know as traditional gameplay elements. You explore a number of locations or speak with characters to progress the plot, or partake in a few minigames or scripted action sequences where fail states are few and far between. The focus is on the story and characters first and foremost, with gameplay used to make both of those elements infinitely more effective.

They usually have a little more gameplay, or narrative choices that the player can impact and change, or just don’t receive much attention from the media. They certainly don’t get a bunch of perfect scores, cries for game of the year, and a desperate attempt to redefine what a game is.

I played through the entirety of Mixtape with two friends by my side, and they ended up treating it as an extended film of sorts while I played through it. The lack of failure states served to make it even more impactful for them.

You “played” through a three hour story and your two friends got the exact same experience from it because it can be watched. Therefore it’s not a game. And how does a lack of fail states make it more impactful for them? Is it because your inability to fail resulted in them not having to watch you attempt something over and over again?

There have always been games like this, and there have always been people who dislike the slow pace, lack of things to do, and generally easygoing vibes of them. But now Mixtape is being treated as a unique outsider, for reasons I don’t really understand.

What’s hard to understand about it? A thing exists and doesn’t usually get a lot of attention. Then suddenly one comes around that the established gaming media begins universally praising, almost from the same script, giving it perfect scores and calling it game of the year. Of course that’s going to rub gamers the wrong way.

I understand if Mixtape isn’t your cup of tea, and you’d rather video games use gameplay to tell their stories in a more involved manner than Beethoven & Dinosaur does.

I’m glad you can understand that. It seems reasonable that people would rather their video games actually have gameplay. It’s where the game part comes from. Otherwise it’s just a visual novel or interactive story where you walk the character around but don’t actually do anything or impact the story.

The studio, for the record, did not spring up out of nowhere and also made The Artful Escape, which was nominated at The Game Awards in 2021.

I don’t see any reason to think normal gamers care about The Game Awards, but okay. No one says the studio just sprung up or that they shouldn’t exist. No one made a big deal out of The Artful Escape so it was allowed to be its own thing in relative peace for those who enjoyed it.

If you’re one of those people put off by games like Mixtape, then just don’t play Mixtape. Not all video games are made for you, and there shouldn’t be a responsibility for you to keep up with every single one of them.

That would be sound advice if it wasn’t coming from someone who called for a boycott against Hogwarts Legacy. You weren’t happy to let people enjoy that one. You happily wanted it to fail. Unfortunately for you, no one cared about your side’s pathetic little boycott and the game sold millions of copies, thanks in large part to actually being a fantastic game. With fun and engaging gameplay, which is where the player makes the character do something besides walk or pick up an object to deliver cringe narration about it.

With Mixtape receiving critical acclaim and overshadowing releases like Crimson Desert, Black Myth Wukong, and Stellar Blade — y’know, real video games, it must, for some reason, be held responsible for its excellence

es, those are actual real video games. Certainly on any metric of what makes a game they are better games. For someone who just said the people complaining about Mixtape’s scores “fail to understand how games are made in the first place,” it seems rather a slap in the face to call a non-game a potential game of the year.

 I wasn’t aware this discourse was going on until I went onto Twitter and posts criticising the lack of gameplay in Mixtape, as the sections that involve running or skateboarding will guide you to the destination without you even needing to touch the controller.

It’s not hard to avoid things on X unless you’re actively looking for them. You went looking to see what people outside gaming media were saying about your precious game so you could be exhausted enough to write an article about it. Just be honest about it.

This is often so the action can meld effectively with the soundtrack, and there are Trophies/Achievements for performing specific actions in these sections, but they are admittedly light on gameplay. 

At least you can admit it.

However, many other parts of Mixtape are far more interactive, and some seem to be cherry-picking moments to suggest Mixtape plays itself.

This is probably the loosest possible meaning of “far more interactive.” There’s very little interactivity, certainly nothing in any meaningful manner.

This, of course, is also true of the elongated cutscenes that interrupt combat in most triple-A blockbusters.

The caveat being that those cutscenes are bookended with sequences where the player is actively doing something and whose experience could be different from someone else’s. You know, that thing called gameplay… which, again, is where the game asks the player to do something instead of doing it for them.

Mixtape also almost certainly will not be nominated for any major GOTY awards despite this score, while Crimson Desert could very well be and Black Myth Wukong was.

We all know it will be nominated by at least one or two outlets, and they’ll deserve to be mocked for it when it happens.

Such a narrow interpretation of what video games can be feels like it’s being argued in bad faith, with a lot of people online getting their licks in because they know it will stoke outrage and drive engagement. 

The irony of that coming from someone willingly stoking the same flames for the same engagement. It’s not a “narrow interpretation” or “bad faith” to think that video games should actually have some gameplay to them and not just be a video with a walking simulator attached.

Mixtape is a progressive narrative adventure all about the nostalgia of growing up in a time period we’ve long left behind with female characters that feel abundatly real, which are all unfortunately kindling for a bonfire of reactionary flames.

No one dislikes this game because of the female characters. They dislike that it scored so highly despite not being a real game. And the characters in this do not, in any way, feel abundantly real.

When I rolled credits on Mixtape, it didn’t feel like a video game that warranted this level of outrage.

Rolling credits on a video game used to mean something. It was either a long journey or a moderately difficult one, and there was a rush of hell yeah, I beat it. You’re not going to get that rolling credits on a three hour movie with a walking simulator built in.

It was a grand old time, and it did everything it set out to do wonderfully.

Sure.

But in the modern day, every game has to be dissected by the culture war, and becomes the latest torch for people to bear in defiance of an enemy which doesn’t exist.

It gets a little tiresome from these people. They’ll bitch and moan about games with large-breasted women whose boobs jiggle, cry for boycotts of certain games, and so on, but God forbid gamers complain just a little bit about a visual novel scoring multiple perfect scores from gaming outlets despite not being a real game.

They’ll dissect a game to see how much male gaze it has, cry if it doesn’t have enough diversity, complain if they can’t see themselves in the starring role, and go into a rage if a female character is remotely attractive or wears revealing clothing, but yet it’s always the other side that has the torches lit.

Mixtape’s focus on narrative over gameplay isn’t anything new. Gone Home, Firewatch, Night in the Woods, What Remains of Edith Finch, and many others have walked similar paths where dialogue and lovable casts of characters take priority. They were all highly praised, all had some people say ‘ehh, not my thing, no real gameplay’, and we all moved on.

Yes, walking simulators exist. There’s a place for them, as there is for anything if there’s an audience for it. But I don’t remember those titles being overly praised as redefining what a game is or can be.

The difference with this one is that you, the person who wrote this article, couldn’t move on when people talked about it not being their thing because of the lack of real gameplay. You went to X, found people discussing it amongst themselves, and wrote this article to complain about those people not liking it, all to drive engagement. I’m doing the same thing here with this Riot Retort, but I’m at least honest about it. I couldn’t care less about Mixtape. I’ll review it eventually, but it’s not a game and won’t be reviewed as such.

It shouldn’t be reviewed the way a Crimson Desert or even a smaller indie game like Mouse P.I. For Hire would be. To do so would be an injustice to those games and to Mixtape as well, because they can’t and shouldn’t be held to the same standards. They are completely different things.

I can even go further back in time to classic adventure games like Monkey Island, where you did a whole lot more reading than playing. Mixtape’s naysayers don’t get to decide what video games can or should be, especially when they have no idea how they are made in the first place.

Monkey Island is not similar to Mixtape. Monkey Island is an actual game, as would something like Myst be. The player does things, makes choices, and engages with the game instead of simply watching it. Don’t insult classic adventure games by lumping them in with a narrative animated novel.

People have also gone after publisher Annapurna Interactive, believing it to be some sort of corrupt, nepo-baby funded art house trying to push a particular agenda instead of a decently sized company with the money and influence to fund unique video games. This argument mostly confuses Annapurna Pictures, the film company operated by Larry Ellison’s daughter Megan Ellison, and the video game company, Annapurna Interactive, which was founded by Megan but mainly run by Nathan Gary and James Masi, and has cycled through a variety of leadership figures since Gary and Masi departed in 2024.

It’s a logical jump and a well founded one. It’s certainly interesting and very on brand.

Annapurna Interactive has more money and influence than most indie publishers, but less than the triple-A big guns. Mixtape is far from its biggest success critically or commercially, either. Stray, Neon White, Journey, Kentucky Route Zero, Sayonara Wild Hearts and countless others enjoyed similar or greater success without any of this hand-wringing.

Those were games. Stray and Journey might not have been favorites of mine but they are at least games.

It’s also worth noting that a bunch of Annapurna Interactive resigned back in 2024 (including Gray and Masi), when Mixtape was already well into production. This is not a conspiracy theory that makes any kind of sense.

Well if you’re going to go down the conspiracy route, a publisher in turmoil spending money on perfect score reviews to gaslight gamers into thinking it’s a good game seems pretty on brand.

Mixtape is about a group of teenagers doing vaguely teenage things like drinking beer in the woods and moaning about school. 

It’s about a group of unlikeable teens with some of the most poorly written dialogue I’ve heard in a long time. The only positive is that the voice acting itself is pretty good. It’s theater kids: the visual novel walking simulator.

Who is benefiting from whatever this game is doing besides people enjoying it? It’s all to generate discourse and stir the same pot of predictable hate.

Again, says the person trying to generate discourse and stir the pot by calling out people who don’t like Mixtape or at the very least don’t think it’s a game.

I could state the obvious and say people actually hate Mixtape because it stars women and is deemed because of its review scores and the typical games in this genre, to be even slightly progressive in its politics, but it doesn’t even really have much politics inside it besides drinking teenagers not liking the cop who wants to stop them drinking.

That wouldn’t be stating the obvious at all. Why is it so hard to see that people are questioning it getting perfect scores despite not being a real game? I don’t think the characters are well written, I think the main girl and Slater are poorly designed, and Cassandra is fine, but it’s not a game. And it doesn’t seem to be overtly woke, so that’s not it either. It’s simply that it’s not a game.

Hardly radical. It isn’t an DEI-fueled mind-control experiment trying to enslave society, it’s merely a labour of love eager to pay homage to the films, music, and quirky small towns so many of us grew up with.

No one suggested it is. Why is it that when people have an issue with something you don’t like, you invent reasons outside of the actual one to attribute to their criticism and then dismiss those invented reasons?

Yes, it’s purposefully idyllic in its narrative and experimental in its gameplay mechanics, but that doesn’t make anything it tries to do any less valid.

Experimental in its gameplay mechanics is a joke and you know it. What’s the experiment exactly? That a game has no gameplay mechanics besides walking and occasionally pressing a button to interact with something?

What keeps me going is knowing that in a couple of weeks all of this negative discourse will be left behind and Mixtape will be viewed on its own merits.

What an asinine thing to say. You brought attention to the negative discourse by searching it out on X and writing a piece designed to drive the exact clicks and engagement you claimed to be exhausted by.

It won’t go down in history as a punching bag for YouTubers with inflated review scores, but a narrative adventure that toyed with the constraints of what a video game can be, all while paying direct homage to the classics that made its existence possible in the first place.

More people will remember funny YouTube videos mocking it than will actually play this game, despite it being on Game Pass.

It isn’t trying to be anything other than itself, and we’d be wise not to forget that.

While hyping it up as a ten out of ten, favorite game of the year, redefining what a game is, pushing the medium past its limits — and then trying to say it isn’t trying to be anything other than itself. Blow a bunch of smoke up the game’s backside and then act like the expectations you set didn’t exist.

Here’s the thing Jade. Nobody is saying Mixtape shouldn’t exist. Nobody is saying the people who enjoyed it are wrong for enjoying it. The argument, the simple, straightforward, non-culture-war argument, is that a three-hour animated visual novel where your friends can watch you play it like a movie and get the exact same experience should not be receiving perfect scores from gaming outlets and potential game of the year consideration alongside actual games. That’s it. That’s the whole complaint.

You went on X looking for outrage, found it, and wrote fifteen hundred words about it to generate the exact engagement you claimed to be exhausted by. At least own that.

Mixtape can be what it is. Just don’t call it a game of the year candidate and expect nobody to notice.