In the underappreciated 2008 comedy Role Models, Christopher Mintz-Plasse's character, the exceedingly nerdy Augie, is asked if he likes Coca-Cola. "I like the idea of it more than I actually like it," he answers.

I always found it a funny, confusing answer, but this fifth entry in The Dark Pictures horror anthology, with its grating performances, rote stealth sequences, and signs of an aging formula, makes me realize I can relate; I like the idea of this anthology more than I actually like playing its games.

In Directive 8020, developer Supermassive Games takes us to outer space for the first time in the series. Following stories focused on a cursed shipwreck, New England witchcraft, monster-infested caves, and a modern slasher inspired by H.H. Holmes, the latest one-off title is heavily inspired by two giants of its genre: Alien and John Carpenter's The Thing. A crew of heroes-to-be surveys a potential new home planet for humanity, Tau Ceti f, before a disaster leaves them stranded on it with an alien organism that can steal organic likenesses, such as human faces and bodies.

Directive 8020 is not just the fifth Dark Pictures entry, but speaks to a longer, broader trend that has seen the studio make movie-like games designed around branching gameplay and story choices, stressful quick-time events, and the threat of permadeath when you screw something up, be it a branching choice or a sequence of button-mashing. When the studio first started making these types of games with 2015's Until Dawn, it presented them like movies, with fixed camera angles meant to mimic the cinematic touch of a feature film. But Supermassive has been moving away from that approach in recent projects, to the point that now Directive 8020 plays like an over-the-shoulder third-person action game.

This change is for the worse, and I'm curious how we got here. I admit, sometimes it could be clunky controlling characters from the traditional fixed angles, but without those cinematic touches, these games are worsening. They're less immersive and less visually interesting, and what this more typical perspective highlights is just how shallow other parts of the formula can be.

More than any entry before it (including recent offshoots The Quarry and The Casting of Frank Stone), Directive 8020 offers gameplay mechanics of a traditional, third-person action game, where you'll solve environmental puzzles to navigate dangerous hallways patrolled by a shapeshifting monster. There are also a lot of stealth sequences that ask you to crouch-walk behind waist-high walls, moving from cover to air duct to stairwell whenever the monster's predictable pathing turns them away from you.

Neither of these elements feels all that exciting, and more often the puzzles of Directive 8020 outright frustrated me, as their solutions were either boringly obvious or surprisingly obtuse. That said, even good versions of these puzzles may have soured me on the experience a bit, as including any puzzles hurt the pacing that I tend to prefer in a game mimicking Hollywood movies like this series used to. But what's actually in the game is worse, and only served to grind me down even more.

On the surface, Supermassive's decision to draw from two hugely influential movies like Alien and The Thing is exciting. Alien has inspired countless other horror stories in the decades since it arrived, but there's always room for another if it finds an intriguing hook of its own. Meanwhile, The Thing suits Supermassive's multiplayer mechanics very well; in Directive 8020's multiplayer, players are assigned different characters to nurture over the course of the game, creating conflict. I might choose to save my character over yours when it's my turn to control the story, for example. It's a fun mechanic that's made even better by the presence of a monster that steals people's likenesses. Instead of simply choosing to save my character over someone else's, Directive 8020 made me question who to trust at all, even when it came to my own character. Am I actually prioritizing who I think I'm playing, or has the monster already killed and replaced them, and am I dooming the whole team with my self-serving choices?

Directive 8020 does a pretty good job of delivering on this tense wrinkle to The Dark Pictures' usual multiplayer set-up, and the game's central monster and storyline are intriguing enough that I was invested in seeing where it went. I especially liked one scene in which the characters are ordered by their commanding officer to pass through a bioscanner to prove their humanity. Recalling scenes from The Faculty and Among Us, it felt like a tropey but welcome--and even necessary--beat to hit. But this moment and others were often hamstrung by issues that have hindered other games in the series, and increasingly feels like they're getting in the way at this point.

While some performances in Directive 8020 are fine or even good, others are distractingly bad. One character in particular has so many confusing line deliveries that I wondered if it was voiced by generative AI. It was whiff after whiff. With so many story branches to account for and too many different angles that must be covered, I lost my sense of who these characters are, as different takes are sometimes jarringly spliced together.

In cutscenes, the camera often moves oddly slowly, in a way that shirks the past games' cinematic quality for something that feels either thoughtless, or is the result of some unseen technical requirement. I wasn't sure which was to blame. There are other signs of technical limitations too, like when two characters had only just set off to perform an important task together before they immediately stopped walking so they could talk, offering players the chance to shape their personalities (and thus their fates in the permadeath system). There was no reason for them not to walk and talk at the same time, Sorkin-style, so it felt like the game just couldn't make that happen for some vague under-the-hood reason that leaves it all feeling a bit uncanny.

Directive 8020 does offer one really cool innovation for these games, however. Its new Turning Points system lets you more easily explore unseen branches of the story--either right in the moment, letting you rewind as soon as a pivotal outcome has occurred, or later, by opening to the story's timeline and hopping into new-to-you sections.

Though I'm the type to prefer to see only my version of events, ignoring other branches as fiction that effectively doesn't exist, the Turning Points system serves a few practical purposes. For one, anyone collecting the game's many secrets can more easily jump around and get what they need without much hassle. Naturally, it also lets you fix what you might regret, if you're less committed to your one-true-path than I am. I did test it a few times for the purposes of this review, and to the team's credit, they did a good job of implementing it, letting you rewind quickly and with a simple button press akin to racing in Forza. That doesn't make Directive 8020 a better story, and really it only subjects you to more of the poor performances, but it does make it a more malleable story for completionists or the exceedingly curious.

After a delay took the game out of its more-fitting Halloween window, it's disappointing to feel like this one is still grinding down its gears to get to the finish line. It's not the first Dark Pictures entry to show these signs, but it gets more apparent with each new one that doesn't overhaul the game's foundational jank. It reminds me of the latter-era Telltale games, where the engine was really chugging and the games' charms, often the writing and player-driven decisions, were held back by an aging formula, technical woes, or both. I've wondered if some future installment of The Dark Pictures will unveil a dramatic technical overhaul, allowing Supermassive to get back to the more interesting, more cinematic version of itself.

The Dark Pictures, as a broad project, feels like it's at a crossroads with Directive 8020. With plans to do several more installments, I feel like the inherent flaws are giving way to diminishing returns. I've said before that I'd take a new one of these games every year, forever, and I still feel that way, but I think I've hit my limit on forgiving some of the series' increasingly obvious hang-ups. The conscious rejection of Supermassive's past cinematic flair confuses me, while the shoddy voice work creates a barrier between the game's intent and its execution.

If Supermassive needs to take some extra time off to bring this series into modernity, I'd happily sit out a while, in the hopes that The Dark Pictures can eventually get the studio back to that high bar set by Until Dawn over a decade ago.

In the underappreciated 2008 comedy Role Models, Christopher Mintz-Plasse's character, the exceedingly nerdy Augie, is asked if he likes Coca-Cola. "I like the idea of it more than I actually like it," he answers.

I always found it a funny, confusing answer, but this fifth entry in The Dark Pictures horror anthology, with its grating performances, rote stealth sequences, and signs of an aging formula, makes me realize I can relate; I like the idea of this anthology more than I actually like playing its games.

In Directive 8020, developer Supermassive Games takes us to outer space for the first time in the series. Following stories focused on a cursed shipwreck, New England witchcraft, monster-infested caves, and a modern slasher inspired by H.H. Holmes, the latest one-off title is heavily inspired by two giants of its genre: Alien and John Carpenter's The Thing. A crew of heroes-to-be surveys a potential new home planet for humanity, Tau Ceti f, before a disaster leaves them stranded on it with an alien organism that can steal organic likenesses, such as human faces and bodies.

Directive 8020 is not just the fifth Dark Pictures entry, but speaks to a longer, broader trend that has seen the studio make movie-like games designed around branching gameplay and story choices, stressful quick-time events, and the threat of permadeath when you screw something up, be it a branching choice or a sequence of button-mashing. When the studio first started making these types of games with 2015's Until Dawn, it presented them like movies, with fixed camera angles meant to mimic the cinematic touch of a feature film. But Supermassive has been moving away from that approach in recent projects, to the point that now Directive 8020 plays like an over-the-shoulder third-person action game.

This change is for the worse, and I'm curious how we got here. I admit, sometimes it could be clunky controlling characters from the traditional fixed angles, but without those cinematic touches, these games are worsening. They're less immersive and less visually interesting, and what this more typical perspective highlights is just how shallow other parts of the formula can be.

More than any entry before it (including recent offshoots The Quarry and The Casting of Frank Stone), Directive 8020 offers gameplay mechanics of a traditional, third-person action game, where you'll solve environmental puzzles to navigate dangerous hallways patrolled by a shapeshifting monster. There are also a lot of stealth sequences that ask you to crouch-walk behind waist-high walls, moving from cover to air duct to stairwell whenever the monster's predictable pathing turns them away from you.

Neither of these elements feels all that exciting, and more often the puzzles of Directive 8020 outright frustrated me, as their solutions were either boringly obvious or surprisingly obtuse. That said, even good versions of these puzzles may have soured me on the experience a bit, as including any puzzles hurt the pacing that I tend to prefer in a game mimicking Hollywood movies like this series used to. But what's actually in the game is worse, and only served to grind me down even more.

On the surface, Supermassive's decision to draw from two hugely influential movies like Alien and The Thing is exciting. Alien has inspired countless other horror stories in the decades since it arrived, but there's always room for another if it finds an intriguing hook of its own. Meanwhile, The Thing suits Supermassive's multiplayer mechanics very well; in Directive 8020's multiplayer, players are assigned different characters to nurture over the course of the game, creating conflict. I might choose to save my character over yours when it's my turn to control the story, for example. It's a fun mechanic that's made even better by the presence of a monster that steals people's likenesses. Instead of simply choosing to save my character over someone else's, Directive 8020 made me question who to trust at all, even when it came to my own character. Am I actually prioritizing who I think I'm playing, or has the monster already killed and replaced them, and am I dooming the whole team with my self-serving choices?

Directive 8020 does a pretty good job of delivering on this tense wrinkle to The Dark Pictures' usual multiplayer set-up, and the game's central monster and storyline are intriguing enough that I was invested in seeing where it went. I especially liked one scene in which the characters are ordered by their commanding officer to pass through a bioscanner to prove their humanity. Recalling scenes from The Faculty and Among Us, it felt like a tropey but welcome--and even necessary--beat to hit. But this moment and others were often hamstrung by issues that have hindered other games in the series, and increasingly feels like they're getting in the way at this point.

While some performances in Directive 8020 are fine or even good, others are distractingly bad. One character in particular has so many confusing line deliveries that I wondered if it was voiced by generative AI. It was whiff after whiff. With so many story branches to account for and too many different angles that must be covered, I lost my sense of who these characters are, as different takes are sometimes jarringly spliced together.

In cutscenes, the camera often moves oddly slowly, in a way that shirks the past games' cinematic quality for something that feels either thoughtless, or is the result of some unseen technical requirement. I wasn't sure which was to blame. There are other signs of technical limitations too, like when two characters had only just set off to perform an important task together before they immediately stopped walking so they could talk, offering players the chance to shape their personalities (and thus their fates in the permadeath system). There was no reason for them not to walk and talk at the same time, Sorkin-style, so it felt like the game just couldn't make that happen for some vague under-the-hood reason that leaves it all feeling a bit uncanny.

Directive 8020 does offer one really cool innovation for these games, however. Its new Turning Points system lets you more easily explore unseen branches of the story--either right in the moment, letting you rewind as soon as a pivotal outcome has occurred, or later, by opening to the story's timeline and hopping into new-to-you sections.

Though I'm the type to prefer to see only my version of events, ignoring other branches as fiction that effectively doesn't exist, the Turning Points system serves a few practical purposes. For one, anyone collecting the game's many secrets can more easily jump around and get what they need without much hassle. Naturally, it also lets you fix what you might regret, if you're less committed to your one-true-path than I am. I did test it a few times for the purposes of this review, and to the team's credit, they did a good job of implementing it, letting you rewind quickly and with a simple button press akin to racing in Forza. That doesn't make Directive 8020 a better story, and really it only subjects you to more of the poor performances, but it does make it a more malleable story for completionists or the exceedingly curious.

After a delay took the game out of its more-fitting Halloween window, it's disappointing to feel like this one is still grinding down its gears to get to the finish line. It's not the first Dark Pictures entry to show these signs, but it gets more apparent with each new one that doesn't overhaul the game's foundational jank. It reminds me of the latter-era Telltale games, where the engine was really chugging and the games' charms, often the writing and player-driven decisions, were held back by an aging formula, technical woes, or both. I've wondered if some future installment of The Dark Pictures will unveil a dramatic technical overhaul, allowing Supermassive to get back to the more interesting, more cinematic version of itself.

The Dark Pictures, as a broad project, feels like it's at a crossroads with Directive 8020. With plans to do several more installments, I feel like the inherent flaws are giving way to diminishing returns. I've said before that I'd take a new one of these games every year, forever, and I still feel that way, but I think I've hit my limit on forgiving some of the series' increasingly obvious hang-ups. The conscious rejection of Supermassive's past cinematic flair confuses me, while the shoddy voice work creates a barrier between the game's intent and its execution.

If Supermassive needs to take some extra time off to bring this series into modernity, I'd happily sit out a while, in the hopes that The Dark Pictures can eventually get the studio back to that high bar set by Until Dawn over a decade ago.

It was only about a year ago when I learned that not everyone gets goosebumps from listening to music. There's a French word for it--frisson--which describes the feeling some get when music or other powerful stimuli trigger a physiological response. This rush is felt in only about 50% of people in the world, it turns out. I used to think it was all of us. That's probably a big part of why music means so much to me, because I'm in the lucky camp that gets to enjoy this positively overwhelming response when the right song hits at just the right time. Mixtape is an adventure game that leans into this magical sensation, pairing its heartfelt, often hilarious moments with a sweeping soundtrack to create a coming-of-age story I'll never forget.

Mixtape is the second effort from Beethoven & Dinosaur, a small Australian team that includes some former rockstars who pivoted to game dev and brought their love for music with them. In it, you play the music-obsessed Stacey Rockford, whose headphones may as well be an organic appendage. Inspired by movies like Superbad and the works of John Hughes, the driving force of the '90s-set story is Stacey's attempt to make it to a killer beach party with her best pals Slater and Cassandra in tow.

The morning after this party, Stacey is off to chase her dream as a music supervisor--basically a professional mixtape maker for Hollywood projects--so this is her and her friends' last hurrah together, whether they're ready for life to drag them into adulthood and see them go their separate ways or not. While relatively small, these stakes are deeply relatable, revealing a lot of big, honest emotions across the four-hour runtime.

The starring trio is incredibly well-written and all three foster empathy and investment from the very start of the game, as they coast down the hills of their town on skateboards, calling out cars to dodge and doing flip tricks over trash cans. As Stacey breaks the fourth wall, announcing to you, the player, the song she picked for the moment, you understand she's no phony. She knows her stuff when it comes to music, but her decision to leave town for New York has driven a wedge in the friend group, who once made plans for a lengthy west coast road trip that's now up in the air.

Mixtape does so much so well, but one of the things I love most about it is its emotional honesty. Sure, as an adult with the benefit of hindsight, a friend moving away isn't the end of the world. But when you're a kid, it's your whole world blowing up. For Stacey, Slater, and Cassandra, they're on the verge of so much changing, and their comfortable routines are being thrown out, exchanged for the ambiguous world of growing up. Though the trio often joke around and give off a level of youthful sarcasm, they're also capable of letting down their emotional barriers and spilling how they feel.

It endears me to each of them and their journeys, whether it be Stacey's bold career-planning maneuvers, Cassandra's desperate desire to wiggle out from beneath her cop-dad's iron fist, or Slater's somewhat untapped potential as a musician himself. How they stand up for each other, challenge each other, and even just how they, for lack of a better phrase, dick around, feels authentic, and it mesmerized me in each scene. Even then, sometimes it's the things they don't speak that affected me the most. Through it all, excellent performances bring these characters and others to vibrant life.

The structure of those scenes is another tremendous highlight. As the night unfolds and the friends remain hellbent on hunting down some alcohol and/or weed for the party, you'll spend hangout time in each of their bedrooms. There, flashbacks unfold to the tune of Stacey's carefully curated mixtape, designed with the explicit intent to become the soundtrack to their grand finale in town together.

Though the game often carries a punky, middle-finger of a spirit, the soundtrack is eclectic, from favorites like Devo and Siouxsie and the Banshees to lesser-known (to me anyway) standouts like Harpers Bizarre and Stan Bush. You won't be shunned for not knowing them all, as Stacey acts as the studio's proxy, providing a bit of musical history with each entry when she breaks the fourth wall a la Ferris Bueller. I loved hearing these new-to-me tracks nearly as much as I loved revisiting some all-time favorites, like The Cure.

Each of these flashback moments is given relatively light gameplay mechanics, often bespoke for just a singular sequence and then quickly disposed of. Like the studio's previous game, The Artful Escape, Mixtape isn't meant to challenge most players on the sticks. Though occasional fail states exist, like if you crash into a car on your skateboard, there's no penalty for messing up. It just rewinds instantly and resumes. This is a game that uses the language of games to tell its story, not test you. And thanks to the story perfectly marrying a killer soundtrack and clever mechanics together, it hits just right.

In one moment, you may be toilet-papering the principal's house, then in another, you'll be stumbling through a video store as the employee calls out to you beyond the fog of your drunken stupor. And this must be the first game to ever let you control a pair of French-kissing tongues, swapping spit and twisting in a fervor of adolescent hormones.

In one of my favorite sequences, the kids fly high above the town, soaring out of the forest, over the nearby lake, and into town, deriding their high school as they coast over the pool of yellow buses. It's all set to the tune of Atmosphere by Joy Division--by my estimation, one of the greatest bands there ever was. Of course, the kids didn't really learn to fly that night, but it sure as hell felt that way to them. How lucky we must be to have had moments in our lives where we felt the same. Mixtape is telling you its story, but it trusts you'll recall moments of your own that resonate.

As great as the game feels and sounds, it also looks exquisite. Built in Unreal, it takes advantage of the engine's impeccable lighting. Coated in a hyper-stylized cartoonishness, it still manages to give its characters the emotiveness their excellent performances deserve. This puts the game on full display, averting the all-too-common video game problem of a great story and performances let down somewhat by wooden character models.

Every frame is a rad painting, and like the gameplay controls, the perspective shifts often, giving each scene what it needs. In one scene, for example, in which the kids flee a party crashed by the cops, you'll seamlessly transition from a traditional third-person perspective to the view from the news helicopter above, watching the runaways take their out-of-control shopping cart onto the interstate.

Broadly speaking, Mixtape is an adventure game, if only because that's often the bucket one might drop a game like this into--a game where the rules of establishing and then iterating on gameplay don't apply. Not one of these moments frustrates or overstays its welcome, with the minor exception being the time spent in the kids' bedrooms, when you're allowed to peruse for a bit and trigger missable dialogue by interacting with objects in each space.

Collectively, it's less like you're playing a game with a great soundtrack and more like someone has turned a soundtrack into an interactive experiment. It had to be a game, and that's partly what makes it so much more affecting than if this were a movie, but still, the music leads. Mixtape is whatever it needs to be in each moment, and the studio makes a strong case for why it must be that way.

By tying each memory or moment to a particular song, Mixtape delivers on its main idea: Music isn't something we do; it's something we are. When we work out, we put on the playlist that gets us ready to run through a brick wall. On our wedding day, we play a song that reminds us of when we first met or whose lyrics speak to our journey. When we scream the words to our favorite songs in a venue of 300 sweaty strangers, it bonds us to one another in a way nothing else does or even could do. Music can behave like a time machine, carrying you to a place and time as though you're there again. Stacey gets this intimately, as does Beethoven & Dinosaur, quite obviously.

Music can make us feel incredibly powerful or cathartically vulnerable. And when the right song hits at the right moment, it may just send a happy shiver down your spine, which is how I spent much of my time with Mixtape, and why I'll never forget it.

It was only about a year ago when I learned that not everyone gets goosebumps from listening to music. There's a French word for it--frisson--which describes the feeling some get when music or other powerful stimuli trigger a physiological response. This rush is felt in only about 50% of people in the world, it turns out. I used to think it was all of us. That's probably a big part of why music means so much to me, because I'm in the lucky camp that gets to enjoy this positively overwhelming response when the right song hits at just the right time. Mixtape is an adventure game that leans into this magical sensation, pairing its heartfelt, often hilarious moments with a sweeping soundtrack to create a coming-of-age story I'll never forget.

Mixtape is the second effort from Beethoven & Dinosaur, a small Australian team that includes some former rockstars who pivoted to game dev and brought their love for music with them. In it, you play the music-obsessed Stacey Rockford, whose headphones may as well be an organic appendage. Inspired by movies like Superbad and the works of John Hughes, the driving force of the '90s-set story is Stacey's attempt to make it to a killer beach party with her best pals Slater and Cassandra in tow.

The morning after this party, Stacey is off to chase her dream as a music supervisor--basically a professional mixtape maker for Hollywood projects--so this is her and her friends' last hurrah together, whether they're ready for life to drag them into adulthood and see them go their separate ways or not. While relatively small, these stakes are deeply relatable, revealing a lot of big, honest emotions across the four-hour runtime.

The starring trio is incredibly well-written and all three foster empathy and investment from the very start of the game, as they coast down the hills of their town on skateboards, calling out cars to dodge and doing flip tricks over trash cans. As Stacey breaks the fourth wall, announcing to you, the player, the song she picked for the moment, you understand she's no phony. She knows her stuff when it comes to music, but her decision to leave town for New York has driven a wedge in the friend group, who once made plans for a lengthy west coast road trip that's now up in the air.

Mixtape does so much so well, but one of the things I love most about it is its emotional honesty. Sure, as an adult with the benefit of hindsight, a friend moving away isn't the end of the world. But when you're a kid, it's your whole world blowing up. For Stacey, Slater, and Cassandra, they're on the verge of so much changing, and their comfortable routines are being thrown out, exchanged for the ambiguous world of growing up. Though the trio often joke around and give off a level of youthful sarcasm, they're also capable of letting down their emotional barriers and spilling how they feel.

It endears me to each of them and their journeys, whether it be Stacey's bold career-planning maneuvers, Cassandra's desperate desire to wiggle out from beneath her cop-dad's iron fist, or Slater's somewhat untapped potential as a musician himself. How they stand up for each other, challenge each other, and even just how they, for lack of a better phrase, dick around, feels authentic, and it mesmerized me in each scene. Even then, sometimes it's the things they don't speak that affected me the most. Through it all, excellent performances bring these characters and others to vibrant life.

The structure of those scenes is another tremendous highlight. As the night unfolds and the friends remain hellbent on hunting down some alcohol and/or weed for the party, you'll spend hangout time in each of their bedrooms. There, flashbacks unfold to the tune of Stacey's carefully curated mixtape, designed with the explicit intent to become the soundtrack to their grand finale in town together.

Though the game often carries a punky, middle-finger of a spirit, the soundtrack is eclectic, from favorites like Devo and Siouxsie and the Banshees to lesser-known (to me anyway) standouts like Harpers Bizarre and Stan Bush. You won't be shunned for not knowing them all, as Stacey acts as the studio's proxy, providing a bit of musical history with each entry when she breaks the fourth wall a la Ferris Bueller. I loved hearing these new-to-me tracks nearly as much as I loved revisiting some all-time favorites, like The Cure.

Each of these flashback moments is given relatively light gameplay mechanics, often bespoke for just a singular sequence and then quickly disposed of. Like the studio's previous game, The Artful Escape, Mixtape isn't meant to challenge most players on the sticks. Though occasional fail states exist, like if you crash into a car on your skateboard, there's no penalty for messing up. It just rewinds instantly and resumes. This is a game that uses the language of games to tell its story, not test you. And thanks to the story perfectly marrying a killer soundtrack and clever mechanics together, it hits just right.

In one moment, you may be toilet-papering the principal's house, then in another, you'll be stumbling through a video store as the employee calls out to you beyond the fog of your drunken stupor. And this must be the first game to ever let you control a pair of French-kissing tongues, swapping spit and twisting in a fervor of adolescent hormones.

In one of my favorite sequences, the kids fly high above the town, soaring out of the forest, over the nearby lake, and into town, deriding their high school as they coast over the pool of yellow buses. It's all set to the tune of Atmosphere by Joy Division--by my estimation, one of the greatest bands there ever was. Of course, the kids didn't really learn to fly that night, but it sure as hell felt that way to them. How lucky we must be to have had moments in our lives where we felt the same. Mixtape is telling you its story, but it trusts you'll recall moments of your own that resonate.

As great as the game feels and sounds, it also looks exquisite. Built in Unreal, it takes advantage of the engine's impeccable lighting. Coated in a hyper-stylized cartoonishness, it still manages to give its characters the emotiveness their excellent performances deserve. This puts the game on full display, averting the all-too-common video game problem of a great story and performances let down somewhat by wooden character models.

Every frame is a rad painting, and like the gameplay controls, the perspective shifts often, giving each scene what it needs. In one scene, for example, in which the kids flee a party crashed by the cops, you'll seamlessly transition from a traditional third-person perspective to the view from the news helicopter above, watching the runaways take their out-of-control shopping cart onto the interstate.

Broadly speaking, Mixtape is an adventure game, if only because that's often the bucket one might drop a game like this into--a game where the rules of establishing and then iterating on gameplay don't apply. Not one of these moments frustrates or overstays its welcome, with the minor exception being the time spent in the kids' bedrooms, when you're allowed to peruse for a bit and trigger missable dialogue by interacting with objects in each space.

Collectively, it's less like you're playing a game with a great soundtrack and more like someone has turned a soundtrack into an interactive experiment. It had to be a game, and that's partly what makes it so much more affecting than if this were a movie, but still, the music leads. Mixtape is whatever it needs to be in each moment, and the studio makes a strong case for why it must be that way.

By tying each memory or moment to a particular song, Mixtape delivers on its main idea: Music isn't something we do; it's something we are. When we work out, we put on the playlist that gets us ready to run through a brick wall. On our wedding day, we play a song that reminds us of when we first met or whose lyrics speak to our journey. When we scream the words to our favorite songs in a venue of 300 sweaty strangers, it bonds us to one another in a way nothing else does or even could do. Music can behave like a time machine, carrying you to a place and time as though you're there again. Stacey gets this intimately, as does Beethoven & Dinosaur, quite obviously.

Music can make us feel incredibly powerful or cathartically vulnerable. And when the right song hits at the right moment, it may just send a happy shiver down your spine, which is how I spent much of my time with Mixtape, and why I'll never forget it.

Tides of Tomorrow is the first single-player game I've played that desperately wanted me to stalk other human-controlled characters, and that sentiment alone was a compelling enough gimmick for me to jump into its consequence-driven story. While that story stumbles in a few places, and the gameplay never quite rises to anything beyond serviceable, Tides of Tomorrow does a great job of incentivizing you to participate in its "we're all in this together" apocalyptic fantasy and care about the ramifications of your choices and actions beyond how they impact you. If you're looking for a game that makes you feel good about helping others and being helped by others, there aren't many options that hit that sense of community like Tides of Tomorrow.

In Tides of Tomorrow, you play as a Tidewalker, an individual who can see glimpses of the past. These visions always involve the actions of other Tidewalkers, creating a network of individuals who can all learn from each other. Fished from the ocean, you find yourself in a world that's been flooded, restricting civilization to makeshift island towns and repurposed oil rigs. A sickness is also worming its way through the population, slowly causing people to transform into plastic. You count yourself among the infected, quickly learning that only the regular consumption of a medicine known as ozen keeps you from turning completely into plastic and dying.

You play through the game in first-person as a largely silent individual who only speaks when prompted to with a dialogue option. Other than your supernatural sight, you move through the world simply--running, crouching, jumping. In certain locations, you can open your sight to see what a Tidewalker--who, like your Tidewalker, is also controlled by another human player--did there, allowing you to lean on the knowledge you glean to better move through the world. A bouncer who welcomed in a Tidewalker the previous day will allow you inside the club if you also offer up to them the same alias, for example, and seeing a Tidewalker hide some ozen in a grate lets you then nab it for yourself.

These Tidewalkers that you see are always players who went through the level that you're currently on prior to you. Between each level, you're always asked which path you want to go to next, which puts you on the path behind a specific player. You can choose to follow that player all the way through to the end (assuming they have beaten the game), or choose to go in a different direction between levels to follow in the footsteps of another player. Whenever you make this choice to follow a player, you get a brief description of how they acted in that particular level. One player may have prioritized animals and nature in this increasingly plastic-filled world, while another could have opted to prioritize their own survival. Following a player who embodies your playstyle is obviously ideal, but sometimes you don't have that choice and simply must take the best option of those available to you.

Another player's choices can inform how the world reacts to you as well. A Tidewalker who was kind to citizens will create a welcoming atmosphere for you, while a more self-serving Tidewalker will cause NPCs to not want to help you without a bribe or favor on your part.

Community is the main throughline of Tides of Tomorrow. The game's story entices you to care about the community of characters you meet through character-driven storylines and relationship trackers, while its main feature invites you to care about your fellow Tidewalkers by bombarding you with messaging of how other players are affecting your playthrough and how your choices are subsequently impacting the playthroughs of players who follow you.

Between those two communities, the game better accomplishes making you care about the players both ahead and behind you on your journey, and it's better for it, as that's the aspect that differentiates Tides of Tomorrow from other single-player role-playing games. Bonding with an internet stranger through gameplay isn't novel--Dark Souls lets players help or hinder others with cryptic messages and invasions, for example, and Pokemon Go seemingly created world peace for one magical summer of pocket-monster catching--but that does nothing to diminish the emotional draw of Tides of Tomorrow.

I feel genuine appreciation when I'm scouring for enough scrap to pay for something, and NPCs around me help me out because the player I'm following made sure to treat them with respect. I'm shocked when I discover the body of a character I'll never get to meet because the player I'm following stole from them, leaving the character too poor to afford the medicine they needed to survive. And I'm frustrated when a stealth mission is filled with extra guards and more security because the player I'm following angered the kingpin in charge of the area, and so he's put his entire fortress on high alert for future Tidewalkers.

These emotional responses are driven by the knowledge that my lucky breaks and ill fortunes are primarily driven by real people out there. The kindness I've been shown came from someone out there being selfless when they didn't have to be, and the moments of irritation and struggle have primarily been the byproduct of another person's selfishness, desperation, or mistake. Given the desperate struggle your character is thrown into from the jump, it would be so easy to be a self-serving asshole, but the generosity of other players is a strong incentive to pay that kindness forward to any players that may be following in your footsteps.

Tides of Tomorrow doesn't tell you whether your actions have directly helped anyone--it's entirely possible that no one will follow your trail, and the consideration you've shown will ultimately be for nothing--but the encouragement to just be kind is there all the same. It felt good just doing all I could to help. Depending on the type of person you are, this might also add quite a bit of tension to each choice--if you're like me, the idea of making a mistake and royally screwing over another player might inject a level of pressure into every dialogue choice that you're not used to.

This same emotional draw doesn't quite come through with the main NPC characters. While I felt pity for the cute, trouble-making platinum-blonde rebel suffering from an illness slowly transforming her into plastic, and disgust for the tyrant keeping valuable resources from the populace, these characters felt largely like archetype tropes solely there to move me along through a by-the-numbers story of survivors in an apocalypse banding together to rise up against the cartoonishly evil villain. Tides of Tomorrow's story isn't bad, and its characters aren't awful, but it's not the strongest narrative backdrop.

The story and characters are also weakened by how Tides of Tomorrow works. Pretty much every part of the story is dependent on the actions and choices of the players who went through that particular chapter before you. A town loves you because another Tidewalker was kind, for instance, not because you've been kind to other characters leading up to that point. This can create bizarre fluctuations in an NPC's treatment of you, where you may have sided against them in an earlier argument or failed to do what they asked in an early mission, but they can still think you're amazing when you speak to them later because you choose to be on the path of a player who helped them out.

It's a bizarre disconnect that lessens the sense of agency that you have in your own choices. If anything, Tides of Tomorrow's story feels less like something that you're affecting and more like a linear tale that others have dictated for you, and then your responses to that story have a major impact on anyone who might be following your path.

Even if I wasn't always the biggest fan of the characters, I did love Tides of Tomorrow's world. The game has a charming, yet striking aesthetic. Visually, it has an almost cartoony vibe that's bright and vibrant, creating these sharp contrasts between the natural and manufactured, whether that's piles of trash floating in ocean water or plastic veins permeating human skin. That's accompanied by a soundtrack that leans into this almost beat-heavy funk during especially tense or action-heavy scenes. Developer Digixart's previous title, Road 96, was one of my favorite adventure games of 2021 primarily because of its stellar atmosphere, and it's awesome to see the studio devote that same level of care again, but for a very different game.

While I don't think Tides of Tomorrow rises to the same narrative highs as Road 96, its primary incentive is a great draw. It's a little weird to want to stalk other players through a digital world, watching and listening to their every move in order to better your own lot in life, but it's a compelling enough gameplay loop that I overlooked the shortcomings in the game's story and non-player characters. And even if I don't plan on playing the game again, it warms my heart to know that my digital ghost is now out there, potentially guiding other Tidewalkers that may need a little help.

Tides of Tomorrow is the first single-player game I've played that desperately wanted me to stalk other human-controlled characters, and that sentiment alone was a compelling enough gimmick for me to jump into its consequence-driven story. While that story stumbles in a few places, and the gameplay never quite rises to anything beyond serviceable, Tides of Tomorrow does a great job of incentivizing you to participate in its "we're all in this together" apocalyptic fantasy and care about the ramifications of your choices and actions beyond how they impact you. If you're looking for a game that makes you feel good about helping others and being helped by others, there aren't many options that hit that sense of community like Tides of Tomorrow.

In Tides of Tomorrow, you play as a Tidewalker, an individual who can see glimpses of the past. These visions always involve the actions of other Tidewalkers, creating a network of individuals who can all learn from each other. Fished from the ocean, you find yourself in a world that's been flooded, restricting civilization to makeshift island towns and repurposed oil rigs. A sickness is also worming its way through the population, slowly causing people to transform into plastic. You count yourself among the infected, quickly learning that only the regular consumption of a medicine known as ozen keeps you from turning completely into plastic and dying.

You play through the game in first-person as a largely silent individual who only speaks when prompted to with a dialogue option. Other than your supernatural sight, you move through the world simply--running, crouching, jumping. In certain locations, you can open your sight to see what a Tidewalker--who, like your Tidewalker, is also controlled by another human player--did there, allowing you to lean on the knowledge you glean to better move through the world. A bouncer who welcomed in a Tidewalker the previous day will allow you inside the club if you also offer up to them the same alias, for example, and seeing a Tidewalker hide some ozen in a grate lets you then nab it for yourself.

These Tidewalkers that you see are always players who went through the level that you're currently on prior to you. Between each level, you're always asked which path you want to go to next, which puts you on the path behind a specific player. You can choose to follow that player all the way through to the end (assuming they have beaten the game), or choose to go in a different direction between levels to follow in the footsteps of another player. Whenever you make this choice to follow a player, you get a brief description of how they acted in that particular level. One player may have prioritized animals and nature in this increasingly plastic-filled world, while another could have opted to prioritize their own survival. Following a player who embodies your playstyle is obviously ideal, but sometimes you don't have that choice and simply must take the best option of those available to you.

Another player's choices can inform how the world reacts to you as well. A Tidewalker who was kind to citizens will create a welcoming atmosphere for you, while a more self-serving Tidewalker will cause NPCs to not want to help you without a bribe or favor on your part.

Community is the main throughline of Tides of Tomorrow. The game's story entices you to care about the community of characters you meet through character-driven storylines and relationship trackers, while its main feature invites you to care about your fellow Tidewalkers by bombarding you with messaging of how other players are affecting your playthrough and how your choices are subsequently impacting the playthroughs of players who follow you.

Between those two communities, the game better accomplishes making you care about the players both ahead and behind you on your journey, and it's better for it, as that's the aspect that differentiates Tides of Tomorrow from other single-player role-playing games. Bonding with an internet stranger through gameplay isn't novel--Dark Souls lets players help or hinder others with cryptic messages and invasions, for example, and Pokemon Go seemingly created world peace for one magical summer of pocket-monster catching--but that does nothing to diminish the emotional draw of Tides of Tomorrow.

I feel genuine appreciation when I'm scouring for enough scrap to pay for something, and NPCs around me help me out because the player I'm following made sure to treat them with respect. I'm shocked when I discover the body of a character I'll never get to meet because the player I'm following stole from them, leaving the character too poor to afford the medicine they needed to survive. And I'm frustrated when a stealth mission is filled with extra guards and more security because the player I'm following angered the kingpin in charge of the area, and so he's put his entire fortress on high alert for future Tidewalkers.

These emotional responses are driven by the knowledge that my lucky breaks and ill fortunes are primarily driven by real people out there. The kindness I've been shown came from someone out there being selfless when they didn't have to be, and the moments of irritation and struggle have primarily been the byproduct of another person's selfishness, desperation, or mistake. Given the desperate struggle your character is thrown into from the jump, it would be so easy to be a self-serving asshole, but the generosity of other players is a strong incentive to pay that kindness forward to any players that may be following in your footsteps.

Tides of Tomorrow doesn't tell you whether your actions have directly helped anyone--it's entirely possible that no one will follow your trail, and the consideration you've shown will ultimately be for nothing--but the encouragement to just be kind is there all the same. It felt good just doing all I could to help. Depending on the type of person you are, this might also add quite a bit of tension to each choice--if you're like me, the idea of making a mistake and royally screwing over another player might inject a level of pressure into every dialogue choice that you're not used to.

This same emotional draw doesn't quite come through with the main NPC characters. While I felt pity for the cute, trouble-making platinum-blonde rebel suffering from an illness slowly transforming her into plastic, and disgust for the tyrant keeping valuable resources from the populace, these characters felt largely like archetype tropes solely there to move me along through a by-the-numbers story of survivors in an apocalypse banding together to rise up against the cartoonishly evil villain. Tides of Tomorrow's story isn't bad, and its characters aren't awful, but it's not the strongest narrative backdrop.

The story and characters are also weakened by how Tides of Tomorrow works. Pretty much every part of the story is dependent on the actions and choices of the players who went through that particular chapter before you. A town loves you because another Tidewalker was kind, for instance, not because you've been kind to other characters leading up to that point. This can create bizarre fluctuations in an NPC's treatment of you, where you may have sided against them in an earlier argument or failed to do what they asked in an early mission, but they can still think you're amazing when you speak to them later because you choose to be on the path of a player who helped them out.

It's a bizarre disconnect that lessens the sense of agency that you have in your own choices. If anything, Tides of Tomorrow's story feels less like something that you're affecting and more like a linear tale that others have dictated for you, and then your responses to that story have a major impact on anyone who might be following your path.

Even if I wasn't always the biggest fan of the characters, I did love Tides of Tomorrow's world. The game has a charming, yet striking aesthetic. Visually, it has an almost cartoony vibe that's bright and vibrant, creating these sharp contrasts between the natural and manufactured, whether that's piles of trash floating in ocean water or plastic veins permeating human skin. That's accompanied by a soundtrack that leans into this almost beat-heavy funk during especially tense or action-heavy scenes. Developer Digixart's previous title, Road 96, was one of my favorite adventure games of 2021 primarily because of its stellar atmosphere, and it's awesome to see the studio devote that same level of care again, but for a very different game.

While I don't think Tides of Tomorrow rises to the same narrative highs as Road 96, its primary incentive is a great draw. It's a little weird to want to stalk other players through a digital world, watching and listening to their every move in order to better your own lot in life, but it's a compelling enough gameplay loop that I overlooked the shortcomings in the game's story and non-player characters. And even if I don't plan on playing the game again, it warms my heart to know that my digital ghost is now out there, potentially guiding other Tidewalkers that may need a little help.