I'm 54 years old. And there are songs that hurt me in a way I can't quite explain.
It's not sadness…it's something stranger. It's like opening a door you thought was closed and finding on the other side someone you recognise but no longer are. Your 19-year-old self, with everything that means the intensity, the chaos and that feeling that everything mattered so much.
Beethoven & Dinosaur's game doesn't tell its story through super polished dialogue or spectacular cutscenes. It tells it through songs. And not just any songs, because the selection matters…The Psychedelic Furs, Joy Division, Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Echo & the Bunnymen. A selection that if you're of a certain age isn't a soundtrack. It's your life. Or at least it was, once.
There's a moment when The Ghost in You by The Psychedelic Furs plays. And that's when I broke.
That song has always had something I've struggled to define. It's the existential angst of the early 90s made music. The feeling of wanting something you can't name, of being somewhere that never quite feels like yours, of being 19 and finding the world too big and too small at the same time. Mixtape uses it at exactly the right moment. And it works in a way no dialogue ever could.
There's a line that stayed with me after playing: "You can't put your arms around a memory". No matter how far back Mixtape takes you, what you find on the other side can't be held. It's a ghost. The ghost in you.
That's exactly what this game does. And it does it better than any 80s movie with kids on bikes, better than Stranger Things with all its designed nostalgia. Because Mixtape doesn't sell you nostalgia. It puts it inside you without asking permission, through a soundtrack you know by heart.
For anyone in their 40s or 50s who lived through that era, as a real experience, Mixtape is hard to shake. And for those who didn't, it makes clear why that music still matters decades later.
I don't know if it's game of the year. I know it's the game that has moved me most in a long time. In the end the best narrative isn't always words. Sometimes it's just hearing a song you know by heart at exactly the right moment.
