Mixtape’s Stacey Rockford is unlikable for a reason

There’s a lot to like about Mixtape. Beethoven & Dinosaur’s narrative adventure is the definition of a crowd-pleaser thanks to its wealth of excellent music, its ‘90s nostalgia, and a bevy of wacky minigames that always find a way to delight you. There’s only one thing that really harshes Mixtape’s mellow vibe: its protagonist, Stacey Rockford.

Since Mixtape’s launch on May 7, Rockford has become something of a polarizing figure among players. The character is a teenage music snob who is desperate to break out of her small town, even if it means leaving her friends behind. While some players find her relatable, others detest her. A middling review from Forbes, for instance, ripped into the “strangely unlikable” Rockford.

“She doesn’t even feel like a real character, and has few redeeming qualities,” the review reads. “She expresses a weird degree of ‘ownership’ among her friends, including hating a girl her friend Cassandra is friendly with, and comes off as intensely selfish through the whole story.”

Tassi is correct. Rockford is a selfish snob who condescends to everyone she meets — including the player. She’s not terribly sensitive about her friends’ personal lives and seems more interested in forcing them to listen to her favorite songs than hearing what they have to say. Though not quite the monster that Saros’ Arjun Devraj is, “unlikable” is a fair descriptor. But here’s the thing: that’s the point. Through Rockford’s sullen demeanor, Mixtape reminds players that they don’t need to throw out the things they love just to escape something they don’t. That’s how meaningful memories get reduced to hollow nostalgia.

Mixtape follows a trio of teens living in Blue Moon Lagoon, a quiet suburban town that evokes America’s Pacific Northwest. Stacey is the de facto leader of that clique. Her sidekicks are Van Slater, a chilled-out skater who seems destined to become a stoner townie, and Cassandra Morino, a black-haired ball of simmering rebellion. I use the word “sidekick” here because that’s how Rockford treats them. She presents herself as the main character — not just of Mixtape, but of Blue Moon Lagoon, period. The story is told from her fourth wall-breaking perspective, which means that players are her captive audience as she embellishes mundane teenage stories and overexplains music history.

If you find it cloying, imagine how Slater and Cassandra feel. The character dynamics are made clear from the jump, following an opening skateboarding sequence set to “That’s Good” by Devo. In a monologue delivered straight to the camera rather than to the friends staged around her, Rockford sets up the game you’re about to play: “This playlist, the one you’ll be hearing today, is a countdown to my last night in Blue Moon Lagoon.” Rockford has created a soundtrack to her own escape, and she has decreed that her friends will spend the day listening to it before she ships off to pursue her dream of becoming a music supervisor for film.

An immediate tension between Rockford and her friends sprouts up. “You’re still going through with this?” Cassandra asks after Rockford’s proud declaration of intent. Rockford ignores the glum tone in Cassandra’s voice and proceeds to explain that she’s all in. Her plan is to go to New York City and hand a mixtape to Bella Deltone, a famous music supervisor who Rockford idolizes. Cassandra is skeptical of the plan. Does Rockford really think she’s going to hand a mix of random music from the past three decades to a famous soundtrack curator and instantly get a job? Rockford has no doubt: “My mixtapes bend others to my will.” In the first eight minutes of the game, Rockford tells you who she is and how she views everyone else.

She’s not much kinder from there. When Cassandra mentions how a smart girl in their high school class didn’t get into any of the colleges she applied to, Rockford doesn’t offer much in the way of empathy. “Well, at least she’s interesting now,” she says. “It was all too easy for her.”

Several conversations between minigames involve Rockford insulting other teenagers, whether it’s because they suggested Devo is a one-hit wonder (“Roxy’s wrong and her life has no meaning”) or just because she doesn’t like their whole vibe (“I hate Jenny fucking Goodspeed”). None of it is out of line for an angsty teen, but it establishes that Rockford believes that anyone in Blue Moon Lagoon that isn’t her is a loser.

Image: Beethoven & Dinosaur/Annapurna Interactive

Slater and Cassandra are the exceptions, but even then, that’s only because they have fallen in line. A main point of drama comes when Cassandra strikes up a friendship with Jenny, an outsider to the clique who has not received Rockford’s blessing. There’s a simmering tension throughout the story as Rockford wants to dictate everything about her friends: what they listen to, who they hang out with, even the exact time they arrive at a party. Rockford’s life is a movie, and she demands that her friends follow the script.

It all comes to a head in a heated exchange full of loaded barbs, where Rockford confronts Cassandra about her friendship with Jenny. Cassandra compares Rockford to her father, a hyper-protective cop who’s stifling her freedom. Rockford protests and says that she’s doing all of this — the mixtape, the curated trip down memory lane — for Cassandra and Slater. Cassandra hits her breaking point.

Cassandra: “Don’t act like you want us all together. All you talk about is leaving.”

Rockford: “I… I don’t mean you guys.”

Cassandra: “All you do is hang out with us. What else could it mean?”

Cassandra storms off with Jenny as Rockford’s cool demeanor drops. “Roads” by Portishead begins to play in one of Mixtape’s most striking needle drops. “I got nobody on my side and surely that ain’t right,” Beth Gibbons croons as Rockford comes to terms with the fact that she’s not just ditching Blue Moon Lagoon. She’ll be leaving her friends in the dust when she does — especially Slater, a puppy dog of a pal who spends the story quietly realizing he’s bound to become a burnout as Rockford boasts about her impending fame.

The petty jokes and condescending posturing finally fall away. Who is Rockford going to be without her friends? All of the fond memories she relives through the story revolve around them: dicking around with Slater in a photobooth, cheering Cassandra up by giving her a cool lighter, making Slurpee abominations together. All of her mixtapes do too. She’s not making them for herself, after all; it’s a love language. They’re carefully curated for the people she cares about. Who will she make mixes for when Slater isn’t around anymore? It’s the one thing she didn’t factor into her airtight escape plan.

Some of the stronger criticism levied against Mixtape is that it weaponizes empty nostalgia to win players over. There’s validity to that; the overly romanticized ‘90s landscape, full of cool music that will make any Gen Xer’s ears perk up, can sometimes come off as disingenuous. It’s a sanitized vision of the past built for people who sit around talking about how much cooler and freer the ‘90s were, a sometimes conservative whitewashing that ignores the political unrest of the era. But nostalgia also serves a function within the story, because Rockford resists the present. She is rarely in the moment with her friends, always using a hangout as an excuse to prattle on about ‘70s music or ‘80s movies. She escapes into memories of bygone teenage antics. All of Mixtape’s low-hanging nostalgia tries to drag its players into that mindset too, drawing on the familiar sights and sounds of days gone by.

That nostalgia isn’t a gift; it’s a crutch. In a telling flashback early on, Cassandra asks Rockford why she always has a pair of headphones on. Rockford says that it’s her way to combat what she has dubbed The Panic. “Time feels like it’s drifting by,” she says, trying to put words to an abstract feeling. “I feel like I’m wasting something.” It’s not about blocking out a bad feeling; Rockford believes that a song can “hold you in the moment.” She desperately needs that, because left to her own devices, Rockford is terrified about rushing through life and not letting those moments slip through the cracks.

Image: Beethoven & Dinosaur/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon

Mixtape occasionally plays with that in its splashes of interactivity. While a few of its minigames have scripted endpoints, a handful of them give players some agency. You can bail out of Rockford’s first kiss quickly, missing a Steam achievement awarded if you smooch for 60 seconds. One of the game’s best scenes, where Rockford skips rocks on a lake, ends when you decide you’ve had enough. You can similarly rush through a memory of the gang breaking into a dinosaur park, barely taking any photos of the moment as you’re meant to. If you’re too impatient, time has a way of slipping away from you during Mixtape’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it runtime.

It all builds up to a quietly gutting scene where Rockford’s worst fears come to a head. Slater walks Rockford to her car at the end of the night, with neither sure of what to say to encapsulate their time together. Slater eventually breaks the silence to give Rockford a copy of his newly-recorded album; something she’ll no doubt listen to one day to fend off The Panic. She sheds a tear, but it’s hard to tell if she’s appreciative of the gesture or devastated by it. Is this all that she’ll have of a friendship that she lost track of as time slipped by? A cassette tape that she’ll find in a drawer 20 years from now and wax nostalgic about?

Slater grabs Rockford’s hands and says goodbye. In one final moment of interactivity, players once again are in control of when the scene ends. A prompt says to hold down a button to keep grasping Slater’s hand. After a moment, the prompt changes to “Don’t let go,” until the “don’t” fades away. After giving you the option to rush out of memories time and time again, Mixtape presents you with one moment Rockford wishes she could stay in forever. She can’t. The player will release the button eventually and the two will separate. The moment draws to a close, just as Rockford feared it would. As Slater walks away, she instinctively lifts her headphones to put them on. It’s her last line of defense against The Panic. She hesitates for a moment, and then lets them fall back to their resting position. Finally, she takes in the present moment, as somber as it is, rather than escaping into the past once more.

Yes, Stacey Rockford is unlikable. She’s selfish, judgmental, and condescending — a lot of teenagers are. She does not leave Mixtape without confronting that and, hopefully, learning from it. Maybe we can too.