It’s hard for any indie game to break into consideration for Game of the Year at The Game Awards. The jury typically favors big productions; we know this. Prior to 2025, no more than one indie game at a time had earned a nomination. But last year scrambled the narrative. Half of the six nominees for Game of the Year were also nominated for Best Independent Game: Hades 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and eventual winner Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Belatedly, perhaps, The Game Awards’ indie era began.
That ought to make things much easier for a game like Mixtape to break through. On paper — and indeed, when you play it — Beethoven & Dinosaur’s game seems like a solid candidate, if not exactly a lock, for a nomination. It’s true that not many short, pure narrative games have made the cut before. But it does have the handsome production values and cinematic style that the jury loves. It has a focus on story and performance. It’s got a memorable gimmick (the mixtape itself, a carefully curated licensed soundtrack). Yet it still feels bespoke and handmade, so jury members can feel good about rooting for it. Perhaps the game Mixtape has most in common with is the lush cat adventure Stray, also published by Annapurna Interactive, which was nominated for GOTY in 2022.
You can see Mixtape as a kind of inversion of Clair Obscur. If Sandfall Interactive’s game is about an indie studio taking on the AAA industry at its own game and crafting a lavish epic, Beethoven & Dinosaur’s is about taking the techniques and resources of blockbuster gaming and applying them to something much smaller-scale and more personal.
After Mixtape‘s review embargo lifted, things still looked good for a hot minute. The critics weren’t unanimous, but there were a number of raves — including a high-profile 10/10 from IGN — and even reviewers with more mixed feelings seemed to have a personal connection to the material. But then people started playing the game and talking about it online. All hell broke loose.
The Mixtape discourse is too hare-brained and poisoned by trolls, bizarre conspiracy theories, and bad-faith arguments to bother going into detail. I would bet that the vast majority of critics and jury members, even those who don’t love the game, would reject its premises outright. So it won’t affect Mixtape‘s chances of a GOTY nomination — which are modest, but not negligible — right? Well… to be honest, it probably will.
Beneath all the noise, Mixtape‘s detractors are fundamentally leveling two charges against it. The first is that it’s not really a game: It has no fail states, and your controller inputs only matter so much in some sections. The second is that it’s a poser: It gets some of its nostalgic detail wrong (that’s not how you rewind a cassette tape!), the characters are grating, it’s a well-financed corporate product masquerading as an indie game. Some of these arguments are sillier than others; it’s not like Clair Obscur didn’t have a big budget and publisher funding, too. But together they amount to a single accusation: Mixtape is inauthentic. It’s not a real one.
Because of the kind of game it is, and because of some choices the developers made (I still think they should have set it in their native Australia), inauthenticity is a hard label for Mixtape to brush off, however unfair that might be. And it’s the reputational kiss of death for an indie game. Hades 2, Silksong, and Clair Obscur could not be more authentic if they tried. They’re passion projects born of a deep love of highly specific video game genres. And, by the way, they’re all pretty hardcore, too. They’re a rebuke to gaming’s soft middle. This might not be what The Game Awards jury wants from every game, but it’s definitely what the jury wants from indie games.
Even if jury members want to support Mixtape, it’s hard for them to feel good about it when doing so raises the specter of so many tedious, decades-old arguments about what a real video game or a real indie game should look like. Like it or not, Mixtape is an ideological battleground now. That could work in its favor, if critics decide to rally around it. But my guess is that the well is poisoned now, and the jury will find a less compromised cause with a purer narrative — just like Clair Obscur‘s — to rally around.
There’s Oscar bait, but where’s the GOTY bait?
And do we really want it?
