I’m not claiming this title was made by GenAI. I’m saying something much more insulting: that the human artists who made it have no talent.
She's been the co-founder and major backer of Annapurna for a decade.
She's not a developer, she's a publisher, and this game is one of the tons of games Annapurna has put out over a decade.
I get that Annapurna is a lightning rod of politics due to ellison and is increasingly under scrutiny for many debates but they are a mainstay of the industry, hardly a blow in, and like it or not, a lot of the games industry and media really like these kinda of artistic pieces, with this being yet another instance of the age old walking simulator debate.
It should be judged on its own merits. Not it's Annapurna link and it's not a shock to see it come up in an artsy Apple Mac hipster circle.
It's not even in the top 5000, because it is objectively terrible. People would rather play the original Life is Strange one more time (despite a remaster being out), than play this game.
At some point you really have to start getting suspicious why it keeps coming up.
The number of reviews vs. number of actual players online doesn't make sense when compared to peers in its genre either. It has a similar number of reviews as Life is Strange Remastered, but it loses to the 4 years old re-release of an 11 years old story-based game by an order of magnitude. For a genre that that has extremely top-heavy player count charts this doesn't make sense.
Funnily enough Life is Strange Remastered had a bit of a revival around that game's release, probably because people decided they'd rather play LiS.
Entertainment media entertaining nobody is just objectively bad at its job and the blatant astroturfing and nepo-baby-pampering adds an unsavory dimension to it.
It is a 3 hour long game with 4k or so reviews.
Life is strange original has 70K reviews and is 14 hours long.
The remaster has 4000+ reviews and again, is 14 hours long. These games are also all time favourites that fans do replay from time to time. If has more replayability than mixtape, despite it being fairly linear.
A 3 hour one time only game does not retain players on the charts like a game that takes multiple play sessions to finish. Or a game like "tennis elbow" which has far lower max concurrent (like, nowhere near the concurrent max mixtape has) but is a sim game that if it's your jam you will repeatedly come back to.
Its very simple - it's not a game for you, and you have to understand that these types of games absolutely have their niche fandoms who love this kind of stuff.
There is no conspiracy here, artsy titles like this have always, across all mediums, got a disproportional critical appreciation vs more traditional titles.
It's just the same old story. Yes people do like these games. No they are not the majority. Yes you can just ignore it, no it's not a conspiracy.
And the player numbers still don't make sense. If you want to compare to a game from the same publisher that was actually good, look at "What Remains of Edith Finch". Released a decade ago, still 4x Mixtapes's player count, roughly the same length, but somehow no 20 video game magazines falling over themselves to give it 10/10 ratings.
You can slap as many 10/10 ratings and astroturfed reviews on it as you want, but I've played too many of these games to not recognize this as below average in its weight class (i.e. price). It's maybe a 6/10, carried by its presentation and vibe, which are okay if you're in the mood for it. And to give it that kind of score I'm looking past its most cringe-inducing moments, immature writing, and bland story - which is being extremely charitable considering it's a game that should be carried by its writing, but isn't.
The only way you can enjoy that game is if you haven't been spoiled by better titles yet - because you've probably not played many narrative-based titles, or maybe not played many video games at all. If it's one of the only video games you've ever played, that fact alone would've made it somewhat exciting. The first time you've had cotton candy it was great as well, but now that you have more developed taste, you probably won't consider it haute cuisine.
I'm sure there's literally dozens of people who actually enjoyed it, and good for them, but we need to have some standards if we're to have any at all. And "well someone out there ought to like it" is not an argument.
tl;dr: If this game is truly one of the best games of all time - as reviews would have you believe - then we need to recalibrate the scale. There are hundreds of games in its genres one should pick up before Mixtape. It only stands out for being pretty.
Similar studios like Telltale also ran out of funding, even with recognizable IP like The Walking Dead at their disposal. Just reading the economic tea leaves, Mixtape is the type of oddity that does direct some scrutiny towards the publisher that pushed for it.