It's not objectively terrible. It's subjective - entirely.

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.

I don't buy it. I'm sorry but I know shit when I play it.

And the player retention 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, again 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.

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 titles like it, or maybe not played many video games at all.

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.