by David Rodriguez
Wax Heads gets the award for being the game I can be my absolute self with. As mentioned in my demo preview article for this game, I’ve been writing about music for almost a decade, poring over so many bands and albums to find connections between them and myself, distilling the art down to how they choose to express human conditions and existence. I likely have around 1,000 total articles written about music by now at a few different corners of the internet, a monolithic number — especially in contrast to my budding journey writing about games here. This is where they both collide. It’s the kind of gaming project I’d love to have worked on myself as a writer.
If nothing else, Wax Heads deserves recognition for that, as a game that combined my two loves so earnestly and one that I know fellow heads will take to so well despite some technical and polish snafus. If you grew up listening to the radio, pining to hear your favorite song or band, if you used your precious allowance to buy a CD and wore the label off that shit with how much you played it over the years, or if you ever ventured out into the infinity of the internet in search of something weird that hardly anyone else knew about, this game is for you.
Developed by the duo Rothio Tome and Murray Somerwolff under the name Patattie Games, Wax Heads is mercifully easy to explain and encapsulate as a game. You’re the new kid working at a local record store somewhere in England. It’s your job to make customers happy with record recommendations, using deduction and growing knowledge of the game’s lovingly crafted world to make the right decisions. You engage with your coworkers and do other little odd jobs both in and out of the store in service to the greater community you and it are a part of. It’s often funny, acutely touching, and a decent challenge to make the right call or suffer a dreaded “sad” rating on your album recommendation. I don’t want to brag or anything, but I was putting up numbers with my “rad” rankings.
The beauty of it is you don’t have to like or know much about music to enjoy this game. My knowledge of certain micro-genres or regional sounds did little to help, but it still allowed for an immense connection. I can see puzzle fans enjoying the deduction and clue-hunting aspects of Wax Heads on their own, with each album recommendation being its own low-stakes mystery. Visual novel fans could get on well with it for the plot and character growth that unfold during gameplay. Just be able to read well (if you’re reading this, then you win), and Wax Heads may have something at its core that moves you.
Digging into the themes and narrative execution of Wax Heads requires a lot more room to adequately delve into, and it is where most of the greatness and justification of my rating comes in. I’m clearly biased, but an album recommendation is a supremely important, often intimate act, even if you’re doing it with yourself. You’re trying to find an album for you or someone else that can soundtrack a moment, provide a friendly and empathetic hand to interlock with the listener’s, or just empower you to do the things you must do. For some, music is the life force through which we operate. You get that sense of importance through the interactions baked into Wax Heads.
Repeater Records, the store where 90% of the game takes place, is itself a character with a bit of an arc, an establishment of great import nestled in the nameless town it’s located in. You have frequent flyers as customers, returning in search of the next record that could alter their lives or simply make it more bearable. Some are more materialistic about it, building collections for its own sake or buying an artist’s new record to support them as a turbo fan. Regardless, the actuation of that internal motivation means something to that person. It’s a level of fulfillment that can’t be achieved elsewhere or by any other means.
It’s almost a ritualistic or religious experience. Though generally secular in its specificity, intense music enjoyment marks itself by routines: carefully unsleeving vinyl and placing it on your turntable, flipping the LP once that side has elapsed, learning the words in the music to chant/sing/yell as motivation to the self. The same goes for the music lovers who prefer their faves enshrined on cassette tape, CDs, or enjoy the convenience of streaming. Hell, returning to an old favorite album or song for nostalgia’s sake or a pick-me-up is akin to recommitting to mind a verse of scripture to carry you through tribulation.
In that regard, your routine as the player is part of the point. You come into the shop when you’re scheduled to work, you talk with your coworkers for the day, each with their own problems and personalities. Paul is a sweetie, a Black gay man with a penchant for activism who works multiple jobs and creates zines to inform others. Abi is a friend we could all use in our corner, supporting her friends’ band Girl Junk by marketing for them, trying to get them booked for gigs at venues, and generally supporting them in any way they can. Hank is an older, tender-hearted punk with multiple bands and an anxiety disorder that often gets in the way of enjoying performing or confronting others about issues.
Each day, you open the store after talking with your new pals and help people with their needs. Retail work is far from glamorous, and self-importance can be a scourge, but Wax Heads makes your station feel as though it’s an integral part of the community — because it is.
Many games purport to be “for the people” through the execution and interpretation of different themes or foster an ethos of togetherness one way or another, but Wax Heads is mightily on the nose with it. Here you are in a diverse community — interacting with different races, ages, and genders — trying to understand what they want. Some simple, some more complex. A man will walk in with their arms full of puppies named by his boyfriend after the members of a popular band. If you were paying attention when that information was divulged earlier on, you know just what to do when asked to pick out an album so it can be gifted to said boyfriend. You help set up a woman with another by passing the first one’s number to the second when you ring them up, because she was too shy to do it herself. Later on, they come into Repeater Records together on a date (and later break up, then get back together). Some just want the cheapest record you got, or the oldest one by a given band. No matter what, there’s an elation I felt with each positive reaction to a recommendation.
The world of Wax Heads is lovingly colored in, literally and figuratively. The art is bold and unique, informed by Bryan Lee O’Malley’s work on Scott Pilgrim media and, to me, old expressive cartoons like Doug. You have a phone that has different apps on it, one to view “Walking the Cow,” which is the Wax Heads universe’s sardonic, stuffy, opinionated music blog. Another is Phonogram, a social media platform where you can see the fruits of your recommendations with people posting themselves listening to the album you chose and how it affected them otherwise, or get hints about future customers. Others are more directly functional, such as an app to track character dialogue, like many RPGs do, a stats screen for the numbers nerds out there, and a jukebox app to change the 100% original music playing in the background.
Oh man, the music. You can’t expect me to be me and not talk about it at length, but to keep things more concise, it’s all great. The bands are an invention of the game’s composer, Gina Loughlin, as are all the albums and their art that you see throughout the game by the artists, but the music is very real. It’s impressive the variation that this one composer pulled off, stretching her musical muscles to create glittery pop, driving post-punk, wistful ’80s rock, liminal ambient, churning metal, stream-of-consciousness rap (with vocals by Strange Scaffold head Xalavier Nelson, Jr!), and snappy electronica. It all fills in the world so well.
Wax Heads is its own contained musical world for the most part. Nothing is licensed here, save for maybe the Post Void game theme, which fits into the above. A character quotes blues laureate Tom Waits and noise rock legend Kim Gordon, and another name drops David Lynch while midway through a psychedelics trip, among a few other things, rare tethers to our reality that feel beautifully ephemeral more than anything else. Loughlin also shouts out one of my favorite albums of all time, Peripheral Vision by Turnover, before the credits where all the primary people involved with making the game recommend three albums, making it a hell of a cool full-circle moment. I was even listening to Peripheral Vision between play sessions of Wax Heads, which made the moment all the more surreal!
One other larger real-world tie is the game’s sociopolitical slant. Unabashedly, Wax Heads has caustic but collected words for the enshittification of all things: music by way of generative AI, landlords and the gentrification of neighborhoods, corporate takeovers, and capitalism’s greater rotted lurch over all our lives. Messaging of mutual aid and collective action, books of socialism and unions, and abstract designs depicting the richest 1% of the world under a guillotine’s blade in Repeater Records itself show the devs know exactly what kind of points they wanted to convey, and it’s punk as fuck.
There’s also an uncompromising inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters, which is honestly quite refreshing as someone under that umbrella and a fierce ally otherwise. Many characters are queer and reference being in relationships with someone of the same gender, and quite a few are transgender and have nonbinary pronouns listed in your in-game phone’s visitors app. This is a mere reflection of our own world — you know several queer people in your life, even if you don’t think you do.
I did have some issues while playing Wax Heads. Designing show flyers using stickers did not work on controller while playing on Xbox Series S. The instructions say to use the right stick to move the cursor to a desired sticker, when it was really the left stick (the whole game does this, actually), and to use the A button to select a sticker and place it. I hit A on a sticker I wanted to use; it highlights, but I could not place it on the flyer paper. I tried holding A and dragging a sticker to the paper, I tried single taps, double taps, but nothing worked. I even reset the game to see if that would fix it, only to see that I couldn’t even highlight stickers with A anymore on the second go. Luckily, I wasn’t barred from continuing the game because of this, and it was humorous to see other characters react in awe at a blank page, but I still wanted to interact with it after doing so in the demo! PC fared much better here, no issues.
The game also inexplicably froze on console while I was in the middle of getting a good read on a customer wearing a mascot uniform and his helpful daughter trying to mediate between us. These types of issues are to be expected, especially early on, but hopefully the game can be ironed out a bit more with post-launch patches.
I also wish there was less linearity in the conversations with your peers. They’re well-written and interesting characters from what you see, but you don’t get to explore much of that on your own. Even when you’re given a dialogue choice between two things, it’s an illusion because they both lead to the same path after an initial reaction to whichever one you picked. Not every game needs to be Mass Effect or Disco Elysium, but I would have liked the option, literally, to explore that with how much personality is packed into this game. In short, I wanted more. The writing often has some grammatical, case, and punctuation inconsistencies that would irritate a more discerning person as well. The most offensive thing for me is that they spell “riot grrrl” normally as “riot girl,” and that just doesn’t feel right!
All of that isn’t enough to sour the experience much. Things have workarounds, games are hard to make, especially for primarily two people. Wax Heads still understood me on a level that another game really hasn’t in the 30 years I’ve been playing them. While I can’t confidently purport that this is the first game of its kind to utilize music, community, and connection in this exact fashion, it is, confidently, the first game of this type I’ve played. As such, it’s one that is going to stick with me for a long time.
Wax Heads represents a unifying beauty and purpose I’ve never seen in a game before. If it exists elsewhere, please guide me to it; for now, this game deserves its moment. I laughed (a lot), I cried (a bit), I smiled (endlessly). It feels like a game made for me, but not only me. This is for the punks, heshers, retail workers, playlist makers, artists, lovers, fighters, queers, stanners, jammers, helpers, punters, stoners, dreamers, even the scalpers, scumbags that you are. This game deserves the world because it is, at its best, a laborious, meaningful reflection of our own, an idealized near future that does right by the people and uplifts the community.
Wax Heads
