When I first went to Singapore for a holiday, I found a record store near my hotel that had a dedicated metal section. Until then, I had only seen a handful of metal albums in rock sections, so having a whole shelf for just metal with multiple Record Store Day exclusives was quite something. I ended up grabbing some rare Blind Guardian and Sepultura albums that day. I went back a few times during the week and appreciated the owner helping me out by even bringing out a special color variant of an album I wanted. I’ve visited that same store every single time I visit Singapore, even if just to see how the owner is doing. I feel like moments like these aren’t going to happen much anymore with very few dedicated vinyl stores left, but I won’t forget moments like that or when a salesperson in a music store sold me Slipknot’s IOWA when I was a kid, despite the Parental Advisory warning.
Wax Heads feels like a game developed and designed specifically for people like me, but I get to (sort of) experience the other side of those moments now. As a narrative-driven conversational puzzle experience, Wax Heads has you join an indie record store called Repeater Records. Repeater Records has its own issues, but your job initially is to just interact with the many customers, learn about them, and get accustomed to understanding the store itself.
In a lot of ways, Wax Heads feels like another riff on VA-11 Hall-A’s gameplay loop, but it is closer to Coffee Talk than the former. Each customer has their own requests and stories, and your job is to explore the store to find which album they want, or even recommend something. All of this is accompanied by an overarching story taking place day by day.
The puzzles here aren’t really anything difficult, and with a handful of records available at any given time, there isn’t much of a chance of failure, but you aren’t coming to Wax Heads for puzzles. You’re here to learn about indie bands, some family drama, and also stare at sublime hand-drawn art in the store and across all the unique record sleeves included.
When I first saw Wax Heads revealed in a showcase over a year ago, I knew I’d want to play it, but I didn’t expect it to wow me as much as it did. I started looking forward to seeing some customers return for more purchases, to learn more about their lives, or even just get them to learn about an artist (fictional in-game) they might like.
Wax Heads also doesn’t try to hide its light core gameplay loop behind tacked-on time-wasting sections like some other adventure games do, thankfully. I love good point-and-click games with incredible puzzles like the Golden Idol series, but I also enjoy just relaxing and experiencing a story through basic interactions.
As you get deeper into the story, the customers become more vague with their requests or reference a specific song or phrase. This is when I fell in love with Wax Heads. The developers care about the vinyl format and music in general. I appreciate that you have to flip a sleeve over or even look at the label on the album to understand what some customers want.
Visually, I knew Wax Heads would hit hard based on its initial trailer, but there are so many small nods to things you don’t really see in music stores anymore. Even minor details like a coffee mug and French press next to it on the counter, and the t-shirts or inner sleeves of an album you might not even need to sell in the story, made me appreciate how much the team cares about music and record store culture.
I expected Wax Heads to have a ton of licensed music, but it has over an hour of original music. This is one of those games that made me refresh Steam, hoping for the soundtrack to release alongside the game so I could buy it immediately. I wasn’t familiar with Gina Loughlin before Wax Heads, but she’s definitely someone I can’t wait to hear from next. The soundtrack has quite a lot of variety, but the tracks still sound like indie bands (in a good way) to perfectly complement the fictional albums in Wax Heads.
I had access to Wax Heads on Steam and Switch. The PC version is great, but playing the Switch version on Switch 2 in handheld mode was lovely. You can use the touch screen and buttons to progress. One thing to note is that you should play it without handheld boost mode since it already runs at 1080p handheld, and boost mode only disables the touchscreen. The only technical issue I ran into is that some of the menus or points of interest in the record store took a few seconds to load, instead of being instant like everything else. Hopefully, this can be addressed in an update.
Wax Heads is one of my favorite narrative-driven puzzle games in years. I hope the developer adds in an endless mode so I can just boot Wax Heads up and spend more time in the world. It makes me wish some of the bands in-game were real, but at least I can keep listening to the soundtrack and think of my time in Repeater Records.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch
Review Copy Provided by Curve Digital
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