You kids today have things so easy, with your music streaming platforms that pay artists a pittance. Back in my day, if we wanted to acquire music through the Internet, we had to buy songs in a proprietary format on iTunes. Or, more practically, download them through one of those sketchy sites Mr. Yankovic sang about and hope we were actually downloading a good-quality version of the song we wanted rather than a computer virus and/or a loop of an infamous Bill Clinton sound bite. I bet the concept of my review subject today will blow your minds, whippersnappers!

Wax Heads, developed by Patattie Games and published by Curve Games, is a narrative-focused game in which you play as the newest employee at a record store called Repeater Records. From the moment you start your new job, you can sense that something is amiss, but it’ll be some time before you can identify what that is. Repeater Records is owned by Morgan Macintyre, who used to be in a massively popular band with her sister, Willow, decades before Wax Heads takes place. The two publicly fell out, and the consequences of that are only just coming to a head.

Willow Macintyre left the band to become a solo act and took another of the band members, who happened to be Morgan’s childhood sweetheart, with her. Morgan never emotionally recovered from that, and she’s made a point of staying out of the public eye ever since. It’s not clear if anyone outside of the employees of Repeater Records even knows she owns the store. Starting out, you only know two things for sure: Repeater Records doesn’t stock any of Willow Macintyre’s albums, and your job is to run the cash register, assist customers, and not ask too many uncomfortable questions.

The core gameplay loop of Wax Heads involves you finding just the right record to satisfy whatever each customer is looking for. The main catch with that is that very few customers you’ll encounter actually know exactly what they want. They might be looking for a recommendation within a specific genre of music, for example. Or, more commonly, they might think they know what they want, but it turns out the information they have isn’t entirely accurate. You’ll need to use the information available to you about the records your store has in stock to find exactly what each customer wants.

You’ll usually do that by reading the backs of each album the store currently has in stock, as well as any additional material (such as press releases) attached to each record. This will give you a general idea of what genre each record is and if any notable events surrounded its release, like the departure and/or death of any band members. Thankfully, you don’t run the risk of any customers getting impatient and leaving if you take too long to find a record for them. Wax Heads also gives you multiple attempts to find exactly what each customer wants.

If you show them an album that’s not what they have in mind, they’ll usually say something like, “That’s close to what I want, but not quite,” or, “That’s not at all what I’m looking for, you must just be guessing.” Based on what they say, their responses will clue you in as to whether you’re on the right track. If you’re sure you’ve shown a customer the record they want, but their response suggests otherwise, you can insist they trust you and buy the record you suggest. Even if you’re wrong, that will at least get them to leave the store.

If you’re anything like me, there will be customers to whom you’ll recommend any record if it just gets them to leave. One example springs to mind: an exhausted man who’s been shopping with two of his unruly children, who will tell you “he just really wants to buy a record for him,” and then give you no other information to go on. Since I can’t exactly read the man’s mind, it got to a point where I just practically thrust a record into his hands, shoved him and his brats out the door, and breathed a sigh of relief.

Maybe I’m just not as perceptive and good at deducing answers based on clues as I think I am. Or, alternatively, Wax Heads could stand to give the player more information to work with to prevent scenarios like the one I just described. I like games that reward players for needing fewer hints, but that simultaneously don’t hesitate to bluntly spell things out for players (like me) who need some extra help. Wax Heads succeeds on the former of those points, but falls short on the latter.

Occasionally, you’ll also be asked to do something like box up a collector’s edition of an album a customer ordered. These are puzzles that require you to fit several items of varying shapes and sizes in a box with nothing overlapping. The catch is that (as far as I can tell), you can’t rotate anything that needs to go in the box. These aspects of Wax Heads feel like needless busywork meant primarily to pad out the campaign. They would be much less annoying if they weren’t so strict about how you’re required to go about fitting everything in a box.

Wax Heads has also been marred by technical issues in my experience. The first time I launched it, I did so with the DirectX 12 API, which Wax Heads recommended. Somehow, this prevented the main menu from loading, so I was stuck looking at a yellow screen with nothing but background music and a custom mouse cursor. That was fixed when I changed its settings to launch with OpenGL3 instead of DirectX 12. Also upon my first launch of Wax Heads, I suddenly received several Steam notifications telling me I had somehow unlocked several of Wax Heads’ achievements.

I’ve no clue how that happened or what might have caused it. I suppose it’s possible that I may have met the criteria for some or all of those achievements when I played the Wax Heads demo quite a while back, but I doubt it. As I progressed through Wax Heads’ campaign, I encountered a persistent graphical bug multiple times where all the yellow arrow buttons you click to navigate the record store were replaced with white rectangles. The navigation buttons still functioned normally whenever this happened, though it was always weird to see. Fully restarting Wax Heads fixed this, albeit only temporarily.

The most disheartening issue I encountered in Wax Heads, by far, was how frequently I noticed spelling and grammatical errors in its in-game text. I’m afraid I have to “be that guy” once again: I spotted a myriad of in-game dialogue boxes that had spelling mistakes and/or were missing necessary punctuation, usually commas and apostrophes. Wax Heads also frequently puts things in italics that I suspect shouldn’t be. I know this sort of thing won’t bother most people nearly as much as it bothers me, and none of these mistakes affected gameplay at all. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to acknowledge all those errors.

To be brutally honest, I’m disappointed in Wax Heads. I had been looking forward to playing it ever since I played its original demo ages ago, but seeing how many issues plague it (at least in its current state) really brings me down. The story it tells through its campaign is decent, but the core gameplay loop (and all the unskippable, error-prone dialogue it contains) distracts from the story more than helps to tell it effectively. The problems I’ve pointed out can be fixed with future patches, but even if that happens, I would recommend waiting to buy Wax Heads until it’s decently discounted.

A PC review copy of Wax Heads was provided by Curve Games for this review.

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Wax Heads

$14.99

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• Decent story.
• Helpful accessibility options.
• Solid core gameplay loop.

Cons

• Frequent errors in in-game text.
• Some parts of gameplay feel like nothing but padding.
• Technical issues abound, at least on Linux.