There’s a moment in Wax Heads where a customer at the record store where you work thanks you for helping to maintain a place where magic happens. It would be a schmaltzy line in most contexts, but not after spending eight hours—and several in-game months—working at Repeater Records as you satisfy customer requests by finding them the perfect vinyl.
The cartoonishly stickered and colorfully wallpapered and sometimes graffitied walls of Repeater Records do indeed feel magical. This fiercely independent U.K. brick-and-mortar shop represents a last bastion against the encroachment of gentrification and the depersonalization of A.I., even the enshittification of the internet, and if there’s any flaw to the game, it comes from having to leave its fantastical world of camaraderie and community.
The nitty gritty of working at Repeater Records is made thrillingly playable throughout Wax Heads, and there’s not an ounce of dead air on any of its tracks (the game’s label for each new day). Between customers, you can click through the store’s rooms of stacks, browse social posts on Phonogram, use the jukebox to broadcast original tracks, and read local anti-capitalist zines and music blogs. The game’s world expands as you go about your duties, so while initial customer requests in the Side A chapter are limited to one of a dozen albums, by Side E, you’ll have to satisfy multi-album requests from over 30 albums displayed across four floors.
The increasingly complex album-identification tasks are fun little puzzles, yes, but they’re also invitations to empathy. The more you look at and listen to the way the store is changing, the easier it becomes to know what a customer is getting at with their vague, sometimes cryptic requests. Players may only briefly interact with customers, but those interactions don’t feel slight or transactional, and it’s truly satisfying to bear witness to people’s evolving personalities: a child finding her own voice alongside her family; a pair of shy lovebirds bonding over a song; customers learning to move past grief upon discovering new tracks; and so on.
Wax Heads ultimately shares the same central conflict as Empire Records, in which an independent shop is at risk of being bought up by a soulless corporation, but the interactive elements of this game really emphasize just how much there is to lose beyond one’s job. Music conjures powerful, immediate emotions, but it’s the game’s masterful story about how that music brings audiences together that produces all the lingering, magical feels.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by Renaissance PR.
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