Cozy and punk don’t really go together. Cozy is restrained, nice, warm, and cozy. Whereas punk is noisy and subversive – angry tunes with an aggressive attitude and anti-establishment ideals. A cozy video game wants to wrap you up nice and tight with a warm drink and tell you everything is going to be okay, but punk games rip that blanket off, pour your drink down the drain, and pull you over to a window to look at the darker parts of the world, or what the world could become. Punk wants to make you feel uncomfortable. So when developer Patti Games calls Wax Heads ‘cozy-punk,’ you might raise an eyebrow.
Give it a look, however, and you’ll see that its ‘punk’ side isn’t leaning towards the moody, political meaning of the word. With its comic-book art style and vinyl record shop setting, Wax Heads only takes the styling and sound of ‘punk’, but it certainly delivers on its ‘relaxing’ promise with its retail-sim-themed puzzles.
After a brief introduction on how the mega-popular Becoming Violet band started and broke up in the 1980s, you get the introduction of Wax Head Steam Next Fest Demo Decades later, you’ll be a new, unnamed employee at Repeater Records, a struggling record shop. It’s owned by Morgan, the old leading lady from Becoming Violet, and she explains that your job as the new employee is to listen to customers’ (often confusing) descriptions of what record they want to buy, then search the shop for it. Choose a good suggestion and you’ll get more points, but make a really bad suggestion and you could lose points. It’s unclear what the points are for in the demo, but it seems they may affect the record shop’s fortunes in the full release.
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It’s a cool loop that presents a different flavor of the puzzle with each new customer, with the solutions getting progressively harder. At first, you’re just looking for records that have ‘New!’ written on the front for excited fans, or giving miserly customers the cheapest tracks you can find.
But soon you have to study people more to figure out what they’re not telling you. For example, a nervous man with a piercing on his body might not like the heavy metal track you think he’ll like if you look at the flyer sticking out of his back pocket, while a teenager might not feel like he’s ready for Sister’s latest experimental songs just yet – so why not give him their cool debut album? One record took me just as long to find as everyone else in the demo, because the customer was stuck in a mascot costume that muffled his voice and I only had three misleading leads from his daughter to work with.
There are a number of workarounds to keep Wax Heads from getting boring when you’re playing for long periods of time, but it also manages to keep you interested with its genuinely engaging crop of minigames. One asks you to create a flyer for your co-workers’ gig with some typically cartoony stickers, and I wasted a lot of time on a piece of digital paper I’ll probably never see again. Then again, it was a pleasant surprise to see my amateur work displayed in the record shop’s window for all of my select customers for the rest of the demo. However, the best of the demo’s minigames is the Diggy Doggo arcade machine you can boot up anytime. You have to avoid old Zelda-like traps while traversing a dungeon that moves from top to bottom to collect items to survive, then eventually escape. I love a good game within a game, and Diggy Doggo is big enough to entertain, but also small enough to not distract from the main game.
These minigames help add a lot of whimsy to Wax Heads’ already charming design, which includes a Tamagotchi to care for, emojis to stick on receipts and minimalist, hand-crafted vinyl records to study – complete with parody or funny band names and song titles. My favorite album of these is Bad Toes, by the band Toes, whose cover art features an appropriately bad toe, slightly angry face and all. It includes hits like ‘Socks Aren’t Enough’, ‘Footsie’ and ‘This Little Piggy Burned Down the Market’.
It all makes for a smooth, slice of life, comfortable time. So even if the real punk elements of Wax Heads are just the songs you queue up on your phone, when you see punk albums on Repeater Records, I’m a fan of them. Do you think the Wax Heads will sign my copy of Bad Toes?
