Review: Wax Heads preaches wholesome punk resistance
Plus, thoughts on Everything is Crab!
Somehow I’ve swerved into reviewing games about music this year, from Unbeatable to People of Note to Mixtape. Wax Heads, also out this month, combines punk and pop beats with gameplay not far removed from Strange Antiquities, a 2025 favorite of mine. It’s cute, clever, and altogether lacking in subtlety.
Each day of Wax Heads begins with you rolling up the shutters of Repeater Records and chatting with your coworkers, who sometimes oblige you to solve a jigsaw-style puzzle. You’ll then open the shop to recommend albums that perfectly match the tastes of your clientele, whose wants range obvious to confused. Succeed and you’ll earn a delighted response and points you can spend to unlock cosmetic store improvements or “Rare LPs” you can spin on the company record player (one of these is even from a real band!). Failure doesn’t block progress; the customer might leave unsatisfied or sad, but the plot will roll on. There’s even a mode that lets you retry recommendations until you ace them.
I’d have rioted if a game about a record shop didn’t have a varied soundtrack worthy of the premise. Composer Gina Loughlin rose to the challenge with unique songs from dozens of fictional bands, bouncing genres from rap to pop to chiptune to punk and more. Each day you’ll unlock a different song that usually pertains directly to the unfolding story — be it a sampling of a controversial album, the latest hit from a rising star, or a deep cut from an old band. You’ll also sift through social media takes and indie reviews, which, along with album blurbs and zines, flesh out figures in the music scene. You’ll need this information to keep up with your customers’ increasingly obscure wishes.
The game doesn’t get too tricky — there’s no overarching escape-room conspiracy to unravel here, like in Strange Antiquities or Strange Horticulture. Wax Heads stumped me only a handful of times over its five-hour runtime. I failed most at its bartending minigame, which was too cheeky and too British for me to parse. I dreaded the infrequent pre-shift puzzles, which the game even frames as chores no other staff can be bothered to do. They’re technically optional, but the game made it clear that my boss would be disappointed if I neglected them.
Normally, I wouldn’t care about pleasing a virtual employer, but Morgan — the rocker turned shop owner — carries the emotional core of the game. You’ll slowly uncover the interpersonal drama that doomed her 1980s band and contend with the landlord that seeks to sell Repeater Records to an old ex that’s pushing a generative music AI. You couldn’t write more obvious villains, but Wax Heads still raises timely questions. How can a store foster community more than blind consumption? How can humans give recommendations personal enough to compete with algorithms? How can you make art when capitalist forces and new technology threaten to replace you?
Don’t expect Wax Heads to provide surprising answers to these questions, for it’s as earnest as a Sunday sermon. The game’s at its best when it shows rather than tells you about collective action and the joy of creation. The final concert you help put together more than drives this point home, even if it’s immediately undercut by a sententious epilogue scene. But perhaps I’m too jaded. Wax Heads is defiant, joyous, and unapologetically political — everything that its self-described “cozy-punk” aesthetic promises and more.
Everything is Crab
I can’t think of a transition into this next game. It’s about crabs! Or rather, it’s about carcinization: the idea that natural selection converges on more of the scuttling crustaceans than statistically likely. You begin each run of this pixelated roguelike as a blue blob. As you eat food — scavenged from plants or animals you’ll kill — you’ll roll random evolutionary traits to increase your painfully slow base speed and buff your fighting prowess. Some evolutions push you up a crab meter, upping the rarity of your drops and the strength of your foes.
Like Vampire Survivors, tougher enemies arrive on a predictable timeline. Defeat bosses to get the most powerful upgrades, with the goal of eventually challenging a “Crabken” and claiming victory.
I loved watching my little ooze become unrecognizable as it gained more and more perks, but Everything is Crab doesn’t have enough variety to encourage the dozens of playthroughs necessary to unlock each difficulty rank. After four hours, I felt like I’d explored all the builds I wanted to (I was most overpowered with upgrades that charmed a small army to fight for me). That’s still a good deal for a game that costs less than $10, though, and I hope that updates or expansions give me more reasons to return.