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Wilmot Works It Out review: a meditative muzzle on the box-stacking puzzleAn extra peace
An extra peace
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Finji
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Finji
One of my favouriteinternet jokesis: “I enjoy video games because they let me live out my wildest fantasies, like being assigned a task and then completing that task”.Wilmot’s Warehousefelt like that joke made manifest, putting you in the shoes of a tiny warehouse working squareboi. This puzzle-solving sequel,Wilmot Works It Out, doesn’t come packaged with its predecessor’s wry humour, nor the same sense of compulsion. Instead, it exudes a calm and homely sense of idle comfort. For me, that ultimately makes it less compelling, even if it is thematically the entire point. This is about a warehouse worker doing jigsaws on his day off.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Finji
It’s very different from the alternating busy periods and free time of the Warehouse, where you had limits of space to think about, and customers to please against the clock. Here, no such pressures exist. The only snag in your gentle pottering is that some packages will contain surplus pieces. And those pieces will often sport the same colours, shapes, and textures as those of an entirely different puzzle. Most of the time, you don’t know what you’re putting together until you’ve assembled enough pieces to make out the idea. Aha, it’s a bunch of tools. This one is a crowd of trumpeters. That one? It’s a moth.
Since you’ll often have a lot of leftover pieces lying around, it might take four or more deliveries before you get all the pieces of a particular puzzle. Like that burger - every time you think this might be it, that the three lettucey pieces that arrived today might finally provide the last layer of an ever-growing meat feast, you’ll discover no, it’s not finished. There is burger yet to come.
At other times, you realise two puzzles you thought were distinct pictures are really both parts of a single big mega-puzzle. These realisations are mild and familiar to anyone who has ever put together a 1000-piece jigsaw of a noisy Monet. They are not the grand revelations of brainier puzzle games but a tiny hint of complication. You’re basically asked to do more than one puzzle at a time.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Finji
This is something that will dog my experience of Works It Out, when compared with Warehouse. Solving the boxy puzzles of this new instalment leads to some familiar questions for fans of the previous outing. Does this piece go with the burger bun or the diving helmet? Is this brown piece the bark of a tree or moose fur? Only this time they’re not questions of category, but of shape and colour. Critically, this time there is a definitive answer. It is the burger bun, you fool. It is the moose fur.Please.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Finji
What that means for players is that you’re not really the one making any significant decisions. This is unlike Wilmot’s Warehouse, where every player would inevitably create a different system of sorting, indulging their own taxonomy of visual meaning. This pile is “flags”, that pile is “food”. In Wilmot’s home, there’s only one solution to any puzzle. Every player will have the same thought process, and see the same result, even if they approach puzzles in a physically different way. Because of this, I find it doesn’t hold the same mental weight as the warehouse.
This is Wilmot outside of work, it makes sense he’d be more relaxed and less pressured. But it also eliminates thepressure of passing time, it abandons thephilosophical ponderings of language, and thepassive-aggressive bossiness of backroom management.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Finji
“But it’s cosy!” I hear you whisper forcefully into your hot chocolate. And that’s true. You’ll unlock new rooms to decorate. You’ll put down cacti and palms, all coordinated to the colour scheme of these rooms. You will adopt a pet cat or dog (both if you make it to new game+), you can install a bookcase or an arcade cabinet, make your home look welcoming and carefree. It’s very cosy. As someone currently trying to find a flat in the hellish selection box that is the UK rental market, Wilmot’s smug home ownership and impeccable sense of decor fills me with powerful envy. Look at the size of his bedroom! Hateful little square.
That’s on me, of course. Wilmot is actually very nice, I concede. But I still greatly prefer him as an employed busybody. For others, this more relaxed Wilmot may unleash his comforting blinky stare, filling cosy game aficionados with serotonin or oxytocin or whatever chemical it is normal people produce when faced with low key jazz piano and satisfying clicky noises.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Finji
These are acts of control and ordering in a low-threat environment. In creating structure, we relieve ourselves of a tension inherent in disorder and feel some release, which our idiot animal brains mistake for actual relief from some invisible threat. “Ah, this is so relaxing, socosy”. But for a game to deliver significant release, it must first create sufficient tension. In Stardew Valley, your energy runs out. In Minecraft, monsters come at night. In Wilmot’s Warehouse, the customers want their goodsnow.
In Wilmot Works It Out, the puzzle is simply incomplete.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Finji
There is a “marathon mode” at the end of it all, in which you’re given the pieces in a truly random order, which feels closer to the spirit of the warehouse, and will benefit from the knowledge you’ve gathered of the puzzles over 8-10 hours of the main game. But having figured them all out once already, I’m not sure I fancy it again.
