Wilmot Works It Out review: a meditative muzzle on the box-stacking puzzle

1 month ago 72

Wilmot stands over three nearly complete puzzles in his hallway.

One of my favourite internet jokes is: "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 Warehouse felt 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.

You hang out in the hallway of Wilmot's house, waiting at the door for a parcel to arrive. It's soon dropped off by a very BBC Radio 4 postwoman, who indulges in small talk as she gives you a package. Inside is an assortment of square puzzle pieces you can grab, push, and pull around until they click together bit by bit to form a complete image. When the image is finished, you can hang it up on your wall and the door will start knocking - it's the next puzzle parcel.

The postwoman arrives and makes small talk with Wilmot.

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.

The wall of Wilmot's living room is covered in colourful puzzles.

It's very cosy, very colourful, and - if I'm honest - a little plain compared to the funny setup, variable pace, and mental box-ticking of Wilmot's last labour. There are some playful and tricky puzzles as the game goes on - a chess set viewed from the top down, for example, in which you need to figure out the shadows cast by each piece, or a hedge maze with some fun "modular" possibilities. But at the end of it all, I didn't feel the same magnitude of satisfaction from completing cloud pictures as I did after a hard series of shifts stacking hats and flags in the warehouse.

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.

Wilmot considers the final pieces in a snake puzzle.

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 the pressure of passing time, it abandons the philosophical ponderings of language, and the passive-aggressive bossiness of backroom management.

Four rooms in the house are shown at once on a selection screen.

"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.

Meanwhile, by the fifth "season" of puzzles (there are eight seasons in total), I was simply brute-forcing my way through by sliding long rows and columns of the pieces together in semi-systematic patterns, until random pairs auto-clicked together. This is absolutely at odds with the philosophy of the jigsaw puzzle, and yet it's a viable approach (and, in some way, exactly how I see Wilmot approaching a puzzle, the wee jobsworth).

Wilmot ponders a few puzzle pieces with a quizzical expression.

When people say they find some games relaxing or "cosy" what I think they often mean is that they find the game "relieving". If you think about the act of relaxation, the act of doing nothing (soaking in a bath, watching clouds, lying on the sofa waiting for a paused TV to go into sleep mode) it's a moment in which tension dissipates. Cosy games most often replicate this by allowing the player to exert a slow and methodical order upon a realm of mild chaos. Sowing fields in Stardew Valley, building a house in Minecraft, stacking crates in Wilmot's Warehouse.

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, so cosy". 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 goods now.

In Wilmot Works It Out, the puzzle is simply incomplete.

A season of puzzles in completed and hanging on the wall.

In its lack of impetus and pressure, Works It Out is maybe closer to true relaxation than the Warehouse. It's a happily meditative game, and by design less energetic. The disorder of puzzle pieces is nowhere near as exciting as the disorder provoked by a lorryload of undefined goods (for me at least). That means the release I feel from solving a jigsaw simply won't be as strong. You are assigned a task, and then you complete that task.

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.

At the end of it all, my decisions in Wilmot's house felt less meaningful, less driven by my internal ideas about the world, less personal, and less rewarding than in our last meeting. It's a quieter game, about turning down the knob in your brain that says "categorise". That makes it both more chill as a task and less interesting as a game. If the Warehouse is a strong mug of hot coffee, Works It Out is a delicate cup of jasmine tea. Both are comforting, but I find one more stimulating than the other.