Review: Wilmot Works It Out Is Puzzling for Squares

Wilmot’s Warehouse, one of 2019’s indie hits, appealed to those with a specific sort of organizational mind and appreciation for whimsical aesthetic. The follow-up, then, shouldn’t be surprising: a puzzle assembly game called Wilmot Works It Out. The overlap in interested players is large, but it’s different enough to offer a new gameplay experience for those same players.

In many ways, it feels like Wilmot Works It Out started as an exploration of what the developer could make with the existing Warehouse engine. Wilmot picks up and moves squares in a similar way, and takes “deliveries” in the form of puzzle packages instead of warehouse shipments.

The premise of the game is that Wilmot, the little quite square buddy with a face, has signed up for Puzzle Club, a mail-order puzzle service that doesn’t always give you pieces from the same puzzle. Each shipment guarantees that one puzzle can be completed, but often includes lots of other pieces for future puzzles. The chaos is narrowed somewhat by the chapter presentation, containing each set within its own bundle.

Along the way, you’ll also talk to the postal workers who hand you boxes, and there’s something of a narrative here. It can serve to immerse you in the world and provide a “cozy” experience, but it also brings in a sense of dissonance. You’re told about the world, and even told that you participate in it. You adopt a pet! Go to the park! But you don’t do these things, you mainline puzzles in your foyer.

There are a few efforts to break up the experience, both through those story bits and the chapter intermissions that have you move completed puzzles to other rooms in the house. And while there’s no actual time pressure, there’s definitely the appearance of it. The moment you complete a puzzle, the postal worker’s knocking on your door and will leave a note if you’re even a bit lackadaisical in moving that puzzle to the wall to get it out of the way. It makes organizing the remaining pieces feel like a dereliction of duty at times. Eventually, we learned to leave one puzzle piece just a square away while cleaning up, just to avoid the guilt.

It’s important to note that, while it’s about puzzle assembly, hobby puzzlers may only find about half that experience here. Assembling a jigsaw puzzle involves two considerations: matching the illustrations and finding the correct shapes. Both help narrow down the possibilities and find the right piece. With Wilmot Works It Out, every piece is a cube. And a rounded one until placed, for that matter! Which does factor in. Since you can’t use shape as a limiter, also losing the illustration detail around the edges makes a notable difference.

The early chapters are really quite easy, and only get to the sort of fun trickery we wanted to see in the back part of the game. That said, it doesn’t wear out its welcome! We completed our leisurely playthrough in under five and a half hours. At this point, you unlock Marathon mode, which jumbles up all the puzzle pieces and gives you a larger room to make it more of a Wilmot’s Warehouse-like organization challenge.

It feels in many ways like Marathon may have been the initial idea. After all, controlling chaos was the whole thing in Wilmot’s Warehouse, and this more closely resembles that. We’d probably have liked something in the middle, with just a bit more grouping to finish some puzzles early. As it is, our floor was nearly full before we got the pieces to finish anything but a few tiny puzzles.

We really like the premise of Wilmot Works It Out, and don’t mind a shorter experience! But the game really only hits its stride in the final chapters, leaving us wishing it expanded its later offerings at least a bit. Still, it’s charming, and if you want to really dig into the Marathon post-game, it could be worth checking out.

Wilmot Works It Out, developed by Richard Hogg and Hollow Ponds and published by Finji, launches October 23, 2024 on PC and Mac.

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Wilmot Works It Out

Wilmot Works It Out is a puzzle building game about completing beautiful images and using them to decorate the walls of your house.

We really like the premise of Wilmot Works It Out, and don’t mind a shorter experience! But the game really only hits its stride in the final chapters, leaving us wishing it expanded its later offerings at least a bit.

Food for Thought

• The illustrations are charming and fun!
• Re-organizing completed puzzles on other walls at the end of chapters can be a bit of a task! We’re hoping patches at least smooth that process out.
• Our favorite puzzles to assemble were the ones with ropes or wires or collections of objects. They seem tailored to be interesting to complete, whereas more landscape-like scenes tend to be a bit too much about aligning cloud textures or what have you.

A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review. Reviewed on PC.