Wilmot's Warehouse (2019)

I just finished playing through Wilmot's Warehouse again and I love this game, even with all of its flaws. It's super unique, original, and entertaining especially for people who like games where the gameplay can be described as "Busywork".

The game is simple. You're a square, working at a minimalistic warehouse where everything else is also squares. Every month four clients will come in and ask for a few items, and it's your job to deliver said items to them. At the end of every month a truck will come in and deliver new stock to the warehouse, you unload it and organize it. Rinse and repeat.

It might sound quite boring, but the real fun of the game comes with the fact that no part of the game is labelled. It's up to the player to not only determine what each icon is supposed to represent, but also in what part of the warehouse they should be stored.

And it's this one single meta-gaming aspect of the game that makes Wilmot's Warehouse so interesting to me, because it gives you so much to think about while you're playing. It's no longer just a game about storing boxes, but now you have to think about how you're storing said boxes: What item do they depict? What category do they fit into? What if the item belongs to more than one category? If it's an abstract shape, where can I put it? Do I have enough space in that part of the warehouse, or should I rearrange the entire section? Can I split one category into two distinct ones? Or should I make a new category just for this item?

The game gives you so much to think about, and it's all thanks to the minimalistic approach it takes. The game is designed in such a way that your thinking process basically becomes part of the game, and I love it.

However for all the praise I have for the design aspect of the game, I still have a lot of problems with this game.

First of all: It's repetitive. While I think trying to organize and keep track of 196 different items inside one single warehouse is enough of a task to keep your mind occupied until the game ends, there's practically no variation to the delivery portion of the game. You just walk around your warehouse and give your clients the things they want. I think the bulk orders are a nice change of pace, but they happen very infrequently and only towards the end of the game.

The game also ends very abruptly, literally playing the ending cutscene as soon as you unlock your 200th item without even giving you the chance to store it inside your warehouse. And as you watch the ending cutscene showing you some of the 300 items you didn't get to see in your playthrough, you're left in there wondering if there was a better way for the game to end.

There's nothing to do in this game other than delivering random goods to your clients, and in the end you're left wishing there was just a little bit more to this game. Yes, the minimalistic approach really helps the gameplay loop of the game, but it also hurts the overall experience in the long run.

The game is pretty great in every other aspect. There's no story, however the few interactions you have with your boss between levels are pretty funny and help you understand a bit better the situation your character is in. While I have my problems with how the game ends, the ending itself is really well made and closes the story pretty nicely.

The game's presentation is also one of its strongest suits. Like I mentioned at the beginning, the minimalistic design of every item perfectly plays into the whole organizing aspect of the game, and totally enhances the experience. The soundtrack fits the game perfectly as well, having a small collection of relaxing songs to help you get in the organizing mood. It's really well made

In conclusion: Not for everyone, but definitely for me. If you think you'll be into this kind of game then by all means go ahead and give it a try, it's a beautifully designed game, and a great experience that I would definitely recommend. 8/10

As someone who deeply enjoys making lists and organizing things into piles and categorizes that don't immediately make sense to other people upon seeing but make perfect sense in your own head, i had heard Wilmot's Warehouse was a game built exactly for people like that and it is! But what i didnt expect going into it was the metacommentary on capitalism and how corporations will bleed you dry for all youre worth and cut you off the second they can replace you with something cheaper, all the while maintaining smiles on their face and silly posters to distract you from the ever growing and more demanding quotas that you have to meet with increasing difficulty and no increased benefits or time to breath!

Silly cubes!!!

In this game you have to store blocks representing goods in a warehouse. It starts out simple, then gets increasingly chaotic. It's not very fun, it lacks the satisfaction of removing lines like in Tetris.

It also has some other problems. Movement is a bit iffy. Double-click selection doesn't work logically. The warehouse isn't organised in aisles like a real one. Orders aren't pinned at the top but shrink when you get close to the customers. And getting upgrades requires finishing early, so if you mess up at the start the game gets progressively harder.

It's not bad but i have no idea who this is for.