Wilmot Works It Out (2024)

I'm a really big fan of Wilmot's Warehouse. I think it's an incredible game with a brilliant concept, and something that's truly one of a kind. I replay it all the time, and while this has made me realize this game's very flawed, I still love it.

I was super excited to find out the developers made a sequel to it, so I bought it as soon as it came out and immediately played through it. Unfortunately, I quickly found out that it was nothing like the original, and instead delivers a pretty boring and uninteresting experience that has nothing to do with the original. How, you may ask?

It's a god damn jigsaw puzzle game.

In Wilmot Works It Out, you play as Wilmot, a cube-shaped warehouse worker who's really into organizing stuff. During his time off, he likes to relax at home by solving puzzles. He's recently acquired a Puzzle Club subscription, where he gets jigsaw puzzles delivered straight to his door every single day.

The gameplay is as follows: You receive and open your package, you solve a puzzle, and you hang it on your wall. Rinse and repeat. That's it, it's just a jigsaw puzzle game. The only gimmick the game has, if you could call it that, is that you regularly get incomplete puzzles in the mail, and will have to store these spare pieces for when you get the rest of the jigsaw later.

And honestly? This kinda hurts the game in the long run. Most of the time, these spare pieces look similar to the puzzle you're trying to solve, but belong to a completely different image. This is done to confuse you and make you figure out where each piece goes, and while I understand why the devs did that, in order for it to work the pieces have to look very similar to each other, so in the end it just means having to brute force every connection by holding pieces with a similar color scheme together and seeing if they click.

You can also decorate your rooms, if you're into that kind of thing. It's nothing in-depth, mind you, all you can do is move your framed puzzles around, add plants to the foreground or change the color scheme of the room. It's... it's part of the game, I guess.

At the start of each day, you also get to interact with the mailwoman who delivers your packages. This is a fun idea, and works as a nice break from these puzzles, but the stories told through these interactions are very hit or miss, and most of them can be reduced to pointless padding and fluff. I don't think anyone wants the game to tell them how there's cute animals (that we never get to see) living in an abandoned building down the street over and over again.

A few of the interactions you have with her do tie in with the puzzles you get. While that's a cool idea, all it amounts to is getting the Astronaut puzzle after a space company launches a rocket. I think the developers added these to make the world feel more alive, but weirdly enough, I feel like it just makes everything feel more artificial.

Graphically, the game looks fine. The puzzle art is very beautiful once completed, but has a completely different art style to the rest of the game, so when you put it all together it ends up looking just fine. The music is very unintrusive, which I guess is the point, and while it helps you zone out while you solve the puzzles it's also very forgettable.

Yeah I really don't like this one. It essentially took the foundations of the first Wilmot game, removed all interesting aspects from it, and turned the game into something very unremarkable. There's no organization, no time management, nothing, it's just another cozy game with nothing special.

The game does have one extra game mode, called Marathon, where you essentially get pieces from way too many puzzles at once delivered to your door. The goal is to organize them separately, and complete these puzzles little by little over the course of multiple packages. I think this is a much more interesting idea that builds on the concept for the original game while still keeping the new puzzle-building gameplay. Still, for a side-mode that you unlock after completing the game, it's too little too late.

In conclusion: It's a god damn jigsaw puzzle game. 5/10