I wouldn’t say I’m having a great time lately. Maybe you’re not having a great time lately either; there is, after all, a lot to be stressed about. One thing that’s been helping me, though, is Wilmot Works It Out.
I enjoyed the game’s demo back in August, and I’ve been pleased that the full game, which came out last week, is largely more of the same: Wilmot (the busy block you’ll remember from the very very good Wilmot’s Warehouse) keeps getting puzzles delivered to his house, and he has to put them together. The game is divided into seasons, which unlock different rooms of Wilmot’s house that you can lightly customize and where you can hang some of your completed puzzles.
The puzzles get slightly harder as the game goes on: their pieces get divided into different deliveries, requiring some of the organization from Warehouse to keep the pieces of different puzzles together, and the pictures they form or how they fit together becomes more intricate. It seems like you don’t get a delivery of more pieces until you’ve connected a certain number of the pieces you already have, which meant on occasion, when I was stumped, I’d need a bit of trial and error to keep making progress. But this pace also keeps the game from getting too overwhelming, steering it away from Warehouse’s core stress.
That stress of too much to do and too much to remember was also Warehouse’s core pleasure, but it’s a smart choice to make Wilmot Works It Out so different. You still get the joy of organizing things, and you still get to work with your own brain as you try to guess what a puzzle might be forming and which pieces might be part of it–at one point, I was zipping through all my puzzle pieces muttering, “Where’s the rest of you, taco crab?” before realizing the picture I was forming was not, in fact, a crab holding a taco. You could certainly do an analysis on why Wilmot spends his non-work time doing what is sort of a leisure version of his job, but overall the game manages a solid balance of doing what Warehouse did well, but also doing something different.
I’ve come to love its rhythms, and how the delivery person shares little details about the world outside–she’s going on a trip, or Wilmot’s flowers look nice, or there are magpies outside. The pause menu calls itself a “tea break,” complete with Wilmot smiling next to a cup and some biscuits, which is terribly charming.
I’m not a jigsaw puzzle guy in real life–I’m responsible for enough tiny pieces of something with my table full of bike screws–but Wilmot Works It Out is showing me their appeal. I also don’t tend to go in for games as escapism, but that’s definitely how the game has felt for me: a distraction when I’m too worked up with worry about something, a chill space to solve small, solvable problems. If you’re looking for a chill-out game, I’d definitely recommend it.
