If you're feeling very rested and at peace today, I do not recommend you play the demo for just-announced puzzle game Wilmot Works It Out. It will relax you so much that you gently petrify. Future archaeologists will marvel at you, a smiling stone figure in the ruins of a bygone civilisation. "What exactly was going on back in 2024 to inspire such a critical intensity of chillax?" they will wonder. Then, they will spot the computer screen glowing beneath its layer of dust, and the cycle will begin anew.
Wilmot Works It Out is, of course, the sequel to Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg's Wilmot's Warehouse, again published by Finji. That game was about organising a warehouse. This game is about doing picture puzzles, around 60 in total. The puzzles are delivered to Wilmot's doorstep by an affable postwoman. You drag each parcel into the middle of his house and shake out a jumble of rounded squares, then set about sliding them together. Then you hang the picture on your wall, and the postwoman shows up with another picture. The sound is immediately blissful: the soft click of tiles meeting, the plop of a completed picture settling into place, the laidback escalation of the piano accompaniment.
The original Wilmot's Warehouse is one of our favouritest puzzle games, earning double Brendawards for Nicest Smile and Best Courier. It made Matt (RPS in peace) write about Wittgenstein. In our 2019 review, Nate called it "a deceptively simple little organism", and I wonder if the same is true of Wilmot Works It Out. Based on a few moments with the demo, it seems a lot less fiddly than the previous game: there's no time limit, and the whole thing is framed as a break from Wilmot's warehouse job. Wilmot's Sunday Afternoon, if you will.
I sense, however, that there's more going on beneath the surface. Perhaps it'll have something to do with the way successive delivery parcels mix up pieces from different puzzles. Or maybe complexity will arise from the unlocking of "new rooms and
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