If you’re feeling very rested and at peace today, I don’t recommend playing the demo of the recently announced puzzle game Wilmot Works It Out. It will relax you so much that you’ll slowly petrify you. Future archaeologists will marvel at you, a grinning stone figure in the ruins of a bygone civilization. “What exactly happened in 2024 to inspire such intense relaxation?” they’ll wonder. Then they’ll see the computer screen glowing beneath its layer of dust, and the cycle will begin again.
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Wilmot Works It Out is of course the sequel to Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg's Wilmot's Warehouse, also published by Finji. That game was about organising a warehouse. This game is about solving picture puzzles, about 60 in total. The puzzles are delivered to Wilmot's door by an affable postwoman. You drag each parcel into the middle of her house and shake out a jumble of rounded squares, then start sliding them together. Then you hang the picture on your wall, and the postwoman shows up with another picture. The sound is immediately joyful: the soft click of tiles meeting, the plop of a finished picture falling into place, the relaxed escalation of the piano accompaniment.
The original Wilmot's Warehouse is one of our favorite puzzle games, having won two Brenda Awards for Best Smile and Best Courier. It inspired Matt (RPS en paix) to 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. From a few moments with the demo, it seems a lot less tedious than the previous game: there's no time limit, and the whole thing is designed as a break from Wilmot's work in the warehouse. Wilmot's Sunday afternoon, if you will.
I sense, however, that there's a lot more going on beneath the surface. Maybe it has something to do with the way successive delivery packages mix up pieces of different puzzles. Or maybe the complexity will come from unlocking “new rooms and customization items for decoration.”
Even though it's as simple as it sounds, Wilmot Works It Out is already a beautiful creation that saturates the veins with calm. It will be released very soon, on October 23. Find out more and try the demo for yourself on Steam.
For more of the latest news and previews from Gamescom 2024, head over to our Gamescom 2024 hub.