The tactile nature of turning a puzzle piece around in your hand while you scan your canvas for similar textures, colors, and shapes is satisfying and famously good for your brain. But often, puzzles are tough to translate into the digital form. That’s not the case for Wilmot Works it Out, the follow-up to Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg’s acclaimed Wilmot’s Warehouse.
While puzzle games often rely on unintuitive key bindings or clunky click-and-drag mechanisms, Wilmot Works it Out iterates on the speed-focused controls used in Wilmot’s Warehouse to create a puzzle game that really feels like solving a physical puzzle. In the world of Wilmot Works it Out, you’re still playing as Wilmot; you’re now in the process of unpacking and decorating your home with art, which has conveniently been disassembled into 1×1 cubes. When Sam the Postwoman drops off a package, it’s time to unpack and start reassembling those paintings on the floor of your entry hallway.
The challenge comes not just in the visual puzzles, which vary in difficulty, size, shape, and theme (my favorites are the sea creatures in space). There are also red herrings — pieces that look like they’re the same color or shape as other pieces, but that actually belong to another puzzle entirely. Sometimes, the corresponding pieces for a puzzle haven’t even arrived yet, and you have to keep solving while you wait for Sam’s next delivery.
The hallway floor acts as a big canvas, where you can organize pieces into piles and work on assembling each piece of art. When you push or drag a piece to the right spot by picking it up, a satisfying click and flash indicates that you’ve found a match. The completed puzzles become artworks that you can put on your wall — first in the hallway, and later in more rooms you unlock as the game goes on.
I could take or leave the decoration element of the game. I find the controls related to that element clumsy and frustrating, and I’m more interested in solving more puzzles than organizing my artwork. But that’s the fun of Wilmot Works it Out — you don’t have to spend time decorating if you don’t want to. And if you do want to, there are unlockable items like hanging plants and pets to place throughout your home.
The art style is essentially the same as in Wilmot’s Warehouse, and I welcomed the pared-down look in an era of so much ultra-realism and 3D modeling. The 2D design simply makes sense for a puzzle game where the puzzles are also 2D, and it’s a nostalgic vibe if you played lots of Warehouse when it came out in August 2019.
Some might end up thinking that this game gets repetitive after a while — because, well, it does. But in my view, that’s the point. It’s a predictable, comforting game that’s kept interesting by the silly overarching storyline involving Postwoman Sam and her oversharing with Wilmot, and the puzzles do seem to get more challenging as the game progresses. If you like A Little to the Left, Wilmot Works it Out is a must-play that’ll keep you busy until it doesn’t. And at that point, take a break and return when you’re ready for a nice solved-puzzle dopamine hit once again.
Wilmot Works it Out was released on Oct. 23 on Mac and Windows PC. The game was played on PC and ROG Ally X using a pre-release download code provided by Finji. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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