One of my favorites internet jokes is: “I like video games because they allow me to fulfill my wildest fantasies, such as being assigned a task and then completing it.” Wilmot’s Warehouse felt like this joke had come true, putting you in the shoes of a little square warehouse worker. This mystery-solving sequel, Wilmot Works It Out, isn’t filled with the wry humor of its predecessor or the same sense of compulsion. Instead, it exudes peace and a homely feeling of idleness. To me, that ultimately makes it less compelling, even if thematically that’s the whole point. It’s a story about a warehouse worker who does jigsaw puzzles on his day off.
You’re sitting in the hall of Wilmot’s house, waiting for a package at the door. You’re soon dropped off by a BBC Radio 4 postwoman who, while handing you the parcel, engages in a chat. Inside is a set of square puzzle pieces that you can grab, push and pull until they come together piece by piece to form a complete picture. When the painting is ready, you can hang it on the wall and the door will start knocking – it’s another piece of the puzzle.
This is very different from the alternating periods of work and free time in the Warehouse, where you had to think about narrow space and satisfy customers on time. There is no such pressure here. The only hindrance to your dainty pottery is that some packages will contain surplus. These pieces often have the same colors, shapes and textures as pieces of a completely different puzzle. Most of the time, you don’t know what you’re putting together until you get enough pieces together to get the idea. Oh, that’s a lot of tools. This one’s a crowd of trumpeters. That? It’s a moth.
Since you will often have a lot of leftover pieces, it may take four or more deliveries before you get all the pieces for a given puzzle. Like this burger – every time you think that this might be it, that the three pieces of lettuce that arrived today might finally be the final layer of the ever-growing meat feast, you discover that no, it’s not over yet. There’s still a burger to come.
Other times you realize that two puzzles that you thought were separate pictures are actually both parts of one huge mega-puzzle. These observations are gentle and familiar to anyone who has ever completed a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of the boisterous Monet. These are not the great discoveries of more inventive puzzle games, but a diminutive hint of complexity. Basically, you are asked to complete more than one puzzle at a time.
It’s very cozy, very colorful and – to be forthright – a bit plain compared to the fun set-up, variable pace and mentality of Wilmot’s last work. There are some fun and challenging puzzles throughout the game – like a top-down chess set where you have to distinguish the shadows cast by each piece, or a hedge maze with fascinating “modular” possibilities. But in the end, I didn’t feel as satisfied with finishing the cloud photos as I did after a series of difficult work arranging hats and flags in the warehouse.
This is something that will be most crucial to me with Works It Out compared to Warehouse. Solving the boxy puzzles of the recent part leads to questions known to fans of the previous part. Does this item fit a burger bun or a diving helmet? Is that brown piece tree bark or moose fur? Only this time it’s not about the category, but about the shape and color. Importantly, this time there is a definitive answer. It’s a burger bun, stupid. It’s moose fur. Please.
For players, this means that you’re not actually the one making any crucial decisions. This is not the case in Wilmot’s Warehouse, where each player would inevitably create a different sorting system, indulging in their own taxonomy of visual meanings. This pile is “flags”, this pile is “food”. In Wilmot’s house, there is only one solution to each puzzle. Every player will have the same thought process and see the same result, even if they approach the puzzles in a different physical way. For this reason, I feel it doesn’t carry the same psychological weight as a magazine.
This is Wilmot outside of work. It makes sense that he would be more relaxed and less under pressure. But it also eliminates the pressure of passing time, abandons philosophical considerations of language and the passive-aggressive domineering nature of back-end management.
“It’s so cozy in here!” I hear you whispering forcefully into your warm chocolate. And it’s true. You will unlock recent rooms to decorate. You can place cacti and palm trees, everything matching the colors of these rooms. If you adopt a cat or a dog (both if you go to recent game+), you can install a bookshelf or a game cabinet, which will make your home look welcoming and carefree. It’s very cozy. As someone who is currently trying to find a place to live in the hellish choice that is the UK rental market, Wilmot’s home ownership satisfaction and impeccable sense of decor fills me with intense envy. Look at the size of his bedroom! Hateful little square.
It’s my fault, of course. I admit that Wilmot is really very nice. But I still definitely prefer him as an employee busybody. For others, a more relaxed Wilmot can unleash his comforting, winking gaze, filling cozy game lovers with serotonin, oxytocin, or whatever other chemical normal people produce when exposed to a still jazz piano and satisfying clicking sounds.
Meanwhile, in the fifth “season” of puzzles (there are eight seasons in total), I just brute force my way through them, connecting long rows and columns of pieces in semi-systematic patterns until random pairs automatically clicked together. It goes completely against the philosophy of the puzzle, and yet it’s a workable approach (and in some ways, that’s exactly how I see Wilmot approaching the puzzle, a little Jobsworth).
When people say that they find certain games relaxing or “cozy,” I think what they often mean is that they find them “relieving.” If you think about the act of relaxation, the act of doing nothing (soaking in the bathtub, watching the clouds, lying on the couch waiting for the paused TV to go to sleep), this is the moment when the tension disappears. Cozy games most often repeat this, allowing the player to slowly and methodically order through a kingdom of gentle chaos. He sows fields in Stardew Valley, builds a house in Minecraft, stacks boxes in Wilmot’s Warehouse.
These are acts of control and order in a low-risk environment. By creating structure, we release the tension inherent in disorder and feel a certain liberation that our idiotic animal brains mistake for actual relief from some unseen threat. “Ah, it’s so relaxing, so cozy“. But for a game to deliver a significant launch, it must first generate enough tension. Your energy is running out in Stardew Valley. In Minecraft, monsters come at night. At Wilmot’s Warehouse, customers want their goods Now.
In Wilmot Works It Out, the puzzle is simply incomplete.
In its lack of impetus and pressure, Works It Out is perhaps closer to true relaxation than Warehouse. It is a fun, meditative game and is intended to be less energetic. The mess of a puzzle isn’t as electrifying as the mess of a truck full of unspecified goods (at least for me). This means that the release I feel after solving the puzzle simply won’t be as robust. You get a task and then you do it.
Finally, there’s a “marathon mode” where you’re given items in a truly random order, which is closer to the spirit of the magazine and will allow you to take advantage of the knowledge you’ve accumulated about the puzzle over the course of 8-10 hours of the main game. But now that I’ve figured them all out once, I’m not sure I’ll like it again.
By the end of it all, my decisions in Wilmot’s house seemed less meaningful, less guided by my internal ideas about the world, less personal and less satisfying than when we last met. This is a quieter turning game down the dial in your brain that says “categorize.” This makes it both more relaxing as a task and less fascinating as a game. If Warehouse is a robust cup of warm coffee, Works It Out is a dainty cup of jasmine tea. They are both comforting, but I find one more stimulating than the other.
