If you’re feeling very rested and composed today, I wouldn’t recommend playing the demo of the recently announced puzzle game Wilmot Works It Out. It will relax you so much that you’ll petrify yourself slightly. Future archaeologists will marvel at you, a smiling stone figure in the ruins of a bygone civilization. “What exactly was going on in 2024 that inspired such critical chillax intensity?” they’ll wonder. Then they’ll notice a computer screen glowing under a layer of dust, and the cycle will begin again.
Wilmot Works It Out is of course the sequel to Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg’s Wilmot’s Warehouse, reissued by Finji. That game was about organizing a warehouse. This game is about putting together picture puzzles, about 60 in all. The puzzles are delivered to Wilmot’s door by a kindly postwoman. You drag each package to the center of his house and shake out the mess of rounded squares, then start pushing them together. Then you hang a picture on the wall, and the postwoman appears with another picture. The sound is immediately blissful: the gentle click of tiles touching, the sound of a finished picture settling into place, the straightforward escalation of a piano accompaniment.
The original Wilmot’s Warehouse is one of our favorite puzzle games, winning double Brendawards for Nicest Smile and Best Courier. It got Matt (RPS in Peace) writing about Wittgenstein. In our 2019 review, Nate called it “a deceptively simple little organism,” and I wonder if the same can be said about Wilmot Works It Out. From a few moments with the demo, it seems a lot less complicated than the previous game: there’s no time limit, and the whole thing is presented as a break from Wilmot’s warehouse work. Wilmot’s Sunday Afternoon, if you will.
I feel like there’s more to it than meets the eye, though. Maybe it has something to do with the way the various packages connect the puzzle pieces. Or maybe the complexity comes from unlocking “new rooms and customization items to decorate.”
Even if it turns out to be as straightforward as it sounds, Wilmot Works It Out is already a lovely work that infuses the veins with peace. It will also be released soon, on October 23. Find out more and try the demo for yourself at Couple.
