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Review

Review: Wilmot Works It Out

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Wilmot joins the Puzzle Club and attempts to to solve over six dozen puzzles.

The puzzle game Wilmot Works It Out by Richard Hogg (game design, art) and Ricky Haggard from Hollow Ponds (game design, writer) is now available on Steam for PC and Mac. The duo has been working on games for 15 years and gifted us with the indie hit Hohokum and this game’s predecessor Wilmot’s Warehouse, in which we have to sort goods into a warehouse and hand them out to customers under time pressure. The simple but motivating gameplay gave the game, which was released in 2017, a loyal fan base. While the simple look and accessible controls have been retained and a character from the game, Borky, even returns, the time pressure component has been shelved in Wilmot Works It Out. Postwoman Sam regularly delivers new puzzles to Wilmot as part of his Puzzle Club subscription and chats about her life and her family. The cute dialogue occasionally asks you to make decisions, such as whether you should take in the cat Nora or the dog Toby as a pet, and lead to an interesting ending, but overall it’s clearly not the game’s focus. In our run a glitch caused all dialogue in the final season to be displayed in French.

Wilmot Works It Out includes around 75 puzzles for you to solve over the span of eight seasons. By using twin-stick controls you can select one or more pieces in no time and as soon as two adjacent puzzle pieces fit together, they are automatically connected. Individual pieces can also be broken out. Each piece is square, so you can only connect them by their design which were drawn in just five months. As expected, the puzzles increase in complexity and size. Since you get pieces for different puzzles with every delivery, you gotta keep a cool head. The beautiful designs include dragonflies buzzing around blooming lotuses, a French flag reflected in an astronaut’s helmet, a group of bunnies sailing and a diver with an ancient-looking bell inspired by a hamburger which is also included and nearly drove us mad since it kept on adding layers. A comic motif that was inspired by the film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Good-bye breaks willfully with the style of the remaining puzzles. The similarity of individual designs can give you a bit of trouble, especially later on, but overall the game offers a varied selection of puzzles.

 

After a day’s work you can pin the finished art to the walls of your house. As you progress through the game you unlock new rooms such as living room, plant room, bedroom and kitchen which you can customize with different wallpaper designs and colors. After completing the game which takes you about five to seven hours, you can engage yourself in Marathon Mode in which you get randomly generated pieces of the designs you already familiarized yourself with. As we puzzled our way through the seasons, we enjoyed the relaxing tunes from Eli Rainsberry (Flock, Saltsea Chronicles) who drew inspiration from the elevator jazz music of the British TV show Tony Hart.

Conclusion

Wilmot Works It Out is an entertaining puzzle game with a charming look, intuitive controls and nice dialogue. Anyone who enjoys solving puzzles every now and then and doesn’t expect a complex story or lengthy sessions with thousands of pieces can hardly go wrong with this game. If Wilmot’s new adventure caught your interest, you can play the first half of the first season in the free Steam demo.

Publisher FINJI provided us with a PC copy of Wilmot Works It Out which we used to capture the screenshots.