Wilmot Works it Out is the personification of a rainy day
In mid-2019, my wife and I spent a week in Barcelona and the south of France, enjoying provincial life, seeing the sights, and eating altogether too much pastry. Our favorite day of that trip was in Montpellier. We were staying in a classic provincial three-floor walk-up above a patisserie and we woke up to pouring rain. After a few minutes of deliberation (over fresh croissants), we decided to stay in, abandon the day’s plan, crack the windows, and relax. That day of playing games, reading books, and finishing puzzles is still one of the best days of my life. In a nutshell, that’s Wilmot Works it Out.
Wilmot Works it Out is a delightfully simple jigsaw puzzle game. You play as cute, expressive box Wilmot who has recently signed up for a jigsaw puzzle club. Every few minutes, a new jigsaw puzzle will arrive via your friendly mail carrier, you’ll move around your living room to open the box, and go about completing a multitude of jigsaw puzzles. Sometimes, all the pieces you need are in one box and other times you’ll need to manage two or three puzzle boxes to get enough pieces to finish a puzzle. Once a puzzle is complete, you’ll frame it and put it on your wall. It’s simple, cute, and delightful.
One of the early surprises of Wilmot Works it Out is the very light narrative elements. For the most part, the game is opening and solving jigsaw puzzles, but each delivery is paired with a line or two of dialogue from your mail carrier. Oftentimes, she talks about the weather or Wilmot’s increasing pile of puzzles, but there’s also mentions of her sister spending time abroad, or an injury in the family. You can ignore the mail carrier’s knocks on the door and just open puzzles as they come through the mail slot, but the breaks for human content are essential in my mind. Your interactions are slight—there’s been one dialogue choice in my three hours so far—but I think adding a character to a simple puzzle game is a perfect choice.
You probably know if this game is for you at this point; at almost three hours in, I can tell you there’s not much more to it than that. As your living room walls become covered with finished puzzles, you’ll unlock some more rooms of Wilmot’s house. You can spend a few minutes with some Animal Crossing style decorating: room borders, wallpaper, and adding plants or furniture. You can also move puzzles from room to room, adding splashes of color to monochrome rooms. It’s the perfect balance of 2D decorating that lets you personalize a room without needing to spend twenty minutes nudging a sofa to get the perfect placement.
The puzzles are beautiful to look at and relatively easy to solve, the only major friction point is managing your space. Every time a puzzle arrives, you’ll need to open it, placing each piece on the floor. I’ve had to steer Wilmot through a labyrinth of half-finished puzzles or drag pieces from one side of the room to the other a few times, but it’s never been frustrating.
As you unlock more puzzles, the color palettes begin to crossover, making it hard to know if you’re dealing with one puzzle or two, which is one of my favorite parts. It’s a manageable level of difficulty that feels rewarding when you snap the pieces together—especially when you’ve been sitting on that one piece for a few puzzles now.
The Bothuns are a big puzzle family, my son most recently having unlocked the skill himself. At three, he’s still pretty young to figure out the controls, but the artwork, calm electro-jazz (more on that later), and satisfying gallery of completed puzzles feels perfect for young children or the puzzle aficionado. Since the pieces are just squares (no nubs here!), you only have the image to go off of, the pieces automatically snapping together when they’re properly in place. The pieces are always in the correct orientation, so there’s no need to rotate pieces. It feels odd to say the tuning in a jigsaw puzzle game is perfect, but Wilmot Works it Out has found a way to maximize the fun and minimize the frustration in jigsaw puzzles.
I’m sure you’re sick of hearing it at this point, but Wilmot Works it Out is the perfect Nintendo Switch game and, after waiting several months, the game is now available on Switch! It has that perfect Picross stickiness: it’s easy to quickly hop in and finish a puzzle or two when you’re going between things…or get sucked in to a deep, rainy day puzzle-palooza. At three hours in, I’m still enjoying myself and have plenty to go, with two more rooms to unlock and plenty of wall space to cover.
The music is a perfect companion to puzzle solving. Composed by Eli Rainsberry, composer of Flock, Saltsea Chronicles, Wilmot’s Warehouse, and many more, the score is a bubbly electro-jazz soundtrack that has been on repeat since I played the game. The sound design—also by Eli—fits perfectly with the low-key score; the escalating notes when pieces are placed on floor to the ever-satisfying click sound of pieces snapping together make the puzzles even more fun to complete.
Wilmot Works it Out is exactly what it appears to be: a simple, short game where you snap together jigsaw puzzles, but it’s also more than that. It’s a game about taking a break, finding time for yourself, and exhaling between big things. In many ways, Wilmot Works it Out is the antithesis of Wilmot’s Warehouse, a frenetic organization game. Whether it’s a rainy day on a French vacation or a low-key Sunday morning, Wilmot Works it Out is the perfect companion for a slow day.
