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Jigsaw puzzles just don't quite do it for me. I see the appeal of piecing together a bigger picture, like Lego, but when the number of pieces is in the hundreds or even thousands and there are no instructions, I think I'd rather step on Lego. I recently watched my parents finish a 1,000-piece puzzle of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights – an utterly bizarre triptych with so much color and detail across its three panels that the puzzle pieces almost gave me a headache.
Wilmot Works It Out has some odd-looking jigsaw puzzles that test your grey matter too, but it's nowhere near as intimidating or stressful as solving a thousand-piecer (I assume that's what jigsaw puzzlers call them). In Hollow Pond and publisher Finji's latest title, you play as cheery white square Wilmot and he's part of what may be the worst puzzle club ever because it always mixes pieces from multiple jigsaws in each weekly delivery. This sounds nightmarishly irritating, but it's actually what makes Wilmot Works It Out so compelling and got me into a puzzle flow state.
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The game is split into eight levels, known as seasons, which see Wilmot receiving puzzle club deliveries every so often from chirpy postwoman, Sam. Each delivery, which you usually get after solving a puzzle and hanging it on the wall, provides a varying number of tile pieces to dump into Wilmot's front room and then it's up to you to continue solving until there are no more for the season.
With the first delivery, you'll learn about the puzzle club's disorganization, where some pieces are so different they stick out like a sore thumb, clearly part of another jigsaw. You'll quickly get to a point where Sam's deliveries have really stacked up, leaving you surrounded by the disparate pieces of three or four puzzles. This forces you into a sort of organization metagame, where you need to divide the front room into imaginary sectors to ensure you don't mix puzzles and make things more confusing with each delivery.
Keeping things orderly becomes much tougher when you discover that, as the puzzles get bigger, the chances of their tiles being more varied in style, color, and pattern increases. That means you'll start grouping tiles into what seem like different puzzles, only to realize later with one crucial piece that they're all part of the same masterpiece.
However, the game's final trick of throwing in tiles with near identical patterns that are actually for completely different puzzles is truly devious. One puzzle features a dinosaur with an orange dot pattern and dark-purple foliage, but those same features appear in another puzzle where the orange dots are clouds in the sky. It sounds frustrating, but the tile pieces can be easily shoved around by Wilmot to find the right place. That means it's easy to experiment and slide individual tiles or even massive clusters around to see what fits, and it's mightily satisfying when you eventually figure out the trick and complete a puzzle that you can hang proudly.
All these design tricks come together to make Wilmot Works It Out highly engaging, even if you're not into jigsaws. Despite the simplicity of some of the final works, the puzzles aren't insultingly easy, and the small piece counts and ease of experimenting means they aren't tediously difficult either. There's a nice challenge in trying to figure out what a completed puzzle is going to look like when it's done so that you can manage the limited space and the tiles within. And when you hit a roadblock, in Metroidvania fashion, you can try looking somewhere else to make progress.
That constant switching between puzzles is what kept me hooked on Wilmot Works It Out, too. I'd start a season, quickly solving the first few puzzles, but inevitably tiles would pile up. Then, while moving things around, I might suddenly notice one tile that'd be a perfect fit, which would cascade into more correct tiles and solved puzzles until I was done with the season - in what felt like minutes but had actually been almost an hour.
Once I wrapped up the game in about six and a half hours, I was presented with marathon mode, where you're given every puzzle piece at once and must solve them all. Tempting though it was, it reminded me far too much of the jumbled mess of real jigsaw puzzles. So, while Wilmot Works It Out has hardly converted me when it comes to jigsaws, it was a charming and extremely pleasant change of pace, and a surprisingly inventive little game that had me hooked over its short run time. Sorry, Ravensburger. You're not getting my money just yet.
Wilmot Works It Out is out now on PC. For more recommendations, be sure to head over to our Indie Spotlight series.
