I used to hate puzzles. I found them frustrating and messy and taking way too long to solve. But my wife showed me that these pieces of a puzzle can actually be fun: There's something satisfying and meditative about working through these frustrations, sorting through the clutter, and piecing together one picture at a time over the course of several hours. (Or days.)
The creators of Wilmot manages ita new puzzle game, get this, and everything about the game is designed to make solving puzzles fun, not annoying.
In the game, you take on the role of Wilmot, an adorable white square with a face who has a puzzle-by-mail subscription. (He has the same smiley square from Wilmot's warehousea 2019 puzzle game also developed by developers Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg and published by Finji.) Every time you open a new package delivered by Sam, your postman friend, the Jumble pieces on the floor so you can match them and assemble them into a picture to hang on the wall.
Once you've set up a completed puzzle, Sam will usually knock on the door with a quick chat and a new box full of pieces to look through. After solving a series of puzzles, you complete a “season” and can move on to the next, increasing the difficulty.
Wilmot manages it has a few clever ways to simplify the process of putting parts together. Unlike any puzzle I've done in real life, the puzzle pieces are put together Wilmot are all square. This sounds annoying, but since you don't have to rotate the pieces to fit them together, it's much easier to compare the pieces side by side to see if they fit together. When you slide a piece next to its correct counterpart, the piece you are holding will flash once and you will hear a quiet but pleasant sound. I loved I'm chasing these chimes.
These design options make it much easier to put puzzles together quickly. The game's best trick, however, is that puzzle packs usually contain a few pieces that combine to form a puzzle that you can't complete yet. Because of this, you're constantly trying to figure out which pieces fit a puzzle that you can solve now, and which pieces you should set aside for later.
Some puzzles are quite tricky
In the first few seasons I didn't find it too difficult. However, that changed in the later seasons as the developers used some devilish tricks to really figure out which pieces belong to which puzzles.
For example, in one season there were pieces that appeared to be composed into a peacock with large colorful circles on the feathers. Then I started combining pieces with more colorful circles, but they turned out to be owl eyes. I tried to find a way for the owls and the peacock to be connected for longer than I'd like to admit – until I finally realized it was them two separate images.
Two of my biggest problems with puzzles were how long they take and how messy they are. They can turn an activity that should be fun into a chore. But Wilmot manages it fixes both and highlights what I love about puzzles in a delightful video game.
Wilmot manages it is now available for PC and Mac.