Wilmot Works It Out is the best parts of jigsaw puzzles, but faster and cleaner

I used to hate jigsaw puzzles. I thought they were frustrating, messy, and took way too long to solve. But my wife showed me how those parts of jigsaw puzzles can actually be fun: there’s something satisfying and meditative about working through those frustrations, sorting through the mess, and putting a picture together, one piece at a time, over the course of a few hours. (Or days.)

The makers of Wilmot Works It Out, a new puzzle game, understand this, and everything about the game is designed to make solving puzzles fun instead of annoying.

In the game, you play as Wilmot, an adorable white square with a face who has a puzzle-by-mail subscription. (He’s the same smiley square from Wilmot’s Warehouse, a 2019 puzzle game also made by developers Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg and published by Finji.) Every time you open a new package delivered by Sam, your mail carrier friend, the pieces appear in a jumble on the floor so you can match them together into a picture to put on the wall.

When you’ve put up a completed puzzle, Sam typically comes knocking with a brief conversation and a new box of pieces to sift through. After you finish a bunch of puzzles, you’ll complete a “season” and can move on to the next, which amps up the difficulty.

Wilmot Works It Out has a few clever ways to iron out the process of putting pieces together. Unlike every jigsaw puzzle I’ve done in real life, the puzzle pieces in Wilmot are all square. That sounds annoying, but because you don’t have to rotate the pieces to match them, it’s much easier to compare pieces side to side to see if they might fit together. When you slide a piece next to its correct counterpart, the piece you’re holding flashes once, and you’ll hear a soft but satisfying chime. I loved chasing those chimes. 

Those design choices make it much easier to quickly assemble puzzles. But the game’s best trick is that puzzle packages typically contain a few pieces that connect to a puzzle you can’t finish yet. Because of that, you’re constantly trying to figure out which pieces fit a puzzle you can solve now and which pieces are supposed to be set aside for later.

In the early seasons, I didn’t find this to be too difficult. That changed in the later seasons, though, as the developers have some devilish tricks to make you really work to figure out which pieces belong with which puzzles.

One season, for example, featured pieces that seemed to assemble into a peacock with big colorful circles on its feathers. Then, I started matching pieces with more colorful circles, but they turned out to be owl eyes. I tried to find a way for the owls and peacock to connect for longer than I care to admit — until I eventually realized that they were two separate pictures.

Two of my biggest problems with jigsaw puzzles have been how long they take and how messy they are. They can take what should be a fun activity and turn it into a chore. But Wilmot Works It Out fixes both, highlighting what I love about jigsaw puzzles in a delightful video game.

Wilmot Works It Out is out now on PC and Mac.