Wilmot’s Warehouse is a delightfully refreshing take on the puzzle genre. You – Wilmot – need to take deliveries, organize them in your warehouse, and deliver them. Sounds easy, right? Did I mention there are 200 different items you’ll need to organize, and most everything is timed? Oh, and you are a white square with a cute smiley face, and all the items you have to organize are the same size as you, just with different, colorful images on them? And that you can unlock a helper named Borky?
Well, buckle up. Wilmot’s Warehouse is simultaneously soothing and stressful – and I had a hard time putting it down.
Platforms: PC (Version Played), Switch
Publisher: Finji
Developer: Ricky Haggett and Richard Hogg
Genre: Organizational Simulator
Release Date: August 29, 2019
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Though it also includes a splitscreen co-op option, I decided to go it alone after I initially installed Wilmot’s Warehouse. In a new game, the first thing that pops up are the four items you’ll be getting in your next delivery. You can put the icons for them anywhere you want on your manifest. Then you receive a delivery in your warehouse of 30 items, and it’s up to you to move and organize them as you see fit. Want to put all the “toys” together on the right wall? Want to put all the abstract symbols together in the middle column? Want to be a total anarchist and organize everything by color? It’s your warehouse, Wilmot. You get to decide!
You have two minutes to deal with the delivery, and then the Hatch opens, and your co-workers need some stuff to deliver, STAT. You can only carry a few things at a time in the beginning, and you have to hoof it to them as quickly as possible. The faster you make your delivery to them, the more Performance Stars you get. Once you get through a quarter – that’s three rounds – you get to do a Stock Take, which is an unlimited amount of time to deal with a delivery and, if need be, reorganize your warehouse.
Every round involves getting four new items, and those are added to the manifest with the items you already have. So your truck delivery will have some number of those new items, and some random amount of other items you’ve already unlocked as well. And there are 200 items total in the game. In the beginning, you can organize the manifest, but as the game goes on, it gets more and more impossible to make any sense of how to keep track of everything.
Wilmot’s Warehouse gets out of hand very quickly. First of all, there’s a threshold at which you can see items in the warehouse. After that point, they start to lose their color, and then become an outline on the screen. So once you start stacking them in places, you can’t necessarily gauge how far back you’re going, which means you may not be sure how many of which thing you have. (I have to admit – while this certainly isn’t a real warehouse simulator, that part felt very accurate in what I imagine it’s like to deal with stacks on stacks of giant boxes.)
In the center of the warehouse are six columns, and you can organize items around them – but that starts to cut off your maneuverability very quickly. Stock Take ends up coming in handy – but so do the powerups that you can unlock with your Performance Stars. These upgrades allow you to delete columns, hire Borky, carry more stuff around, and get a mini-map that shows you where everything is in your warehouse at one time.
My husband, Anthony, was watching me play, and I could feel him getting increasingly frustrated at how inefficient I was being. He is an expert-tier Factorio player, so I could feel his efficiency-simulator brain kicking it into high gear. So naturally, it was time to restart the game in cooperative mode, and we had more fun than I even thought possible.
In co-op mode, the screen is split vertically, so you can see what the other player is doing and, if there are too many items on the screen, you can help them to navigate by positioning yourself in a way that allows them to see past their blind spot. We organized everything as best we could, but every single round, you get four more items, and there were some boxes that we thought belonged in our abstract symbol area, and let’s just say that area got straight up out of control. But we did the best we could, and I’m happy to report that we never once missed a single delivery to the Hatch. I can’t say I did that well in my single-player game, but it turns out Anthony and I are darn good at managing a virtual warehouse.
Oh, I forgot to mention – once you hit certain numbers in the game, your boss, CJ, celebrates by bringing you to his office and commending you – and giving you a nice poster that you can look at whenever you want. What a thoughtful boss! His bland praise and silly posters make the ending even funnier – and darker. If you enjoy the game, I will say that it’s worth to get all the way to the end.
Wilmot’s Warehouse really surprised me with its depth and humor. I was worried it would wear out quickly, or ramp up too slowly, but it got more difficult at the perfect pace. We were laughing as we dashed around trying to get what our co-workers needed, and more than once, I yelled “Damn you, Borky!” as our robot friend kept dropping things off in inconvenient places. I highly recommend playing Wilmot’s Warehouse with a friend if you can, but even if you can’t, it’s worth a try.
Review Disclosure: A review copy of Wilmot’s Warehouse was provided by Finji for the purposes of this review.
