Wilmot’s Warehouse

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local Split-Screen)

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Review:

Wilmot’s Warehouse is a family-friendly Puzzle game with a pretty simple premise – you are a box-shaped employee working in a warehouse that receives a variety of box-shaped items, which must then be sorted for storage however you see fit within the time allotted. Then, you’ll be approached at a customer window where you must retrieve specific items from among those in your storage, again with a limited amount of time. The better you sort and store items, and the better you remember where everything is, the easier it will be to retrieve them.

The game’s visuals are presented in a simple fashion, with a plain black background and with boxes using various simple, color-coded graphics to depict their contents. It’s not impressive in any way, but the simplicity is probably for the best to help you keep track of what is where, especially because by the end of the game you’ll be keeping track of 500 different products (by then, suffice it to say, your sorting skills had better be on point). These simple graphics are paired with a dreamy trance-like electronica soundtrack that helps the game to feel relaxed and mellow, even as you’re racing to get boxes sorted or put an order together.

After a brief tutorial, you’re left to fend for yourself, and it’s refreshing how little hand-holding the game does. You can sort boxes however you choose – heck, leave a bunch out in the middle of the room if you like. Just be sure to leave the loading area free for the next shipment, and how you go about moving the boxes around is up to you.

What’s more, to some extent you’re free to manage your time how you like. Finish putting together customers’ orders early? You can report the job done and get extra points for finishing quickly (which in turn net you upgraded abilities), or you can make use of the extra time to get a bit more sorting out of the way before the next shipment arrives. It’s this game’s hands-off approach to how you play that is one of its greatest strengths.

The game’s controls are decent enough once you get used to them, although it does take some time adjusting to how the game handles picking up and dropping multiple boxes at a time. Players also have the ability to spin their grabbed boxes like one would do with a Tetris piece, in order to better arrange things or fit a group of pieces through a narrow gap. I’ll say that the controls here never quite felt natural to me, but they never felt so overly cumbersome that it made it difficult to play – I just had to think through what I was doing a bit more.

This game touts a local split-screen Co-Op mode that’s a wonderful addition, as this is a pretty ideal game to play in co-op, since players will have to communicate to divide tasks and keep track of inventory – does one player sort while the other grabs orders? Is one responsible for the left side of the warehouse and the other takes the right? Again, the game leaves it to the players, and how well they coordinate will determine how successful they are.

In terms of gameplay modes and options, Wilmot’s Warehouse has a Normal mode that includes some helpful assistance like showing you orders when you’re away from customers and giving you occasional “stock checks” where you have an endless amount of time to organize boxes until you’re ready. There’s also an Expert mode where you can opt to remove or restrict one or both of these features or place other handicaps on yourself. One this the game doesn’t have and I wish it did was a more casual mode where players could play without a time limit, or perhaps a limited-move mode or a puzzle mode – this game’s relaxing core nature kinda’ runs counter to its use of time limits, and it would have been nice to have an option to play without them.

In the end, Wilmot’s Warehouse does a good job of putting together a simple, compelling Puzzle game with a solid Co-Op mode, even if it’s light on game modes to cater to different styles of play. Fans of Puzzle games would do well to check this one out, especially if they’re looking for good local co-op.

tl;dr – Wilmot’s Warehouse is a family-friendly Puzzle game that has players sorting boxes as they see fit, and then looking for specific boxes to fill customer orders. It’s a simple game with compelling puzzle gameplay that lets players decide the best way to go about doing things, and it’s even better in co-op. I wish the game had more gameplay modes that didn’t rush the player, but overall this is a solid entry in the genre, especially if you have a friend to play with.

Grade: B+

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