I used to hate puzzles. I thought they were frustrating, confusing, and took too much time to figure out. But my wife showed me how those parts of puzzles can be really fun: There's something satisfying and meditative about working through those frustrations, sorting through the clutter, and putting a picture together, one piece at a time, over the course of a few hours. (Or days.)
The creators of Wilmot solves itA new puzzle game, get it, and everything in 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 mail-in puzzle subscription. (It's the same smiling square of Wilmot Warehouse(, a 2019 puzzle game also created by developers Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg and published by Finji). Every time you open a new package delivered by Sam, your mailman friend, the pieces appear in a jumble on the floor so you can put them together. together forming a painting to hang on the wall.
When you've put together a complete puzzle, Sam usually arrives at your door with a brief conversation and a new box of pieces to examine. After finishing a bunch of puzzles, you'll complete a “season” and can move on to the next, which increases the difficulty.
Wilmot solves it has some clever ways to make the process of putting pieces together easier. Unlike all the puzzles I've done in real life, the puzzle pieces wilmot They are all square. This sounds annoying, but since you don't have to rotate the pieces to put them together, it's much easier to compare them side to side to see if they fit. 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. Yo beloved Chasing those chimes.
Those design choices make it much easier to put together puzzles quickly. But the best trick of the game is that puzzle packs usually contain a few pieces that connect to a puzzle that you can't finish yet. Because of that, you're constantly trying to figure out which pieces fit into a puzzle that you can solve now and which pieces you're supposed to put aside for later.
Some puzzles are quite complicated.
In the early seasons, I didn't find this too difficult. That's changed in recent seasons, however, as the developers have some devilish tricks to make you really work to figure out which pieces belong to which puzzle.
One season, for example, featured pieces that seemed to come together to form a peacock with large colored circles in its 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 connect for longer than I care to admit, until I finally realized that they were two separate photos.
Two of my biggest problems with puzzles have been how long they take and how complicated they are. They can take what should be a fun activity and turn it into a chore. But Wilmot solves it solves both, highlighting what I love about puzzles in one charming video game.
Wilmot solves it It is now available for PC and Mac.
