You know how games like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing can make chores and work seem fun? Well, I never thought I'd be frantically raving to my friends about how much I enjoyed a game that consists entirely of organizing objects and doing warehouse labor as a little white square with :^) for a face, but here we are.

Do they think I'm crazy now? Probably.

Bought the soundtrack on vinyl, too. Whoops.

Wilmot’s Warehouse is a logistical organization game developed by Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg. You play as Wilmot, a cute little square with a smiley face who runs a warehouse with over 500 possible products. You receive shipments, which you then need to sort and organize before customers give you requests. It’s a fairly short, but satisfying gameplay loop that gets increasingly more complex as you unlock new products.

It was originally available as a Humble Original through the Humble Monthly Trove, but this new version has been fleshed out and polished a little more. If you’re a HB subscriber, I’d highly recommend trying the old version that’s available, you’ll quickly figure out whether or not you want to buy the game on Steam.

• Great art, I particularly like Wilmot’s design. The music is really well done too.
  
  
• The core gameplay is satisfying, and having the constant transition between organizing and collecting orders helps to keep things interesting.
  
  
• As you progress, you’ll be able to unlock upgrades that add in new mechanics or improve something you could already do, such as increasing your load limit or giving you a dash ability.
  
  
• The level of difficulty progresses really well. Each delivery makes the game feel slightly more difficult than the last time, but I didn’t feel like there was ever a big jump.
  
  
• For a game with time limits, it’s surprisingly relaxing. There are bonuses associated with completing the order phase but it’s not a big deal if you miss out on them.
  
  
• The game saves any time you pause, which also means you can quit anytime without losing progress.
  
  
• Every three cycles, you get free time called Stock Take, which you can use to rearrange your warehouse. This is also when you’re able to unlock upgrades. It’s nice to have some downtime to get things back in order.

• Some of the product designs are so ambiguous that it’s hard to tell what they are. I saw it as a kind of extra challenge, trying to categorize things you don’t recognize is tough, but I’m not entirely sure if this is an intentional challenge and I could see this being frustrating for some people. Either way, it only effects a minority of the products in the game.
  
  
• There is an expert mode that lets you toggle three different options to increase difficulty. It’s a nice touch for people looking for an extra challenge, but I would have like to have seen more options or special modifiers (such as no upgrades) as well as a third customizable difficulty level with options to make things easier or harder.

• When you unlock new products, you’re given a manifest screen that shows all of your current products as well as what’s just been unlocked. You can rearrange things to organize things into categories, but unfortunately this isn’t saved when you save and quit, making the organization of it pointless. I would have also liked this to have some kind of effect on the organization of the delivery itself, but it doesn’t.

Wilmot’s Warehouse won’t appeal to everyone, but they’ve done a great job at creating a satisfying organization game. It’s a unique concept that’s well executed. Some may consider $15 to a be a bit pricey, but I think it’s well worth the price of admission.

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Oh great, new items to ruin my organization.

Wilmot’s Warehouse is a simple game. You basically play a cheerful square named Wilmot who recently got employed at a warehouse. At the start of each round you’ll be getting deliveries of what you’ll be stocking your warehouse with, which are other squares with some art on it to signify what it is. It’s all up to you to decide where these products will go, how it’s organized, and how you interpret what the art is supposed to be for some products where it isn’t as clear. However, you better be quick about it as you’re on limited time here to finish stocking up. Once that phase is complete, you’ll enter service phase. In service phase you’ll be delivering these products to four co-workers, each asking for different things, in a short amount amount of time. So you’ll have to remember where everything generally is and be able to get it and get to the service hatch in time. Of course, having products grouped up by similar type helps. Depending on how quickly you fulfill all the orders, and if you fulfill the orders of co-workers with stars under them, you’ll get stars for your work. Though, remember to clock out or you won’t be able to get as many, or any, of those stars.

And then you start back over on the stocking phase. While you do start with only a handful of products, it slowly increases as you continue playing. At the end of most rounds, you’ll get four new products to sort in. In addition, co-workers will transition into asking for multiple products in various quantities. Making sure everything has its place while still having room to navigate around while holding products certainly gets challenging once you pass the 100 product threshold. Especially when no one is making bulk orders (I had so many wheelchairs man).

Every three rounds, you’ll finally get to the Stock Take phase. You can take it easy here. You don’t get new products, but you’ll be able to choose an upgrade. These help tremendously. Upgrades range from upgrading Wilmot so you can pick up more products and rotate them, to demolishing pillars so you can have more room, to even some optional additions that’ll give you an electronical pal, a map, or an upgrade that lets you see a timelapse of your warehouse. Don’t worry, you can get dungarees too. After you decide whether or not to upgrade, you’ll get a bulk product delivery and be able to sort for as long as you need. Yes, you heard that right. If you need to reorganize or fix stacks that you hastily placed, you can do that without worry before continuing onto the service phase.

Wilmot’s Warehouse continues until you hit 200 products.

If Normal difficulty isn’t challenging enough, you can play on Expert. Expert basically just lets you to set custom rules. You can lower how much time you have to sort, if you’ll have a timed or no stock take phase, or if you’ll be able to see orders when away from the service hatch. Or you can play with a friend through local/remote play co-op. I didn’t play co-op, but your screen is split. You’ll have less room to look (though it isn’t that much of a problem since products are obscured unless you’re a couple blocks away), but you’ll see what your partner is doing as well as what products are around them.

However, there really isn’t a fail condition or consequences for failing a round. Other than being told that your boss is very disappointed and Wilmot doing a “oh no” face, you only lose out on getting stars (which won’t be a big deal once you get all the upgrades you want). Considering that this is supposed to be a chill game, I’m not too surprised, but I’m a little bit surprised there wasn’t an option where you’d get fired in expert difficulties (or more aspects you can customize to make a run harder).

While Wilmot’s Warehouse is only going to appeal to those that like to organize things, it’s definitely going to be a worthwhile purchase. As there are 500 possible products, every warehouse is going to be different both by what products the warehouse has, how it’s organized, and what the product’s art is interpreted. This game ended up being more addicting than I thought as I constantly went back to it both to further how many products I have and to just relax as I was playing Heart’s Medicine - Doctor’s Oath at the same time, while having quick moments of stress I tried to deliver everything on time and get most products sorted. If you’ve been eying Wilmot’s Warehouse for a while, I definitely recommend picking this up.

This is equal parts a language game, as it is a game about working within limitations.

Do the volcanoes go next to the mountains, because nature? Or sailboats, because islands? Or dinosaurs, because reasons?

Do the tomatoes do next to the apples, because of fruit? Or next to the apple cores, because they belong in the trash like the awful food that they are?

Bit by bit, you unlock upgrades that really feel like upgrades. Your first upgrade is the ability to rotate, which feels like a damn superpower. Before you know it, you'll be demolishing obstacles, checking out a map, and dashing around.

It is shockingly relaxing to play, even when the delivery driver just dumps out mammoth tusks mixed in with sandwiches, like he doesn't even remember the kind of black market we're running here.

10/10 would contemplate semantics as an ASCII face again.

Every third round in Wilmot's Warehouse you get a round in which you have unlimited time to rearrange your warehouse. UNLIMITED TIME. So sure, dump the socks by the traffic cones, I mean, the shutter's coming up in ten seconds and you have to get ready to fill some orders. But the next time you do a stock take? You'd better move those to... well... um... hm. We don't have a clothing department yet, so... start one? Or just stick the socks with the mittens in the Winter section? Yeah, that'll be all right. (And no, by the way, I don't agree that lemons are diamond-shaped, but we'll let that one slide.)

Also, after every round, when new products unlock and start being delivered, you can drag them around and group them on the stock list screen to plan how to group things together. A secondary screen to sort and arrange! No, I don't know where hundreds-and-thousands should go, either.

As a fan of Storage Inc (the first one; never played the second), Wilmot's Warehouse immediately called to me for the logistical nightmare that it is and apparently it also called to my wife as she passed by, seeing me sort out little icons. I had been playing for a couple of hours or so when she stopped behind me and was like, "ooh, what's this?" Once I had explained it to her, she proceeded to apply a full nelson on me and huff me over the back of my chair and took over. She did 5.5hrs in that one sitting.

You see, my wife and I are very different creatures when it comes to certain things. She adores taking all of my stuff and shoving it into bins and "organizing" everything to the point where I can't find anything whereas I tend to stack things on open surfaces and have a pretty good recall when it comes to zeroing in on the thing I'm looking for. I prefer to keep things loose in that I remember where I left things and therefore where I first put it down is where it lives. She prefers a tighter ship, categorizing and sorting, then stuffing things away neatly somewhere. This dichotomy is exemplified in the two profiles that we have going in my copy of Wilmot's.

The game itself is rather simple in concept - you are in charge of a warehouse that stocks any number of items as described by perfectly-square icons and during each shift, people will appear at the counter and request a specific amount of specific types of items. The trick is you have a limited amount of time to run into your warehouse, grab all the stuff that's being requested and bring them back to the counter. The faster you do it, the more bonus points you earn to spend on unlocking abilities or making more room in the warehouse. Simple, right? Except that how the warehouse is organized is entirely up to you. As far as the game is concerned, it only cares that you deliver the specific items that are being requested in the time allotted. The remaining part of your shift which is also timed is receiving new stock and organizing it before the next requests come in.

The shipment is more often than not a chaotic jumble of stuff and you need to take it all from the loading dock and sort them out however you like. At first, the warehouse will be cluttered with giant pillars which initially help you figure out your starting areas, but you will eventually want to obliterate them with your earned points in order to get more room to put things away. You have a limited amount of time to square things away so that when it comes time to actually pick stock and bring it to the counter, you're not wandering around your warehouse wondering where you put something.

At first, the game is pretty easy as you'll have only a handful of items to organize. The icons themselves are meaningless under the hood, so to speak, as they are all the same size. The difference between each piece of stock is simply a picture which can be specific or abstract. You can sort them by theme, background color, or whatever other category suits your fancy. However, this task becomes increasingly daunting as you progress towards the item count of 200. That's 200 categories, not 200 individual pieces of stock. You don't control what comes in so you'll often have to re-organize your collections, especially when completely new stuff comes in that doesn't slot into your established head canon.

Do your job fast enough and you'll earn stars which can be spent during the stocktake, which is also a bit of a breather for you as this is an untimed moment in the game where you can reorganize the entire warehouse as you see fit before starting another volley of timed rounds. The stars themselves can be spent on strengthening yourself, giving yourself a speed boost, a robot helper (who sucks, don't get him), removing the pillars, etc. It's a strangely addictive gameplay loop for those who find fun in managing logistics or at the very least, those people that walk into stores and reorganize the shelves because they don't look right.

Between my wife and I, our warehouses are testaments to our personalities insofar as organization goes. My warehouse is extremely loosey-goosey with little rhyme or reason to where things go. I tend to just find a spot and remember where the stuff is until the stocktake where I will try to figure something out for the next run, usually confusing myself because it takes a while to shake the initial locations from my memory. My wife's warehouse, on the other hand is an immaculate work of organization; she doesn't rely on the stocktake. She went straight to the outer walls and had everything in very specific categories that don't mesh in my head, but totally mesh in hers. We looked at each others' warehouses and simply balked, criticizing each other and making harsh personality judgments. It was hilarious. The only thing we really had in common was a "WTF" pile for the more abstract icons that can't be sorted into real-world buckets.

While I definitely enjoyed my time with this game, I treated it as a casual experience, something to do while I'm doing other things; my wife considered it her duty to make the best warehouse possible, such that I even wandered away to take a nap and she didn't even notice I was gone. I woke up, played something on the TV, played with the dog, and made dinner. It wasn't until the smell of food snapped her out of her logistics trance that she had noticed how much time had passed.

The Richards have tapped into something very special and taken the simplest of concepts with the cleanest of UIs and made some magic for this household. Perhaps it'll do the same for yours.

Wilmot's Warehouse is an obsessive organizer wet dream.

It's like running an amazon warehouse by yourself.
Do your best to keep everything organized so you can mentally find its place when the item is requested.
Be quick, be efficient or you'll be shortly drowning in hundreds of random items !

[:^)]

If you're autistic this game is like crack 10/10

I love logistics.
I love pick up and delivery.

This is probably the most casual these mechanisms can be implemented in a game without compromising on the strategy and challenge they typically require. Instead, it offers a mental exercise in categorization and the meaning we give often abstract images.

If you're looking for something with supply chain management, transportation and economic efficiency, there's plenty of good options elsewhere; this is a game my mom could play and have a good time.

The gameplay can be a bit repetitive - after 8 hours over 2 days, I was glad to see my playthrough end - but I will likely come back to this in the future.

Wilmot's Warehouse is a very specific kind of game that indulges the organizer in a player. This game does a single thing very well and for me is a meditative; satisfying experience that I wasn't sure I would care about before trying it out. For a relatively simple game Wilmot does get complicated and there are a good number of factors to juggle when creating the perfect warehouse. Or at least one that gets the things to the place with even a little bit of time to spare. There is a good balance of hectic moments, peaceful but very much still timed organizing and then straight up free time every so often to fix everything you have done trying to rush stuff out. Highly recommended to try at least; you'll know if Wilmot is for you in less than hour easy.