Instead, it exudes a calm and homely sense of idle comfort.

For me, that ultimately makes it less compelling, even if it is thematically the entire point.

This is about a warehouse worker doing jigsaws on his day off.

Wilmot stands over three nearly complete puzzles in his hallway.

Here, no such pressures exist.

The only snag in your gentle pottering is that some packages will contain surplus pieces.

Aha, it’s a bunch of tools.

The postwoman arrives and makes small talk with Wilmot.

This one is a crowd of trumpeters.

It’s a moth.

There is burger yet to come.

The wall of Wilmot’s living room is covered in colourful puzzles.

They are not the grand revelations of brainier puzzle games but a tiny hint of complication.

You’re basically asked to do more than one puzzle at a time.

This is something that will dog my experience of Works It Out, when compared with Warehouse.

Wilmot considers the final pieces in a snake puzzle.

Solving the boxy puzzles of this new instalment leads to some familiar questions for fans of the previous outing.

Does this piece go with the burger bun or the diving helmet?

Is this brown piece the bark of a tree or moose fur?

Four rooms in the house are shown at once on a selection screen.

Only this time they’re not questions of category, but of shape and colour.

Critically, this time there is a definitive answer.

It is the burger bun, you fool.

Wilmot ponders a few puzzle pieces with a quizzical expression.

It is the moose fur.yo.

What that means for players is that you’re not really the one making any significant decisions.

This pile is “flags”, that pile is “food”.

A season of puzzles in completed and hanging on the wall.

In Wilmot’s home, there’s only one solution to any puzzle.

Because of this, I find it doesn’t hold the same mental weight as the warehouse.

This is Wilmot outside of work, it makes sense he’d be more relaxed and less pressured.

“But it’s cosy!”

I hear you whisper forcefully into your hot chocolate.

And that’s true.

You’ll unlock new rooms to decorate.

You’ll put down cacti and palms, all coordinated to the colour scheme of these rooms.

It’s very cosy.

Look at the size of his bedroom!

That’s on me, of course.

Wilmot is actually very nice, I concede.

But I still greatly prefer him as an employed busybody.

Sowing fields inStardew Valley, building a house in Minecraft, stacking crates in Wilmot’s Warehouse.

These are acts of control and ordering in a low-threat environment.

“Ah, this is so relaxing, socosy”.

But for a game to deliver significant release, it must first create sufficient tension.

In Stardew Valley, your energy runs out.

In Minecraft, monsters come at night.

In Wilmot’s Warehouse, the customers want their goodsnow.

In Wilmot Works It Out, the puzzle is simply incomplete.

It’s a happily meditative game, and by design less energetic.

That means the release I feel from solving a jigsaw simply won’t be as strong.

You are assigned a task, and then you complete that task.

But having figured them all out once already, I’m not sure I fancy it again.

It’s a quieter game, about turningdownthe knob in your brain that says “categorise”.

That makes it both more chill as a task and less interesting as a game.

Both are comforting, but I find one more stimulating than the other.