Wilmot's Warehouse is a clever puzzle to stay organized

It can be difficult to find the time to complete a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week. In our biweekly column Short game, we suggest video games that can be started and ended a weekend.

About two minutes in the puzzle game The Wilmot warehouse, I had a moment "Oh no!". This is the kind of moment that just played a lot of Sid Meier's games like Civilization or SimGolf where you blink and a whole day is gone. This is the kind of moment when, even when you recognize the feeling, you still say, "OK, but just one more trick."

In the game, you control Wilmot, a manager who manages a warehouse full of squares of similar size with images representing in an abstract way what they contain. One could have a bird's head on it, while another might have an alternating series of red and white diagonal lines. As Wilmot, it's up to you to manage the warehouse by organizing it as you see fit and recovering items on demand.

This naturally divides the game into two separate steps, which can test your puzzle solving abilities in different ways. The organizational step tests your ability to sort everything in the warehouse while planning. During the recovery phase, you need to remember where you are putting things and you will also know if you have made your warehouse navigable.

At each stage of recovery, you will have four people at a service window asking for various things stored in the warehouse. One could ask for two blocks that look like the head of a fountain pen and three camping tents, while another wants a cartoon duck head. The faster you gather them and respond to requests, the more stars you get. These stars can then be used later to upgrade your warehouse or give new skills to Wilmot. Finally, it can carry more boxes or travel short distances. But when you "grab" a block, it simply attaches to Wilmot or a block that is attached to Wilmot. As you start collecting more items in the warehouse, Wilmot begins to give the impression that they are attached to a tetromino from a knock-off Tetris If you have planned properly, it will be difficult to navigate the warehouse.

That's why you will spend most of your time organizing the warehouse. At the beginning of each day, you have unlimited time to organize boxes as you wish. At first, it's pretty easy because there are maybe 20 or 30 varieties of things that you have to follow. However, as you complete each batch of orders, you can add up to four new types of items to your warehouse stock.

In the end, you will have to stop remembering where each individual type is and start grouping things the same way and remember where that group is. As a result, you may not remember exactly where the fountain pens are, but you will remember that you have grouped all the stationary boxes at the bottom left of the warehouse. That is, until you start running out of space to fit everything you have effectively, that is, when you're going to have to rework your whole organization scheme.

The brilliance of Warehouse Wilmot it is that you will never have a perfect solution. It always changes. It is quite easy to start the game after a few laps of recovery and organization to such an extent that you may feel as if you have solved it or at least been solving it. But as new items and new varieties begin to arrive, you begin to find efficiency problems in your organization – whether because of the way or where you grouped them, it is difficult to navigate or because you can not easily remember where something is. Worse, these are all problems that you have created yourself.

But even if you have a good system, you'll spend more time in the back of the game making sure things are organized. It is surprisingly exciting to see that all your preparation pays off when you manage to spend a day of trouble-free recovery, knowing exactly where the items are and getting them out of the stores in the right configuration for easy navigation through the store. 39; warehouse.

The game ends when you get 200 varieties of objects. At this point, Wilmot is returned and replaced by a fully automated robotic system. It sounds a bit abrupt, but you can always start a new game to continue or even switch to an expert mode that allows you to edit some of the rules for more difficulty. Even during your second part, you will always have these moments "Oh no!".

Warehouse Wilmot was created by Ricky Haggett and Richard Hogg. You can get it for $ 14.99 on Steam, Itch.io (Windows and macOS), and the Nintendo Switch. It takes about seven hours or more to finish.