About a month ago, I was idly browsing through Twitter when i came across a rather strange game called Wilmot's Warehouse. It featured an adorably blocky character (presumably named Wilmot) who was moving blocks around a game world (which I presumed was the titular warehouse). I was quite keen on trying it out for myself, and I had no idea the sort of nightmare I would unleash.
Wilmot's Warehouse is a game that is very, very simple at its face. You are in charge of a warehouse. As the sole employee, you have the freedom to store various items wherever you want within the confines of the building. Your only goal is to get four deliveries to your fellow employees in a little over a minute, with bonus stars awarded for quick delivery.
Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Very, very wrong.
The Three Phases of Wilmot's Warehouse
Wilmot's Warehouse has three phases: the Delivery Phase, the Service Phase, and the Stock Take. Each phase has its own distinct challenges for players to overcome, and two of these three phases have a time limit that can get pretty tight as your warehouse gets fuller.
In the Delivery Phase, a truck backs up to the bottom middle of the warehouse and unloads several items, a portion of which are probably going to be new additions. You then have just a few minutes to place these wherever you'd like in the warehouse. You can end the countdown prematurely, but there's no bonus for doing so, so you really ought to make sure that you have everything set up as best as you possibly can.
Once that's over with, the Service Phase comes in. Four of your co-workers will pop up at the top middle of the screen, asking for one or more items. You have to gather these items from the warehouse and bring them to the window before time runs out. You're finished once all four of them have been serviced, and you can end the phase early for a bonus.
The bonuses awarded in the Service Phase are what allow you to purchase upgrades at the end of a quarter, so it's very important that you get it done as quickly as possible. The challenge is only going to increase as time goes on and you'll want every advantage possible.
After several rounds of alternating between the Delivery Phase and the Service Phase, you get a bit of a breather in the Stock Take. The Stock Take is like the Delivery Phase in that a larger-than-usual truckload of goods gets delivered at the loading dock. However, you have as much time as you'd like to move everything around and get it organized however you like.
Memory and Organization
One thing that is key to doing well in Wilmot's Warehouse is your memory. You can only see a few boxes deep into a stack, so you really have to remember where the heck you've placed everything in the warehouse.
In the two hours or so I spent with the game, I made use of a system that sorted items based on their color. Items that were mostly blue were in the Northwest corner of the warehouse, purple items were further south, and so on. This made the most sense to me, but problems emerged as I played on.
You see, there are hundreds of items in Wilmot's Warehouse and you unlock more than a dozen every quarter — four items after each Service Phase. Each item is represented only by an icon and some of them look staggeringly familiar to one another, so much so that it can be very easy to get confused and grab the wrong thing.
The way you set everything up in the Stock Take will determine your failures and successes in the subsequent Service Phases. I'm sure that someone more organizationally-minded could devise a smart way to sort everything, but I just haven't been able to figure out something that works well.
'Unique relaxing gameplay'
The phrase "unique relaxing gameplay" is noted as one of the features of Wilmot's Warehouse. Whether or not this game is relaxing depends on how you approach the game, I suppose.
I've worked in warehouses and similar jobs where getting orders out as fast as possible is the priority. It is never relaxing. It is chaos. Even in the neatest, best-organized warehouse, it is chaos. Wilmot's Warehouse is no different, and I'm tempted to question the sanity of whoever may have described this as "relaxing".
I found Wilmot's Warehouse enjoyable in short bursts. I don't think I could play a marathon session without going batty. It can be hectic and your success or failure is highly dependent on how good your memory is and how well you organize the warehouse.
I think there are people out there who would appreciate the challenge of trying to organize a constantly-shifting warehouse and trying to get things moving as efficiently as possible. I'm just not one of them.
TechRaptor covered Wilmot's Warehouse on PC via Steam using a copy provided by the developer.