I kind of hate this game but it hasn't left my mind since the very first time I tried it. It is hypnotic and somewhat relaxing despite also being crushingly difficult and often panic-inducing. There's an overtly ironic tone throughout the titular Warehouse that aims to satirize modern work culture, but more often than not it hits a little too close for comfort and winds up feeling soul-crushing. I'm really not sure what to make of this game, but I also often find myself coming back to it from time to time.

I have, quite frankly, never felt more alive than when I was coming up with complex storage schemes on the fly while I lagged one and a half truckloads behind, zig-zagging through narrow lanes like some kind of twisted demon of geometry. Ive learned I have precious talents (organizing blocks) that I could be contributing to society if I didnt have to waste my life doing much less intelligent work for a paycheck, me and Wilmot both.

I didnt even realize until after I had completed the game and convinced my friend to play it, that the game gives you a couple of strikes before failing you and starting over. I played this game like it all had to be done in one shot, I didnt even know there was more than one character until my boss was laying me off.

Wilmot's Warehouse is a gem. A worldless game of semantics and logistics where you plan on-the-fly and curse yourself later for your foolish decisions.

Patterened squares arrive in the warehouse, and you later deliver specifically request patterns/shapes to your customers. The game however happens in the time between, as you find spaces in your warehouse to store your squares - grouping them by shape or colour or meanings so they can be found again at a later date.

6x squares with an Orange? Easy. They're over here with the foods.. or over there with the circles.. oops.

It's such a simple design, but ultimately so clever and satisfying. Wilmot's Warehouse is a game many more people should play.

I've loved Wilmot's Warehouse mostly from afar since it's release, occasionally picking it up for an hour until reaching around 100 items, getting overwhelmed, and shelving it again. Over the past few weeks, however, and after five years of my living space becoming increasingly chaotic (particularly throughout the pandemic), renovations have been underway and are almost complete. With more clothes than dresser space, more books than bookshelves would allow, and a collection of tchotchkes, bulky controllers, and piles on top of piles of things that my cat kept knocking over, reorganisation was crucial just as more storage was. Within that context of shuffling everything around, not simply moving it out and plopping it back in, Wilmot's Warehouse finally made sense.

The shuffle of the warehouse is ongoing as mental categories ebb and flow across artificial boundaries. A bottle of liquid goes from my medicine area to the science area to the food area to the liquids area back to the medicine area. A tent goes with outdoor paraphernalia on the side for temporary shelter (opposite my weather conditions), itself abutted against permanent structures, construction goods, and patterns. An influx of tree stumps upsets the spacing of all my botanical wares, so much so that I move them with other measurement iconography (tree rings show time, are they not the calendars of nature?).

Like the pillars cleared with my performance stars, those new vast storage spaces let me categorise my own collection. Books with books, sure, but with academic texts in a place of their own, art books elsewhere, historical tomes too receive a space, writing on games adjacent to other books but also physical games. Those, of course, are near my music CDs. My archival cases of X68000 print media and diskettes stay with texts on games because they too are referential works.

It sounds innocuous and almost childlike to describe this in such a way, but these spatial allocations are the product of manoeuvring things around other things for a fortnight. It approaches a completeness, but the few remaining things threaten to displace other things meaning a potential collapse of this established order of things. If necessary, I'll dedicate a weekend to my own stock take, laboriously but methodically getting everything back into its place. For now.

Every collection of things is ultimately a self-serving system of chaos teetering on the brink. Archives, libraries, stores, warehouses, attics, bookshelves, museums, landfills, mechanics, grocers, blogs, directories, transit systems. With my post-graduate studies in library and information science beginning in the autumn, I too will be a cog in the machine of sorting one of humanity's warehouses. Like Wilmot, I hope to have a smile on my face all the while. :^)

This is a very good and novel puzzle game. I'm impressed by how much the game's designers created a puzzle framework that relies on the idiosyncrasies of how players categorize symbols. While it's not entirely random - there are purposeful similarities between icons - the possibilities of how to interpret and sort the puzzle pieces that the game provides is extremely wide. Few games sit in that realm of ambiguous interpretation and puzzle solving. The Witness comes to mind, but even that game had a more determined framework for puzzle solutions (and a vastly more pretentious tone). In Wilmot's, on the other hand, it's almost entirely up to the player to both deal with the ambiguity of the puzzle and create solutions that will work for them. However you can sort the pieces so that you can rapidly bring a small selection of them to one spot on the warehouse wall is the right way to do it.

The game also maintains a subtle, sardonic sense of humor throughout as an undercurrent to Wilmot's cheery face, the omnipresent tinkling of the background muzak, and the brightly colored icons that pour into the warehouse anew at two-and-a-half-minute intervals. The ending is just what I expected. For folks who would call this "Amazon warehouse simulator," well, the designers have you pegged.

The only things that get in the way of the game are the repetition of that muzak and, perhaps, its length. By the time I was at around 150 of 200 stocked items, I had a firm grasp on what the game was all about. There weren't too many twists caused to my categorization scheme by the addition of another 50 icons - rather, things simply took a little more time to sort. The main destabilizing force in the last quarter of the game is adjusting to the sudden influx of a large stock of icons that previously only existed in small numbers. There wasn't quite enough variety to carry this one all the way through, although the puzzle remained fun throughout.