Ever wondered about the inner workings of Santa’s Workshop? Wooden Toy Joinery pulls back the curtain, showing you that everything is manually assembled by hand, the good ol’ fashioned way. This PICO-8 game is the brainchild of PICO-8’s very own creator zep, and is part of the Twelve Days of PICO-8 Christmas 2022!
Within a limited number of moves, players are tasked with assembling toy parts and getting them ready for delivery. I found myself coming up with creative ways to move the toy towards my goal in as few steps as possible. The toy is usually split into 3-4 parts, with the initial levels asking you to assemble elves and robots. It progresses to more abstract tangram-esque puzzles with pieces that move in tandem.
Using only a small number of colours, the game is visually simple and does not distract the player, making it easier to identify paths to a solution. Especially with the tangram-like puzzles, the pink and white palette allowed me to line up the disparate puzzle pieces perfectly. The number of mechanical pieces is kept similarly small — mostly the standard pushable blocks and walls — which cements some very tight level design. The biggest challenge is needing to actually fit the final product into a marked area.
Wooden Toy Joinery has fourteen levels in total, each with increasing complexity. The game doesn’t hold your hand as it gives you no hints and only the barest of instructions (fit pieces together and place it in the goal area), but doesn’t punish you for taking your time. Coming back after a good night’s rest often meant a solution would suddenly jump out at me where I’d been stuck before. It soon became a personal quest to complete each level using the most optimal path to improve my step-totals reflected on the level selection screen.
This little Christmas treat is a great game to play on one’s commute, and a big surprise in a tiny package for puzzle game enthusiasts (check out the game’s page for a deeper dive into its origins). I want to play more PICO-8 games like Wooden Toy Joinery — this one made me appreciate the work that goes into puzzle games like these, no matter how simple they may look. A limited workspace is often where the best ideas flourish, and within the realm of puzzle games, this means innovative puzzles that often contain simple, yet clever twists.
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