Good morning faceless drone, and welcome to your first day working for Ama…Jüngle. Prepare to learn how to use your Jünglepod to navigate our warehouse the size of Manhattan to locate and dispatch items to our customers faster than humanly possible or be fired/possibly used for fuel.
This is the premise for The Last Worker, a game where you play as Kurt. Kurt is the last remaining human worker at the Jüngle dispatch warehouse, where he has spent the last 25 years. A short cinematic shows Kurt meeting and falling in love with a coworker who tries to get him to leave after she becomes pregnant. He refuses and continues to pick up his items for dispatch as she walks out of the warehouse into the blinding light.
While Kent knows how things operate, you, as the player doesn’t. Luckily your best friend is a perpetually malfunctioning robot called Skew. Unfortunately, on this particular day, he is malfunctioning and thinks it’s Kurt’s first day on the job, meaning you get to learn the ropes.
As well as piloting your Jünglepod, which is kind of like the power loader from Aliens, you also have your patented Jünglegun. Your Jünglegun helps you to select and levitate the intended packages towards you. It also doubles as a way to mark defective products and prep them for recycling. Once you have the box on your pod, you have to make sure the weight lines up with your readout and that the package isn’t damaged. You check these things by looking down at your H.U.D. display.
The Last Worker Is Very Clearly Based On A Certain Mega Company
The game is optimized for V.R. Everything is in first person and designed as if you are in the pod. Of course, the effect is probably better in V.R., but I played on Nintendo Switch. Thankfully, I didn’t feel like I was missing out as I did with previous games made for V.R. It’s simple enough to control, but even with your boost, it is incredibly slow. Considering the game and the themes, this is intentional.
The smiling, bald overlord of the company (can’t think whom this is based on, definitely no one real) is an almost constant presence. He looms over the warehouse on big screens, his extremely progressive rainbow hair flap never moving. His dead eyes follow your every move as you slowly propel your way toward your next designated dispatch. Your speed and performance are judged by letter rank every shift. If you do too poorly, you’re fired, and it’s game over.
Soon enough, Kurt is confronted by an activist who has infiltrated the warehouse using a small hummingbird robot. The activist is part of a group called S.P.E.A.R., which is looking to expose the truth behind the shady underside of Jüngle. Things aren’t so rosy outside the compound, but Kurt wouldn’t know as he’s been inside for 25 years. Wars rage, people live in poverty, and pollution destroys the environment. Jüngle is more than a little bit to blame, and S.P.E.A.R. wants Kurt to help them take it down from the inside. This is out of necessity more than anything because he’s the last human worker in the company.
The Last Worker Offers A Great Visual Style and A Stellar Voice Cast
Navigating the dark and dingy areas of the warehouse is made bearable by Skew. Fizzing and sparking frequently, the malfunctioning bot is like a sweary Gir from Invader Zim. He’s also extremely jealous that another bot has appeared in Kurt’s life. It’s also made more pleasant by the hand-drawn 3D art and character designed by comic book creator Mick McMahon who helmed Judge Dredd and 2000 A.D. It has an incredibly unique feel, but it will also be familiar to fans of McMahon’s comic book work.
A stacked voice cast also features Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Jason Isaacs, Clare-Hope Ashitey, David Hewlett, Zelda Williams, and Tommie Earl Jenkins. The soundtrack is composed by Oliver Kraus (Sia, Adele, Florence and the Machine), with vocals by classical music star Jakub Józef Orliski. It’s at once beautiful and sad music, lonely and sometimes hopeful.
While the difficulties in navigating are almost certainly by design, it can also be frustrating. Selecting and reeling in your designated package can be a bit fiddly, and the slowness of the Jünglepod is, in the beginning, somewhat annoying, especially when you have to race against a bot to keep your job. The scenario is designed to show that you are inferior to the bots and absolutely going to lose your job. Still annoying. These are such minor gripes that they are hardly worth mentioning, but they are still good to know going in.
Wrapping Up
Is the “capitalism bad” messaging a little on the nose? Sure, but it isn’t precisely unwarranted, considering that we are close to living in Robocop. However, The Last Worker is smartly written and well-stylized, with interesting and sympathetic characters. We’ve all felt stuck in jobs or situations we’ve been in for too long. We’ve all reached the turning point where a choice has to be made. The question is, what do you choose?
