In The Last Worker, players step into the shoes of the last human employee of a monolithic company, Jüngle, and soon find themselves torn between three factions: their job, their family, and humanity. Wolf & Wood’s game is meant to be a dark satire, but between the oblivious protagonist’s POV, his gamified working conditions, and the script’s unearned calls for rebellion against automation, the experience is about as all over the place as the various goods that players are tasked with shipping. Just about the only aspect of the game that these broad, cartoonish brushstrokes befit is Mick McMahon’s standout art, which applies the uncompromising style of his work on Judge Dredd to the depiction of corporate machinery.
The dissonance between narrative and gameplay begins with the game making work at Jüngle seem fun. Shifts are only six in-game minutes long and involve boosting around the labyrinthine corridors of Jüngle’s fulfillment center (think Crazy Taxi but with packages instead of people). Once you’ve located the requested object on your map, you hoover it toward you with your JüngleGun and use your custom JünglePod to check that things like the size and weight are correct before dropping it off at the blue shipping area or the red recycling area. Every delivery, correct or not, pops a little achievement-like hologram that shows you the item you sent (turns out, you’re “making dreams come true”!), followed by your next assignment.
The Last Worker’s oversimplification of shipping-floor life makes it impossible to land any sort of critique against the barbaric sweatshop culture of a company like Amazon, because it doesn’t look all that bad as presented here. After all, Kurt’s been doing this for 9,124 days by the time you step into his shoes, so it can’t be all bad, right? Indeed, whether it’s brainwashing or the toxic fumes that he regularly inhales from his on-site sleeping quarters in a recycling sector that he calls his “penthouse,” the only thing that seems to make him unhappy is the external request (and subsequent pressure) from an outsider to help them sabotage the company.
Though it’s natural to expect that The Last Worker to gamify things, don’t go into it expecting anything other than a generic dystopia that doesn’t make room for depictions of such indignities as workers not being allowed to pee during a 12-hour shift, or not being supported for back-breaking injuries on the floor. The game may be good at introducing new rules for making deliveries, such as processing seasonal or fragile objects, and providing you with new tools, like a hacking beam that lets you access otherwise off-limits areas, but that’s actually anathema to the plot. Make no mistake, The Last Worker’s impressive mechanics are at odds with the oppressive mechanisms of the corporation it’s trying to send up.
The sight of a live cow going into a bit of cogged machinery and coming out the other end as a meat cube should be an eye-opening moment, but that process is depicted quietly and relatively bloodlessly. Which is to say, the opposite of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or the Oddworld series, to say nothing of the footage already publicly available of inhumane slaughterhouse conditions.
By remaining locked on to the unaware Kurt’s POV, the game wallows in his anodyne responses rather than the anger at the heart of any good satire. It casually makes shocking moments—like the reveal that Manhattan is submerged, likely due to climate change created by companies like Jüngle—mere footnotes in a game about delivering packages. Other games of this nature, like Lucas Pope’s wonderful Papers, Please, get around this by giving players agency in how they chose to carry out their job (and making them complicit), but The Last Worker is at such a remove from anything human that we see no consequences to your actions.
Navigating The Last Worker is entertaining on a moment-to-moment basis, but its narrative is as scattershot as the 110 products players can discover while making randomized deliveries. Those items deliver the occasional zinger across the campaign, like how the existence of a “Drone Walker” suggests that humans want pets without the inconvenience of actual interactions with them. Most objects are just played for laughs, like the “Golden Shower Head” or “World’s Greatest Troll” toy (that’s Donald Trump in the style of a Troll doll). None of these things are relevant to the game’s plot or critique, and it’s frustrating to get a handful of funny distractions in lieu of an understanding of how Jüngle operates, or what Kurt feels.
Even the game’s most effectively bleak ending, in which Jüngle’s founder, Josef Jüngle, is revealed to have been dead and automated for quite some time, is undercut by him still being very much alive in the other two endings. The Last Worker’s conclusions should feel earned—that is, a consequence of the protagonist’s decisions. Instead, they’re as easy and largely frivolous as just adding something to an online shopping cart.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Renaissance PR.
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