The Last Worker is a narrative adventure game developed by Oiffy and Wolf & Wood Interactive and published by Wired Productions.
You take on the role of Kurt, the last human worker at Jüngle Fulfillment Center 1. Jüngle is the leading retailer selling anything and everything in a world corrupted by capitalism, but Kurt doesn’t know that. Whether through willful ignorance, naivety, or blatant denial, Kurt has lived his life for the past 25 years in faithful service to the omni-store despite his lover’s departure, worsening working conditions, and stricter regulations that slashed the workforce down until only he remained.
Most of your hands-on experience revolves around the JünglePod, an industrial mobility scooter that flies you around the warehouse, and the JüngleGun, a tool used for moving packages that can be modified with a tracker, hacker, or EMP attachment. The gun feels responsive, but the scooter is a little unruly at times. With these two you’ll go about your workday finding packages to ship off. If they’re damaged or incorrectly labeled, the packages will need to be labeled and recycled. Later on, you’ll be moving around in your scooter to evade capture by drones, and the gun will be used to hack or fight your way through the facility.
The story is okay and the game is average, but the two halves come together to make an unbelievably unbearable experience. On the technical side, the game soft-locks itself constantly. I had to close out and restart the game multiple times because some events just wouldn’t trigger, so I couldn’t continue. The moments where you have to pilot your robot companion are by far the worst, because the controls become even more unruly and the game has a tendency to reset you inside of collision points. Even then, the game incentivizes failure during the flying because crashing into the walls resets you in a better position than you were before.
The game isn’t much of a game. It’s more of a play with an all-star cast. The vocal deliveries from the likes of Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Jason Isaacs, and Clare-Hope Ashitey are phenomenal for the leads, with David Hewlett, Zelda Williams, and Tommie Earl Jenkins adding more shine to the casting bill. The emotional score is composed by Oliver Kraus with vocals by Jakub Józef Orliński. To say there is talent behind this game is an understatement, but that may be The Last Worker’s problem. The artistic direction feels compromised by the gameplay, and the gameplay feels like it’s begrudgingly there to justify its being a video game.
The game elements never evolve and serve more to give you something to fidget with as the story happens around you for five chapters in about as many hours. The Last Worker feels like a shoddy stage set for an award-winning cast held back by the player’s performance and the need for gameplay.
The Last Worker is available now for $19.99 on PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X | S, PlayStation 5, PSVR 2, and Meta Quest 2.
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Published: Apr 2, 2023 02:50 pm