youThe Last Worker deals with a topical issue: the increasing automation of the workplace and its effect on workers. Playing as Kurt, the only human employee of an Amazon-like online retailer called Jüngle, you spend your days keeping pace with an army of robotic drones as they sort millions of packages for delivery. Then, a group of activists draws you into a plan to take down the giant corporation, whereupon both Kurt’s world and the game’s central premise begin to fall apart.
Initially, The Last Worker is based on a light simulation of Kurt’s daily routine. Using a floating cart, you must place your assigned packages among the endless shelves and transport them to a delivery ramp or send them for recycling. Packages vary in size, weight, and condition, all of which should be verified prior to shipment. Incorrectly sorted items affect his grade for the day’s work, and if he gets an ‘F’, he’ll be out the door faster than a Prime package.
The rules superficially resemble Lucas Pope’s bureaucratic masterpiece Papers Please, in which increasingly unreasonable demands from your superiors push the player into an impossible position. In Pope’s game, the goal was to explore his willingness to make ethical compromises to keep his job. But the gears of the Last Worker have far fewer teeth. Delivering just a couple of packages will keep you safe from outages, and while later levels make the rules a bit more complicated (like an Easter-themed level where undelivered Christmas packages have to be sent to the incinerator), the pressure never builds.
This is because Last Worker is not interested in exploring its topic in a systemic way. Instead, he has a story to pursue: a group dedicated to fighting against the substitution of human workers with robots, SPEAR, wants Kurt’s help in defeating Jüngle. After Kurt begrudgingly agrees, the rest of the game is a hodgepodge of light stealth, lighter hacking puzzles, and some virtually weightless gunplay. This all works appropriately, and exploring the murkier depths of Jüngle’s capitalist megastructure provides for some atmospheric moments. But none of it is as interesting or relevant as those early delivery scenarios. The game returns to these periodically, but at this point any power or meaning they may have held is lost.
The narrative suffers from a lack of conviction. Kurt is an interesting character, a man who has worked so hard to keep his job that he has given himself completely to it, living in the Jüngle waste disposal area scavenging for food. But his path to destructive revolution is not convincing. Some scenes work fine; a section where Kurt literally has to run to keep his job sums up the humiliating and childish way large corporations often treat their lower-ranking employees. But the plot needlessly muddies the water by implying that activists are as bad as the corporation they seek to destroy, then evades making a point entirely with a multiple-choice ending that the game never indicates is being built.
The Last Worker also misses a more fundamental point, which is that the problem with automated workspaces is not the automation itself, but a society that requires people to work to survive as the very concept of work it becomes redundant. As he transports cat oral brushes and Ricky Rouse figurines to the delivery ramp, Kurt intermittently asks, “Who buys this crap?” It’s by far the most pertinent query the game raises. WHO is Buying all this tattoo when no one has a job? What happens in the heat-death of capitalism, where all wealth resides in a person’s pocket? However, much like Kurt when he makes his rounds, the Ultimate Worker not only doesn’t answer this question, he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s asked it in the first place.
