I’ve been working at Jüngle for as long as I ca🅘n remember. At first the work was dull, but I quickly got into it. Moving boxes from storage to delivery tubes sure sounds boring, but when you’ve got to assess it for damage, check it’s the right size and weight, if it’s seasonal, and if it’s expired, there’s a bit more complexity to it. I’m not just Josef Jüngle’s lapdog playing fetch with people’s orders, I’m labelling and delivering like only a skilled labourer can, and I ⭕get top ‘J’ rank every shift, I’ll have you know.
Except that’s not quite right. As fun as The Last Worker’s gamification of work is, your job is at risk of being taken by a robot. You are Kurt, and – you guessed it – the last human worker in the massive Jüngle facility, after choosing to focus on your career over your family, your health, and, well, everything else r𓄧eally. Two robot compan꧅ions break your routine, though; your best friend, SKEW, a buzzy little scouser, and an intruder controlling a robotic hoverbird and is intent on taking down the corporation. They reveal some hard truths, and suddenly you’re a part of something bigger.
As you can already tell, the satire in The Last Worker is not subtle. It’s a criticism of excessive capitalism, from whole cutscenes dedicated to definitely-not-Amazon binni🎃ng hundreds of old phones to make room for this year’s model, to the compelling gameplay of delivering packages in the not-Amazon warehouse. This gamification of everyday work is fun. I really got into my role as Jüngle delivery man, but it becomes a little more serious when you remember that its real-life corporation counterpart employs very similar systems to encourage its workers to work harder, longer, and forgo toilet breaks in order to meet their productivity quota.
The Last Worker’s story stops this 𝔉from getting too heavy. A deeply political tale about revolution and anti-capitalism, the narrative surprised me with how heartfelt and personal it was. The characters are charming, helped by the stellar cast of voice actors, and compel you to push further through the game. But occasionally, impᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚortant narrative moments are undermined by the game’s VR capabilities. While the version I tested for review couldn’t be played in VR, the fact that you can look anywhere you want while cutscenes are playing means that I sometimes missed key visual information that lessened the impact of important beats. Maybe that’s a me problem, but it was annoying nonetheless.
I’d be remiss not to talk about SKEW at this point. Jason Isaacs’ scouse robot is the true hero of this story, like Portal 2’s Wheatley with more f-bombs. His sarcastic comments and enthusiastic “f*** off”s when shit hits the fan make the unrealistic scenarios (I’ve never tried to violently revolt against my boss) relatable. I’ve long been a vocal supporter of having 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:more scouse characters in video games, and SKEW is the exact representation I want to♔ see.
The story is solid, the writing is great, the voice acting is excellent, and I love the graphic novel-esque art style, but the revolution isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. The stakes get higher as you progress through the linear levels, but unfortunately the puzzles get more frustrating. The hacking minigame, which involves solving a Rubik’s Cube of sorts, is incredibly annoying in every possible way. The cub⛦es themselves aren’t intuitive tﷺo rotate, and aligning nine of them in the correct order takes too long. Add in a 60-second timer and a patrolling sentry that forces you to disengage from the puzzle four or five times to avoid being seen, and I’m letting out an audible sigh every time I see one of those Rubiks-looking interfaces.
At least those puzzles are easy to find, though. There were multiple occasions during my playtime when I spent minutes trying to locate the puzzle that my robot companion had urgently told me to complete. Looking for a tiny metal buddy in a massive metal room is as tedious as you think, made even moreso by the fact that your꧙ hovering mobility scooter has an in-built map that will guide you to your destination, but that’s only used in your dayjob delivery sessions.
I often ended up following noises to find the puzzles – beeps and whirs tended to lead me to the right destination – which is a credit to The Last Worker’s sound design. However, the signposting of where the next tiny lever or destructible vent is could be vastly improved to ease frustration. The developer nailed this with the fun stealth portions of the game, where hideaways and routes through the levels were clearly pointed out with graffiti, but this should have been extended to the rest of th🤡e puzzles.
The final chapter of the game turns everything on its head. Where you’ve been exploring the linear level of your own accord for the whole game, you’re now essentially placed in an interactive cutscene with basic gameplay and no stakes. The story, which is consistently the best part of the game, boils down to one choice that dictates which endꦯing you see, and therefore feels reductive. This is meant to be the time when Kurt reclaims his power as a worker, and yet the gameplay makes you feel completely powerless. If you want to replay to see the other endings, the cutscenes aren’t skippable either. In fact, the only skippable thing in the game seems to be the credits, which feels ironically anti-worker for a game so critical of the corporate machine.
The Last Worker tries to be a lot of things. It’s a satirical puzzle adventure at hea𒅌rt, but a large part of it is spent stealthily avoiding sentries, it’s got an endless runner minigame starring SKEW that overstays its welcome, and there’s a lot more first-person shooting than I expected. While the story and stealth are both great, the rest of the puzzles are frustrating exercises in tedium, and that’s the feeling that lingers after playing. When the most compelling gameplay is the tedious day job that the game is trying to satirise and not the exciting revolution empowering you through the bowels of the Jüngle warehous꧋e, you know there’s a problem.
Score: 2/5. A PC code was provided by the publisher.