The Last Worker

Kurt always says he works from home. Actually, the truth is that he lives at work - in conditions that are miserable, to say the least. Kurt is the last worker at JFC-1 (Jüngle Fulfillment Center 1), the world's largest parcel center, where for 25 years he has been delivering parcels to expectant customers and fulfilling their deepest dreams. Or at least that's the mantra of the Jüngle Corporation.

Kurt once had thousands of colleagues, but now everything is automated to achieve even greater efficiency and customer satisfaction. He moves around the huge parcel center, side by side with lots of machines and robots doing similar work, but much more efficiently. You can imagine that this is what Amazon's parcel centers and central warehouses will look like in the near future.

The Last Worker is a strange game - not that that's necessarily a bad thing. This is a narrative adventure game and the story is the strongest part of it. Kurt has been employed almost indefinitely, but one day his loyalty is tested when he is contacted by Hoverbird, a member of a mysterious group of activists who ask him to help overthrow Josef Jüngle, the richest and most influential man in the world and the man behind the Jüngle Corporation - Kurt's employer. From here, the story develops in unforeseen directions and as Kurt learns about his boss's dark side, he soon has to choose between his job or activism.

You take control of Kurt and move around on his JünglePod, a cross between a pallet lifter and a hover scooter. Normally, Kurt's job is to move around between kilometers of shelves full of parcels that need to be delivered to customers. Kurt has to make sure the parcels arrive on time by transporting them to the dispatch area, he has to remember to discard parcels that are either the wrong size, the wrong weight or have been damaged.

Kurt is always accompanied by his robot sidekick and good friend, Skew (a fun interpretation of SKU), who is a small flying robot with a cute little propeller. Their dialog is quite entertaining and is delivered with real conviction - more on that in a moment. Besides making sure the packages get to the customers so he doesn't draw attention to himself, Kurt, along with the Hoverbird and Skew, goes on smaller stealth-based missions around the darker corners of JFC-1. Gradually, Kurt gains more and more abilities, allowing him to hack locked doors and shoot down guard bots, among other things. It's simple gameplay and it's clearly the story that keeps the player hooked and makes you want to continue.

The graphics look quite nice and have a strong comic book style. Characters and environments are based on concept art from comic book legend Mick McMahon, who was responsible for Judge Dredd, Slaine and The Last American back in the 1980s and 1990s. I'm not crazy about the design by Kurt, which seems a bit oddly out of place, but the rest, from the menus to the world itself, seems pretty well done.

As mentioned above, the game's dialog is delivered with great conviction. The Last Worker is filled with known actors who provide voices for the game's characters - and you can tell. Behind the voice of the main character Kurt is Icelandic actor Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (Murder Mystery, The Tourist, Banshee) and he does it really well. The rest of the cast also deliver convincing performances, including Jason Isaacs (Harry Potter, Star Trek: Discovery) as Skew, Clare-Hope Ashitey (I.T., Riviera, Seven Seconds) as the activist HoverBird and David Hewlett (Suits, Midway, Stargate) as Josef Jüngle. The music was created by Oliver Kraus, who has previously worked with artists such as Adele, Christina Aguilera, Sia and Pink.

All these names can't save The Last Worker for me, though. As I said, it's a bit of a strange game - and it never really grabbed me and you're left with the impression of a game that just isn't very exciting. The gameplay is very simple but it can also sometimes be difficult to figure out or see what to do, so I got stuck several times. In addition, towards the end of the game, there are some weird Flappy Bird-inspired mini-games that are both tedious and frustrating. On the other hand, picking up packages and delivering them to the right areas in the Jüngle parcel center is strangely satisfying, and several of the stealth sequences work fine, but then suddenly there can be a sequence where you are left without knowing what to do.

Finally, I found several times that in-game events were not triggered, so I had to restart a task in order to progress. There were other minor technical challenges, so in the end it all ended up being a somewhat frustrating experience, although underneath the annoyances, there is quite an interesting story that is delivered with conviction. Unfortunately, it just can't make up for the game's other problems.

The Last Worker is available for a wide range of platforms (including on Utomik, which we found to be an intuitive take on subscription services that while having a few issues with performance, served as a packed and interesting indie-first substitute for a subscription style that Game Pass still finds itself as the gold standard of) and for PlayStation 5 and PC it can also be played in VR, with PSVR2 and Meta Quest 2.