Kurt always says he works from home, but the reality is that he lives at work (and in miserable conditions, to say the least). Kurt is the last worker at JFC-1 (Jüngle Fulfillment Center 1), the world’s largest parcel service. For 25 years he has been dedicated to delivering packages to expectant customers and making their deepest dreams come true. At least that’s the Jüngle mantra.
Kurt once had thousands of employees, but now all tasks are automated for the highest possible performance and customer satisfaction. He has to move around the huge parcel center, side by side with several machines and robots doing similar jobs but much more efficiently. I think this is what Amazon’s central parcel services and depots will look like in the near future.
The Last Worker is quite an odd title, although that doesn’t have to be a negative. It is a narrative adventure game where the story is the most important element. Kurt was hired almost indefinitely, but one day his loyalty is tested when he comes into contact with Hoverbird, a member of a mysterious group of activists who seek his help in taking down Josef Jüngle. Jüngle is the richest and most influential man in the world and owner of the company of the same name; so Kurt’s boss. From there, the plot moves in unexpected directions, and when Kurt discovers his boss’s dark side, he must choose between his job and his activism.
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As a player, you take control of Kurt and move around on his JünglePod, a mix of storage and retrieval machine and electric scooter. Normally his job is to navigate through miles of shelves full of packages that need to be delivered to customers. Kurt must ensure they arrive on time by transporting them to the shipping area and remembering to discard any that are the wrong size, wrong weight, or damaged.
Kurt is always accompanied by his sidekick and good friend Skew the robot (a fun take on SKU, the acronym for item reference code). Skew flies and has an adorable little propeller. The dialogues are quite entertaining and convincingly presented, but more on that later. While making sure packages are delivered correctly so as not to draw attention, Kurt embarks on minor stealth missions through the darkest corners of JFC-1 along with Hoverbird and Skew. Gradually, he gains more skills, such as hacking locked doors or shooting guard robots, among others. The game has a simple dynamic and clearly the storyline is what gets the player hooked and encourages them to keep going.
The graphics are quite nice, with a style inspired by the comics. The characters and environments are based on concept art by comic book legend Mick McMahon, creator of Judge Dredd, Slaine and The Last American in the ’80s and ’90s. Feeling a little out of place, but the rest (from the menus to the universe itself) seems very well done.
As I said before, the game’s dialogues are delivered with great conviction. The Last Worker has a cast full of well-known actors lending their voices to the title characters, and it really shows. Kurt, the lead, is voiced by Icelandic actor Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (Criminals at Sea, The Tourist, Banshee) who delivers a fantastic performance. The rest of the cast also delivers very convincing performances. Cast members include Jason Isaacs (Harry Potter, Star Trek: Discovery) as Skew, Clare-Hope Ashitey (Threatened Online, Riviera, Seven Seconds) as activist Hoverbird, and David Hewlett (Suits, Midway, Stargate) as Josek Jungle. The music is by Oliver Kraus, who has worked with artists such as Adele, Christina Aguilera, Sia and Pink.
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For me, however, all these big names fail to save the game. As I said, it’s a bit of a shock: it never really caught on and I left feeling it wasn’t very exciting overall. The gameplay is very simple, but there are still moments when it is very difficult to figure out what to do that I got stuck several times. Also, towards the end of the game, there are some weird Flappy Bird-inspired mini-games that are as boring as they are frustrating. On the other hand, picking up and delivering packages to the right places at the Jüngle delivery center is oddly satisfying. Most stealth sequences work pretty well, but then suddenly there’s a sequence where you don’t know what to do.
Finally, I found at various points that some in-game events were not triggering, requiring me to restart a quest to continue progressing. There were other minor technical issues so it ended up being quite a frustrating experience. Despite these annoyances, the story is very interesting and convincingly told. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to offset the game’s other issues.
The Last Worker is available for a variety of platforms (including Utomik, an intuitive subscription service version that, despite some performance issues, presents itself as a complete and interesting indie-focused replacement for a subscription style whose default is set by Game Happen). It can be played on PlayStation 5, PC and VR with PSVR2 and Meta Quest 2.
