It doesn’t take a lot of speculation to see the path that our capitalist society is heading down. Just a cursory glance at socio-economic trends of the last few decades will show you the impact of increasingly broad mega-corporations consolidating their power, egging on consumerist tendencies, the ever-growing role of machines, automation, AI and more. The Last Worker skips ahead into a future where the human workforce at the very Amazon-like Jüngle has dwindled into near nothingness.
Set in the JFC1 fulfilment centre the size of Manhattan, Kurt (played by Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) is the last one left in the otherwise completely automated and self-sustaining facility. The opening to the game shows the workforce’s gradual decline, where Kurt in his eye-catching orange (and definitely not red) cap initially troops into work with throngs of other employees. Over time, the numbers thin, until he’s pretty much on his own.
He’s not quite alone, though, and as the game proper opens with a little green AI robot called Skew (voiced by Jason Isaacs) welcoming Kurt work and guiding him through a re-orientation and training session. With the facility no longer really built for human employees, Kurt now has an anti-gravity chair to get around the maze of different rooms, with a little GPS map down in front of you and a mirror off to one side.
The first task is a nice and simple one or making your way through halls and rooms to a storage hall that’s filled with packed-up boxes in cubby holes. Use a little remote manipulation device and you can grab a box and then place it on the front of your hover cart, driving through the halls some more to then fire it into an anti-gravity Dispatch Point and deliver it.
Mission accomplished, you’re given a little time rating to show how well you did, and a note about what you’ve just sent on its way to a happy customer. Oh… it’s a VR headset for a baby? Well, that’s pretty dark…
Even through this opening, you get a real sense for the cartoonish take on the late-stage capitalism the game depicts. It’s darkly humorous how the bizarre excess of the machinery will pass packages around, and it will only get darker as you delve deeper into the game and break out from the intended work area.
Skipping ahead to later in the game, and Kurt’s in areas that Jüngle really wouldn’t want him to see. Skew’s not the one leading you now, but HoverBird, a robot sent in by a dissident group S.P.E.A.R., is dragging him deeper and deeper into the facility’s recesses. There’s real dangers to Kurt now, with robots patrolling and searching for things that are out of the ordinary, attacking him if they find him. While Kurt does get some limited ways to fight back, like with an EMP, stealth also plays a major factor here.
The level we played through was fairly linear, scripting the need to duck into side-passages to pass them by, but others promise to have multiple paths to potentially take as you avoid detection through wide-linear locations.
If the baby VR headset wasn’t icky enough, then the imagery deeper into the game, with battery hens and cows and strangely alien machinery, absolutely plays off all of the dystopian fears we might have for the future as corporations continue to grow and grow – forget that the meat-eating population already turns a blind eye to the conditions under which animals are reared and slaughtered to meet demand. It’s appropriate that the hand-painted 3D art is based on concept art from Mick McMahon of Judge Dredd and 2000 AD fame. He’s well versed in depicting dystopian futures!
The Last Worker is set to tell its tale of end-stage capitalism on PC first, releasing on October 19th 2022, with consoles and VR to follow.
