The Last Worker concerns itself with a timely subject: the growing automation of the workplace and its effect upon workers. Playing as Kurt, the sole 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 an activist group wrangles you into a scheme to bring down the giant corporation, whereupon both Kurt’s world and the game’s central premise begin to fall apart.
Initially, The Last Worker is built around a light simulation of Kurt’s daily routine. Using a hovering cart, you must locate assigned packages among the endless shelving units, and either transport them to a delivery chute or send them for recycling. Packages vary in size, weight, and condition, all of which must be checked before dispatch. Incorrectly sorted items affect your rating for the day’s work, and if you get an F you’ll be out the door faster than a Prime parcel.
The rules superficially resemble Lucas Pope’s bureaucratic masterpiece Papers Please, in which the increasingly unreasonable demands of your superiors push the player into an impossible position. In Pope’s game, the goal was to explore your willingness to make ethical compromises to keep your job. But The Last Worker’s gears have far fewer teeth. Delivering only a couple of packages will keep you safe from the chop, and while later levels complicate the rules slightly (such as an Easter-themed level where undelivered Christmas packages must be sent to the incinerator), it never piles on the pressure.
This is because the Last Worker isn’t interested in exploring its theme systemically. Instead, it has a story to chase: a group dedicated to fighting the replacement of human workers by robots, S.P.E.A.R, wants Kurt’s help to take Jüngle down. After Kurt reluctantly agrees, the remaining game is a mishmash of light stealth, lighter hacking puzzles, and some practically weightless shooting. This all functions adequately, and exploring the murkier depths of Jüngle’s capitalist megastructure provides some atmospheric moments. But none of it is as interesting or relevant as those first few delivery scenarios. The game returns to these periodically, but by this point whatever power or significance they may have had is lost.
The storytelling suffers from a lack of conviction. Kurt is an interesting character, a man who has worked so hard to keep his job he has become fully surrendered to it, living in Jüngle’s waste-disposal area scavenging food from the rubbish pile. But his journey to destructive revolutionary is unconvincing. Some scenes work well; a section where Kurt must literally race to keep his job encapsulates the humiliating, infantilising way large corporations often treat their lowest-ranking employees. But the plot needlessly muddies the water by implying the activists are as bad as the corporation they seek to destroy, then ducks out of making a point entirely with a multiple-choice ending that the game never indicates it is building toward.
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 demands people work to survive as the very concept of work becomes redundant. As he conveys oral cat brushes and Ricky Rouse figurines to the delivery chute, Kurt intermittently asks: “Who buys this shit?” It’s by far the most pertinent query the game raises. Who is buying all this tat when nobody has a job? What happens at the heat-death of capitalism, where all wealth resides in one person’s pocket? Yet, like Kurt as he makes his rounds, not only does the Last Worker fail to answer this question, it doesn’t seem to realise it has asked it in the first place.
