The Last Worker Review – Welcome to the Jüngle

Welcome to the Jüngle

In “The Last Worker” we play as Kurt, who is the last living employee of Jüngle, the world’s largest online retailer. He has dedicated his life to his work, which involves either dispatching parcels or marking them for recycling. You get to zoom around the giant fulfillment center in his JünglePod and try to get through each work day without getting fired. The work day is really fun to play, and I definitely replayed days in order to get a perfect J rating to impress my capitalist overlords. But the tranquility of monotony is soon disturbed when Kurt is contacted by HoverBird, a representative of an anti-capitalist activist group called The Society Promoting an End to Automated Redundancy (S.P.E.A.R.) and is asked to help dismantle Jüngle from the inside.

The game starts with a dream sequence and a flashback, but the gameplay kicks off with a tutorial, which can often feel heavy handed, but I think they handled it cleverly. The tutorial is framed as an introduction to Jüngle led by our robot companion, a Stock Keeping Unit who goes by Skew. He’s glitched out again, and is treating us like a new hire. This allows for a really organic way to show us how to use our JünglePod and JüngleGun, while also giving us the opportunity for some exposition and world building. We are in the future, Manhattan has sunk at some point, and almost everything is automated. I think there are a few things that could be made clearer, it took me a while to put together how to actually check the packages properly, but once I got the hang of it, it was a blast. I loved the simulation aspect of the game – I’d probably play a game entirely made up of the daily dispatch portions.

The heart of the game is when you start to venture outside of your duties and start to assist HoverBird with her mission to destroy Jüngle. There are some tense stealth areas and puzzles, which only get harder as you get deeper into the facility, as well as a couple of action sequences where you get to take down WorkerBots with an EMP gun, which starts to deteriorate and can’t be used as much as you go. I think the difficulty builds at a great pace, it never felt like I was being thrown into the deep end.

The hand painted 3D art creates this beautiful gritty feeling about the facility. You get a great sense of the loneliness and lack of life, so many areas are dilapidated and haven’t been cared for in what appears like a very long time. There aren’t many characters, but a great deal of care has been put into their designs.Josef Jüngle looks like a mix of every creepy billionaire you know and a cheerful member of the Capitol from The Hunger Games, thanks to his blazer and shirt combo, and half-bald half-rainbow hair, which HoverBird makes reference to with disdain. Kurt has such a starkly different appearance, he looks tired and haggard and unkempt, as you would expect of a man who has been living at his place of work for over 2 decades.  The only real negative I found in terms of the visuals was that it was hard to find HoverBird in some sections, as her coloring was not a stark enough contrast.

I don’t want to get into spoilers, because I really would recommend experiencing “The Last Worker” for yourself, but I found the story to be touching, and that the game overall was an incredibly apt critique of monopolistic businesses, rainbow capitalism, and the rise in automation. Some of the dialogue could feel a little preachy and heavy handed, but that might be because I’m already a member of the choir.

Potentially better in VR

I played on PC with a mouse and keyboard, and while I didn’t run into any major issues, I do think that the controls are optimized for VR. There were a few times when I spent far too long trying to charge my JünglePod because I couldn’t quite get the timing right, which was especially annoying when it was right after a checkpoint, so I had to do it again after dying. Moving certain obstacles with my JüngleGun felt a little clunky sometimes, it wouldn’t be enough to just move my mouse, I’d have to move Kurt too. Nothing gamebreaking, or enough to make me rage quit, but enough for me to notice. I would absolutely love to play the game again in VR in order to compare the experience. If I ever do I’ll be sure to let you know.

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