Reaching each parcel becomes a race against time. Yet because your efforts are evaluated and rated at the end of a shift, the task is oddly compelling. To do so, you swoop and slide between enormous shelving units on a kind of hover buggy, armed with a Jüngle gun that can magnetically pull in boxes then ping them off at speed, preferably towards a delivery chute.Īs one character points out, all you’re really doing here is playing fetch in a tedious routine. Early on, it gets its points across succinctly enough, simply by asking you to do Kurt’s job, fulfilling orders within a towering library of consumer knick-knacks. Jüngle smothers the entire retail market, and Kurt becomes, well, the last worker.įrom there you assume control of Kurt’s monotonous existence and The Last Worker’s story leaps from its premise into a polemic on tech CEOs, ‘late stage’ capitalist waste, and the encroachment of automation on our ability to earn a living. But when she gets pregnant and quits, he stays behind, living full-time in the warehouse. As the numbers dwindle, top-performer Kurt remains steadfast, and even finds love among the boxes with a fellow product picker. Before long, though, any drop in output sees the employees themselves plucked off and given the boot, to be replaced by robots. So what does happen in that opening animation? First, we see everyman hero Kurt among thousands of recruits arriving at the gigantic distribution centre of megacorp Jüngle (like Amazon, get it?), to spend their working lives plucking products off shelves to order. For a game that takes critical aim at the future of work, frankly, it’s all a bit laboured.
It’s surprising, then, that as The Last Worker continues its story, it takes less graceful turns, electing for verbosity over economy. It’s an apt start for this first-person satire set in a fully-automated dystopia, in that it underlines a very human aptitude for artistic communication. Developer: Oiffy, Wolf & Wood Interactive LimitedĪ short animated sequence kicks The Last Worker into gear, reeling off the game’s backstory with breezy efficiency.Yet its story focuses on showcasing the talents of its stellar voice cast at the expense of offering meaningful things to do, and its satirical punches rarely leave lasting bruises. The Last Worker’s comically exaggerated vision of the future of work is highly relevant.
0 kommentar(er)
