Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)
First announced for Switch in March 2021, news of the immersive parcel shipping sim The Last Worker has been exciting. Over the past two years, there’s been plenty of time to pack and ship interesting little trinkets of information from the Wired Productions warehouse. There was the time when the game was in competition at the Venice Film Festival, the time when director Jörg Tittel presented development through cinematic and interactive media in the offices of Jerry Bruckheimer, and the time relatively stronger where a Hollywood voice cast was announced. Finally, we can look past the hype and have the game in our hands.
The Last Worker sees you take on the role of Kurt, an employee and full-time resident in the futuristic Amazon Jüngle’s distribution warehouse. Your job is to fly on a small, floating cart, using some kind of pull beam hand gun to grab boxes from shelves and send them through huge suction chutes. What is curious in the scenario is that all your companions are robots. Work has become automated and the workforce has been reduced to one: you. You are – and you will have seen where it leads – the last worker.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Connected)
Piloting the car pretty much follows standard first-person controls, except that movement is slower than forward, which encourages acceleration and cornering, giving the vehicle character. Pressing ‘L’ goes down vertically and ‘R’ goes up. Hitting walls, floors and ceilings is no problem, providing a liberating, stress-free floating feeling. Instead of a HUD there is a radar attached to the front of the car and you have to look down to see it. It’s a trade-off of convenience for immersion, which says a lot about the spirit of The Last Worker: presentation usually trumps gameplay.
That’s not to say there isn’t a solid core of gameplay on offer. The first major task to complete with this floating cart movement pattern is to collect and ship crates. This involves following your radar to a crate of the hundreds stored in the honeycomb shelving towers, picking up that crate with your Jüngle gun, and inspecting it. You must confirm that the size and weight match the labels on the box and check for damage. If all is well, follow your radar to a blue conduit and send the box. If something goes wrong, you change your gun’s settings to apply a tag describing the problem (wrong weight, damaged, etc.) and then take the box to a red dump for recycling. Complete a square, move on to the next and get a score for your round based on accuracy and speed. It’s a pretty solid game mechanic on paper, but a bit too complicated to really get into the nitty-gritty. It’s a relief that most of the game involves doing completely different things.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Connected)
While The Last Worker may look like an arcade action game about honing your sorting skills, it’s actually a fast-paced, story-driven play filled with cutscenes and dialogue. As the plot unfolds, Kurt begins to receive communications from outside the warehouse, which leads him to explore the bowels of the Jüngle facility, crawling past sentry robots and tearing vents to access it. .
Dialogue is expertly delivered by Ólafur Darri Ólafsson as Kurt, Clare-Hope Ashitey as Hoverbird, and Jason Isaacs as your flying robot companion, Skew. Mixed in with profanities, “cuppas” and “choccy biccies”, Skew’s Liverpudlian digi-quawks are loads of fun. However, performance is sometimes hampered by frustrating timing. Some in-game interactions feel forced and too much time is spent waiting for lines to be played. Some main character filler lines are repeated too often, and some checkpoints are right before the exchanges you’ll hear on every restart. When the dialogue lands, it’s great; sadly, when it’s not, it feels like an animatronic puppet show, not real characters sharing real space.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Connected)
A surprising facet of The Last Worker’s feel is Kurt’s constantly seated position. Playing chapter after chapter without leaving your hover scooter, combined with the low friction movement at more or less walking speed, gives a very different feeling of mobility. Seeing Kurt’s legs sitting below you, and at the start of the game his face reflected in a mirror, places you in his body. However, rather than giving the player a body to go along with the first-person mechanic, as Portal does, for example, it mirrors the player’s seated position.
It certainly has its roots in the embodiment of virtual reality in gaming, but the feeling of immersion is also subtly present when playing on Switch. Sitting on a flying scooter is somewhat empowering, but the fact that Kurt is invariably seated, whether he’s on duty or not, also limits his movement. It’s a surprisingly attractive feeling.
The biggest obstacle to the game comes from its pace. There’s never enough time to get into the package delivery flow before the next excursion into the facility’s secret recesses. Checkpoint spacing is irritating at times, with restarts just before waiting sections, for example, or long, easy sections before the tricky action. The cutscenes are long, slow and very numerous. The attractive presentation and strong voice talent seems to make the game too fond of its own voice.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)
It is also sometimes a challenge to figure out what to do next. Compounding this experience were two bugs we found that made it impossible to continue without a restart. After that, any doubt about what to do made us fear that something might break again. Wired Productions informs us that a day one patch is coming that will include audio mixing tweaks, as well as general optimization and bug fixes, but we can’t say if this will fix the issues we’ve found.
conclusion
The Last Worker is an ambitious project and lands when it comes to graphics, performance, and voice acting. However, its core box-delivery gameplay is convoluted, and the game’s pacing doesn’t let you into the flow. Tricky sections that require repeated checkpoint charges break the immersion and clash with long, slow exploration sections of the Jüngle facility. He’s likeable and well-packed with lots of character, but he doesn’t always deliver.