The Last Worker

I spend most of my time in games optimising resource chains and plotting tech trees, so a first-person narrative puzzler set inside an Amazon-shaped mega-warehouse is not my usual Friday night. What pulled me in was the systems design hiding inside the satire: The Last Worker splits its runtime between two distinct loops, and how those loops interact tells you almost everything about whether this game is for you. The first loop is the day job. Riding a six-degrees-of-freedom hover-buggy called the JünglePod, you zip through corridors to retrieve packages, then inspect each one for damage, weight discrepancies, or labelling errors before routing it to the correct chute. Shifts run to a tight timer and end with a performance grade. Fall below the threshold, and you are fired on the spot. It sounds trivial, but the game keeps introducing new wrinkles: seasonal goods, fragile items, edge-case labelling rules that catch you out just when you think you have the system figured out. If you have ever played Papers Please and enjoyed that low-key bureaucratic tension, this will feel familiar and good. The second loop kicks in once the activist group S.P.E.A.R. recruits Kurt to sabotage Jüngle from inside. The JüngleGun gains a hacking attachment used for symbol-matching terminal puzzles, and stealth sections require you to ghost past guard bots. This is where the game stumbles: the stealth carries near-instant fail states and the pathfinding indicator that helps during normal shifts disappears entirely, leaving you to blunder around the facility's darker corners. Several critics flagged this pacing problem, and it is a real one. What rescues the whole package is the writing and the cast. Kurt, voiced by Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, is a man with over 9,000 days on the job and essentially no life outside of it. His banter with the foul-mouthed CoBot Skew, voiced by Jason Isaacs, carries the game through its duller stretches. The broader cast also includes Zelda Williams, Clare-Hope Ashitey, David Hewlett, and Tommie Earl Jenkins, and the performances across the board are well above the indie-game norm. The art direction, built on concepts by Judge Dredd artist Mick McMahon, delivers a cel-shaded comic-book look that fits the satirical tone well, even if level variety inside the warehouse is limited by design. The anti-corporate themes draw obvious parallels to real-world logistics giants, and the game earns most of its punches without becoming preachy. On the decision-making side, the game offers multiple endings tied to a three-way moral choice: stay compliant, side with the activists, or pursue a more personal resolution. The branching is light rather than deep, and at least one critic argued the conclusions feel underearned given how the story sets them up. For a strategy-minded player, do not expect the branching complexity of a proper CRPG. What you get is closer to a tightly authored interactive story with enough player agency to make a second run interesting if you care about completion. The 31 achievements support that revisit, but without new mechanics to discover, a second playthrough is mostly for the alternate ending beats. Runtime lands between four and eight hours depending on how thoroughly you explore, which sets realistic expectations for the asking price.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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