The Last Worker Melds Work and Play in Clever, Disconcerting Ways

ign.com:

Last month, I finally got to play an extended chunk of The Last Worker, a game I’ve written a little bit about before. Specifically, in my Gamescom preview, I was drawn to the ways in which its dystopian Amazon warehouse environment both amused and unsettled me. You should read that if you haven’t yet because all my feelings about it then still hold true. But having now gotten to grapple with the game in full, I’ve stumbled upon another way in which The Last Worker clearly wants to break my brain: it’s putting me at odds with my own relationship with both work and play.

In The Last Worker’s first “act” of sorts, you’re playing a man named Kurt who works at Jüngle, the fictional world’s most profitable company that produces and delivers all sorts of bizarro goods and an unsubtle satire of Amazon. Over the years, the warehouse has become increasingly automated against mistake-prone human workers, and now only Kurt is left. Kurt’s job is to ride a little hover cart around the warehouse, picking items for delivery, inspecting them for defects or issues, and then either dropping them into a delivery hole or recycling them. This is what he does, day in and day out until the events of the game get the better of him, and eventually begins doing something decidedly different.

But during the job-doing bit, I found myself at an uncomfortable juxtaposition of wanting to do Kurt’s job well while mentally screaming at him to bail. Jüngle is a horrible company! Kurt sleeps in a garbage pit at the job site every night! He should quit, like, yesterday! Surely there’s something else he could be doing, how are all these other people making money to buy weird crap like baby VR goggles?! But through these thoughts I’m also, you know, a person