The Last Worker Preview: Welcome to the Jüngle
A very neat and cool thing about being a millennial is watching an endless parade of news headlines revealing that the dystopian novels I read in high school are effectively a day-to-day reality now. It’s understandable, then, that in answer to that our own generation’s artists have turned around and upped the ante on dystopian fiction by satirizing these horrors that now exist to new levels, whether in an effort to spread awareness or simply out of reasonable fury. Which is, I suppose, how I ended up both playing and loving The Last Worker – a narrative game that takes capitalism to its worst, most fearsome extremes while laughing sardonically at the result.
I played two segments wearing the cap of protagonist Kurt, the titular “Last Worker” at Amazon-parody company Jüngle. Jüngle is the most profitable company in the world, and largely runs on automation. But Kurt, for whatever reason, has managed to hold down his job delivering packages from one side of the factory to the other in his company-assigned hover cart. On the tutorial level, it promises to be appropriately boring work: pick up a box, take it to its destination, and drop it. Kurt in his cart can move in all three dimensions – which took me a moment to get acclimated to but promises to make the VR version of this game very interesting – and he can pick up and fling boxes using a little grabber device he has at hand. A Wheatley-like robot companion who seems to think Kurt is new on the job walks you through the basics, all while laying on thick the extremely Bezosian nature of Jüngle’s founder.
That’s the opening. And then The Last Worker cranks up the capitalist horror several more notches.
You see, all is even less well than expected in the hellscape of
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