The Last Worker Review
It’s not hard to see the allusions to the real world and the path that capitalism is taking us down in The Last Worker. Jüngle is a riff on Amazon, its figurehead founder looks an awful lot like Jeff Bezos behind a virtue signalling rainbow of a hair cut, and the introductory cinematic depicts how a bustling warehouse job for an online shipping company gradually transforms from human jobs to purely robotic ones – and in rather more brutal fashion than you might expect. It’s high time we tear it all down, isn’t it?
Kurt is the only one left, with more than 9000 days of work behind him, as the rest of the human workforce has eroded away over time. He lives on-site, making a home for himself in a dust-clogged recycling pit, hops onto a hover buggy for the day-to-day of sorting packages, and has just a single friend in the world – a Jüngle CoBot nicknamed Skew. Skew is oddly full of character and personality for an AI cog in the Jüngle machine, but you can immediately see that he’s been through the wars, the metal housing around his eyes having been torn and warped in some accident or another. He’s not just a regular bot anymore.
The day-to-day for Kurt sees him racing around an inhospitable warehouse, looking to grab specific packages from shelves, check that they meet the label specifications of size and weight, ensure they’re not damaged, and then either send them on their way through pneumatic tubes, or mark and send them for recycling. It’s an engaging little loop, especially as it’s gamified with a rating system that tops out at J (for Jüngle, of course). Some boxes will be on a timer, others will be fragile, and you’re always given a preview of what it is you’ve managed to sort once you drop it off, from baby VR goggles
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