Developed by Wolf & Wood Interactive Limited and published by Wired Productions, The Last Worker is a first-person action adventure game centred around – you guessed it – the last worker in an increasingly automated company.

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With an all-star, if intentionally small voice cast including Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (Severance, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla) as Kurt and Jason Isaacs (Star Wars Rebels, Harry Potter) as Skew, you’ll spend your time between being a good little worker, organising and dispatching items for the baying masses who have purchased them, and trying to piece together the emerging situation and story involving a new addition in your little corner of Jüngle.

On the fact of it, The Last Worker is seemingly an incredibly simple game. You find the package you’re told to, you take it to be dispatched, rinse and repeat. Like a lot with this game, not everything is as simple as it seems though. Before you even contemplate throwing the package into the huge, great hole to be sent to the paying customer, you need to ensure the package is the right size, weight, undamaged, within date and more – if they fail any of these, then the package doesn’t get dispatched but instead discarded and ‘recycled’.

Throw in a loud, micromanaging boss with allusions to multiple billionaires but especially Jeff Bezos and a constantly-reminding time-limit, and you have a fraction of the feeling those who work in these dispatch centres may feel on a daily basis.

The Last Worker – A Small but Fantastic Cast

When you’re not spending your shift fulfilling the next order with Skew, the excellently voiced by Jason Isaacs robot that spends more time insulting you in expletive ridden comments than he does actually helping anything; you’ll be spending it with Hoverbird, skulking behind the scenes trying to help the rebellion in their attempt to destroy/subvert/otherwise upend Jüngle and loosen their grip on the planet.

The real star of the game is Ólafur Darri Ólafsson as the game’s protagonist Kurt, who due to the limited cast of characters, spends as much time talking to himself or the disembodied, booming voice of your manager as he does talking to the supporting characters like the aforementioned Skew. With this comes a lot of pressure, and thankfully Ólafur delivers a performance that’ll have you feeling morose one second and elated the next. 

As you’re playing you’ll catch the odd line of dialogue that explains just how dire the outside world has become since the rise of Jüngle, with them controlling not only their consumerist obsessed customers with the latest ‘must-have’, but also everything from cancer medication to housing. It’s an exaggerated view of what the world could look like sooner rather than later.

The game doesn’t make much of a secret of its criticism on the wider world of consumerism and capitalism, but its all within the realms of the story, and whilst its as subtle as sledgehammer, by the time the credits roll you’ll be both disappointed its finished, wanting and needing more, and also wondering how we as a human race got to this point.

I can whole-heartedly say @wolfandwood #TheLastWorker is one of the most fun and engaging games I've had the pleasure of reviewing this year. Between the relevant and hard-hitting story, voice performances, and the simple yet fun gameplay, I'll be replaying it again.@WiredP pic.twitter.com/Hg3ePfTaUG

— Luke Addison (@callmeafilmnerd) March 30, 2023

The game isn’t all political and consumerist commentary though, with some genuinely fun gameplay. Whether it’s the rapid sorting of packages, the hacking of rooms and bots or attempting to fly your way through a range of incredible scenes, I’ll be surprised if you don’t do exactly what I did and restart as soon as you’ve finished. It’s rare to have a game that conveys an important message, its rarer still to have that game be incredibly good fun.

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Honestly I can’t say enough how much I enjoyed every facet of this game, and it would have scored higher still were it not for one unfortunate bug – due to be patched on day one, so you won’t experience it – which resulted in me restarting a chapter thankfully losing only a few minutes progress, but in a time where I don’t get the time to replay games, as soon as I finished this, I restarted it and played through a second time; that should say everything.

9/10

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