To think it’s already been a little over half a year since the opening section of The Last Worker was first explored. The surprise isn’t so much that that length of time has already passed, but more to do with the fact that one’s initial take-away last year is just as relevant here by way of the full release as it was prior. Asstated then: it’s, if nothing else, admirable that a studio – or in this case a collaboration between two separate entities – has gone about their intended narrative premise with barely any subtlety that it’s practically non-existent. A parodying (even if that term feels relatively sparing in this case) of one of most globally-recognized of real-life, corporate brands in the form of Amazon. With what aims to be a tale of one man – seemingly stuck in a perpetual, day-by-day cycle of being the sole remaining human employee of this vast corporation – slowly uncovering the true nature of what’s really going on.
But herein lies the crux: parody by design is often personally-motivated in its structure. To parody someone or something, is to exaggerate or otherwise draw attention to that which you deem a significant amount of attention should be drawn towards. It doesn’t have to stretch to some kind of disagreement, or even loathing, but parody is seldom meant to be favorable. Aiming instead to cast its subject in a light that can be crass, revealing or a combination of both. It’s important to lay out the reason why parody in any kind of writing – comedic or otherwise – can be easy to approach, but easier still to get wrong. And by wrong: wrong in the sense that what should be read as comical-albeit-selective exaggerations, instead comes off more as preaching to some unnecessarily-focal choir in lieu of other more-lacking areas in the final product.
Because as brief a time it’s been playing through The Last Worker, the joint effort between developer Oiffy and Wolf & Wood can feel like a hefty slog in what’s a rather brief but uninspired trek. A game whose VR-first priorities are evident from the get-go and whose resulting hasty retrofitting to non-VR space doesn’t scratch the surface to the mounting problems. It’s one thing that The Last Worker comes across mildly preachy with nothing substantial or otherwise original to add. It’s another that, outside its main plot and key story-beats – of which the more prominent reveals are so painfully obvious to see coming from a mile away – the gameplay surrounding just isn’t all that exciting to warrant even such a short run-time as this.
That’s not to say the opening moments don’t hold promise; another referring back to the first impressions of last year. Appealing The Last Worker is (and could’ve been overall) with its implied narrative focus. Here, on a single individual and this more personal struggle-come-journey amid the stale, lifeless, joyless, corporate surroundings that is both employment and sadly one’s home on top. Introduced in an effective-enough, wordless fashion and soon enough, even managing to pull off a genuinely good subversion on a common-day trope when it comes to a particular character archetype. The inevitable reveal and subsequent voice work of Jason Isaacs especially, one of The Last Worker’s limited, though acknowledged highlights here.
But then gameplay commences and things so quickly fall apart for The Last Worker. Ironic it is (and I’m confident this wasn’t intentional by the developers) that a premise all about gathering, tagging and sending packages out for eventual delivery is as tedious and uneventful in-game as it may be in real-life. Again, there’s a flash of an idea for lite puzzle-solving and deductive-come-tactical thinking on how to spend what limited time you have to gather and correctly categorize as many packages as possible. Plus, given that the packages chosen are entirely random – with no way to “cheat” so to speak in getting a perfect run – it’s clear there’s at least some thought put behind this novel albeit simple loop. But not only does it appear at brief spots throughout, but aside from a basic “game over” state if you fail to correctly sort enough packages in time, the concept is a shallow one on top. The initial assumption that this would be some sort of reputation or rank you’d have to keep in check throughout the story, instead relegated to what feels more like some tossed-aside mini-game devoid of any real consequence or impact on the narrative.
The bigger issue, however, is that it’s simply not all that enjoyable to control. The Last Worker making it too cumbersome and clunky to do something as basic as latch onto a target by way of the anti-grav styled tool you have at your disposal. Then you factor in that your mobility is sorely lacking in speed – outside of the accompanying brief boost you can administer when fully charged – and you have a situation, pressured you already are due to that rudimentary time limit, where the controls come across as poorly thought out. The fact that the button prompt for keeping a package afloat is set to hold by default – and not just a simple press – is bizarre. And the less said about a later objective that requires you to fumble your way grabbing a certain number of rodents (while still maintaining that facade of distributing packages) the better. By far the most frustrating and loathsome section of the game by a landslide.
Thus, devoid of any real relevance of influence this part of the game is, what’s left in The Last Worker is a plain and basic first-person stealth game. One that has you teleporting (quite literally, another suggestion this was a game made entirely for VR, but found itself forced to quickly adapt for other formats) from one unremarkable, linear scenario to the next. Again, where there was – and in all likelihood, should’ve been – hope that its premise and more specifically, six-degrees-of-freedom movement would open itself up to interesting deviation on level design quickly dissipates. Replaced instead by a more predictable dose of hiding behind cover until an enemy’s vision-cone is sufficiently distant enough to get past. A part of the game that in some cases weirdly forgets its own sense of verticality – attempting to make do with air-ducts to navigate and graffiti to hopefully ignore in the vain attempt to pretend you’ve found such routes on your own.
So much is lacking in originality or even just variation, all you have left with The Last Worker is its supposed story. A tale that, were compelling enough and populated by pockets of world-building, character writing and such, could have countered some of the gameplay woes. Maybe it’s, again, the irony of the intentionally drab setting and of the dire straits of the tale, but it’s hard to truly care about the events of The Last Worker when little actually happens on-screen. A lot is implied to be happening – outside, somewhere, beyond the walls of your employment – but it’s hard to care about what the game implies. Not least because most of the cast are either faceless, distant or simply lacking in presence throughout. So much so that come the end’s climax, when a choice is given to players, the inevitable decision not only feels apathetic but rather pointless given the prior hollow stature.
Closing Comments:
What could’ve been a comical, perhaps novel, approach to tackling themes of corporatism, consumerism, activism and comfort in the familiar alike, The Last Worker instead can only muster up a mediocre clutter of half-baked ideas that rarely feel properly fleshed out. A “work-day routine” that could’ve been more tactile and morally-engaging, like so much of the game, comes off more as some uninspiring filler to pad out what is in the end a rather hollow and narrow-minded effort. Bland stealth segments coupled with a narrative that’s far from creative enough to deter from its otherwise regurgitated “corporations bad” rhetoric. Some occasionally-credible voice work and performances from its cast aside, The Last Worker (in a fitting, albeit ironic, kind of way) ends up as deprived and joyless as the very corporate setting it means to ridicule.
