‘The Last Worker’—How it All Started on Meta Quest 2

When Ryan Bousfield (creative director and founder of Wolf & Wood) and I teamed up to make The Last Worker in 2019, many people thought we were crazy. But it’s out today on Meta Quest 2 + Pro, and I wanted to take this chance to celebrate and talk about how we got here.

The Last Worker is a unique—some might say weird—concept. You embody Kurt, the last human worker in a near-future fulfillment center the size of Manhattan. You steer a JünglePod (don’t call it a flying mobility scooter!) past millions of boxes every day, each containing another useless product on its way to the outside world. You haven’t left work in 25 years—such is the dedication to your job. But that all changes when a group of activists contact you to dismantle the Jüngle Corporation from the inside.

Combining a first-person narrative with a dystopian work simulator—with 6DOF movement, intense stealth sections, puzzle mechanics, and a whole lot of action and combat—sounded like a risky cocktail to most. But we firmly believed that Meta Quest 2 would bring VR to the masses and make VR the home for wildly new gameplay experiences, becoming the future of storytelling in the process. And it did.

Before I met Ryan, I’d spent most of my professional life directing movies (The White King), writing graphic novels (Ricky Rouse Has a Gun), and producing big stage shows. I worked as a game journalist for years and games have always been my first love, but my skills are limited to dreaming up concepts, telling stories, and assembling creative teams.

And so to kick off The Last Worker, I approached comics legend Mick McMahon (Judge Dredd, 2000AD) to design the characters and create concept art to help shape our game’s world, as well as composer Oliver Kraus (who’s worked with artists like Adele, Sia, and Florence + The Machine) to write a score full of tension, melancholy, and movement.

I also recruited an incredible cast of actors worthy of the big screen: Jason Isaacs (Star Trek: Discovery, The Death of Stalin, the Harry Potter franchise); Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (True Detective, The Meg); Clare-Hope Ashitey (Doctor Who, Children of Men, Shooting Dogs); David Hewlett (Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, The Shape of Water, See); Tommie Earl Jenkins (Death Stranding, Wednesday); and Zelda Williams (Legend of Korra).

Photo of Jason Isaacs playing an early prototype of The Last Worker on Meta Quest 2 in the summer of 2021.

The more ambitious your game concept and scope—and on an indie budget, no less—the more skilled a team of developers you need. Only Wolf & Wood (the studio behind A Chair in a Room: Greenwater and The Exorcist: Legion VR) would fit that bill. I'm amazed by the things we’ve been able to get out of the Meta Quest 2. It has so much hidden power. And it’s been our trusty ally from the start.

Less than a year into development—a year ravaged by countless lockdowns and other surprises (but then again The Last Worker is technically about working from home)—we were encouraged to submit our game to the 78th Venice International Film Festival, and the organizers selected it based on some rough gameplay footage and concept art. We only had six weeks to assemble 15-20 minutes of gameplay. Help!

We chose to create it on Meta Quest 2, and the response was amazing. For our little game that dares to dream big to compete at the world’s oldest and most prestigious film festival gave us a much-needed confidence boost. It also confirmed our goal to make VR the ultimate destination for immersive and fully interactive narrative experiences. You don’t merely empathize with the larger-than-life characters—you get to fully embody them.

Just wait until you look at yourself in the JünglePod’s mirror and see Kurt staring and talking back at you. Or when you hear Jason Isaacs’s voice coming out of your jailbroken CoBot Skew’s propellerhead. There’s a whole narrative world that expands and unfolds around you while you play. And you can strap it all to your head thanks to Meta Quest 2—and a crazy talented team of mad (?) developers.

Are you brave enough to bring down the oppressive Jüngle Corporation? See for yourself in The Last Worker, which is out now on Meta Quest 2 + Pro for $19.99 USD.