Game 16 of 2023 - Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

Developer: Sundae Month
Publisher: Sundae Month
Platform: PC
Genre: Adventure (Anti-Adventure)

Difficulty: Easy
Hours: ~7

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 7.5/10

This game is so delightfully weird.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor bills itself as an "anti-adventure" game, and it's not messing around. You mostly spend your days incinerating as much trash as you can before your incinerator runs out of batteries and finding the cheapest and safest (and sometimes not so safe) food you can sustain yourself on.

You also get cursed by some asshole skull that just follows you around and yells at you.

This dude is such a dick.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is rendered in an old-school combination of pixel art and 3D, think the early Doom games or Daggerfall. The world is filled with all sorts of creative little details that give the feeling of depth; items have interested descriptions, the spaceport is filled with a variety of weird little guys, and spaceships land and take off.

It's kind of a shame you don't have the luxury of taking it all in, as you've got trash to burn. I guess that's kind of the point, though. You're barely scraping by in a dead end job, and then you get this dumb curse. Your dream of leaving the spaceport just got that much more difficult.

The game often feels like work, since you have a bunch of busy work to do in addition to your normal job. You need to find the fetishes of all nine goddesses (Sprense took FOREVER), save up enough money to buy some blob his weird porn, and run away from this creepy specter in a sewer of green goo.

Actually kind of terrifying.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor feels like a labor of love from a small team, and while it overstays its' welcome by a couple hours, I feel like it made it's point. Great buy.