Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is an anti-adventure game about picking up trash in an alien bazaar. You play as the Janitor, an Alaensee woman with a municipally-subsidized trash incineration job, and dreams of leaving the planet of Xabran’s Rock far behind her.
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I like it well enough but I may have to call it quits in the last leg. It's too grindy towards the end trying to get enough cash to hire someone. I'm gonna give it one more go but the repetition isn't too annoying at first, but it kind of accumulates as time goes on to the point of being a bit unbearable. All in all though, at least the first half of what I played was very charming and had some nice atmosphere, music, and design. and the gameplay loop for a spell was fun.
A game about keeping a diary while working at a spaceport. As a janitor. Really it's hard to give the game a rating because on the one hand it's not exactly fun to play. The core gameplay loop involves going around and collecting trash. The next day you are given a seemingly random amount of money roughly correlating to the trash you collected. Occasionally you'll come across something worth selling. However hunger, random bouts of dysphoria, and shakedowns from guards eat away at your money.
On the other hand the frustration of grinding away for a goal you will probably never achieve is kind of the point. Diaries advertises itself as an "anti-adventure" game and it really achieves that. You're on a planet littered with ruins and teeming with the adventurers come to loot it. But you are not one of them. You are a janitor picking up their trash. There are shops selling all kinds of fantastical items, but you will never be able to afford any of them with what you're paid.
All in all, it's not a fun game to play, but that's the whole point. So at least it succeeds in what it sets out to do.
On the other hand the frustration of grinding away for a goal you will probably never achieve is kind of the point. Diaries advertises itself as an "anti-adventure" game and it really achieves that. You're on a planet littered with ruins and teeming with the adventurers come to loot it. But you are not one of them. You are a janitor picking up their trash. There are shops selling all kinds of fantastical items, but you will never be able to afford any of them with what you're paid.
All in all, it's not a fun game to play, but that's the whole point. So at least it succeeds in what it sets out to do.
it's hard to describe the experience of playing this game in a way that reflects how i feel about it. it's a work simulator that actually feels like work. it's not fun to play, and "completing" it isn't rewarding either. but that's the point, so in a way, it's a great reflection of real life.
I cleaned for like an hour and then didn't know what else to do. Accurate janitor work I guess
A charming little experience.
Poor janitor.
Poor janitor.
CWs for Memories of a Spaceport Janitor: bodily fluids, harassment, transphobia.
A deeply unfocused, dispassionate, and not very carefully tuned container for the weird liberal middle-class imagination of a distinctly working class job. I'm theoretically into the core loop and really a big fan of how consistently disorienting the city is, but it's in too loose of a frame and ends up stumbling where decades of sims have already produced so many models for designing day-to-day minutia. The scaling of numbers and the general cost of life is baffling given the dice roll to figure out your daily piece-wage and doubly so when you realize that there's just no rent due for some reason. I have a bit of sympathy for this game because I really did otherwise enjoy bopping around the city, but it holds a really nefarious and delirium inducing bootstrap moralizing directed at an individual in an abstraction of our own society that's way too fucking stinky.
A deeply unfocused, dispassionate, and not very carefully tuned container for the weird liberal middle-class imagination of a distinctly working class job. I'm theoretically into the core loop and really a big fan of how consistently disorienting the city is, but it's in too loose of a frame and ends up stumbling where decades of sims have already produced so many models for designing day-to-day minutia. The scaling of numbers and the general cost of life is baffling given the dice roll to figure out your daily piece-wage and doubly so when you realize that there's just no rent due for some reason. I have a bit of sympathy for this game because I really did otherwise enjoy bopping around the city, but it holds a really nefarious and delirium inducing bootstrap moralizing directed at an individual in an abstraction of our own society that's way too fucking stinky.