Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor: Silly, Dreary, and covered in throw up

View from your apartment… pretty nice for a struggling janitor

Self-reflective, nauseating, perplexing, confusing, and, most of all, compelling. Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor by Sundae Month reminded me of my late teens and early 20s, highlighting that gnawing feeling that life is passing you by. The silly idea that many of us are possessed with as young people, that if you don't achieve things before you are 23, maybe 25, you missed your shot! It parodies the discomfort that follows many through youth, from their bodies to their place in society. It's a game that is filled with promises of adventure, but tricks you into being last place in the rat race, with seemingly no way to get ahead.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is a simple game where you play as a janitor in an alien spaceport, cursed to be annoyed by a magic skull. The spaceport is full of adventurers, wanna-bes, travelers, and all the merchants who service them as they are coming and going. Some days, the streets are filled with parties and festivals; others, the city has a down-to-business attitude. You'll pass aliens in the middle of their own grand stories as you learn the winding paths of the spaceport and become familiar with the merchants and oddities that inhabit it. You will exist in the background of the hustle, not very important to any of it.

Game Play

You are surrounded by these cartoonish aliens making their way through a bustling galactic market, dropping their trash and vomiting their alien foods. Your job is to clean it all up with a portable incinerator. The basic mechanic of the game is to inspect each piece of trash and decide whether to burn it or keep it to sell back to the merchants for extra cash.

You are rewarded with a tiny bit of money for each piece of trash you burn, so your goal is to burn as much as you can each day. There is a small survival element to the game where you must stay nourished. This cuts into your meager funds. If you eat the wrong food, you get sick and throw up (this game has a lot of throw-up), which empties your stomach and makes you eat more. You may also need to purchase medicine to treat your illness.

On top of this, you have an addiction to gender shifting pills. Every couple of days, your vision begins to distort, text becomes unreadable, and your character starts shaking. You must spend your hard-earned money on gender shifting pills to reverse this process. The genders include: beast girl, crossfit, wizard, and NPC. Overall, it’s a humorous system that speculates on how different these aliens' views of gender are from our own.

The gender-shifting system is another way to force players to spend their hard-earned cash to make the gameplay more comfortable. Beyond the visual distortion, there is no other negative to the gameplay. It reinforces this major theme of feeling out of place and uncomfortable. Everything from the food your character eats to their own body seems to be at odds with their goal of finding a good life.

A Survival Game?

After you have taken care of yourself, you'll have a little bit of money left over. Most of this money will be spent trying to rid yourself of the cursed magic skull. You will find a variety of quests to complete, which amount to running errands for people, mostly buying items or finding the required items left on the ground as trash.

The city is also littered with lotto machines, spitting out mostly junk items. Occasionally, you'll come across something you can sell for a decent profit! The whole game seems to bring some twisted idea of Maslow's hierarchy of needs to the surface. It’s a survival game, where survival is not really a threat. Rather, it asks the question, what does survival look like in a world that offers to cater to your pleasure while denying you contentment.

The gameplay is simple and enjoyable. You can get into a flow state, picking up trash and debating whether to burn it or sell it. Most of the time, the reward is hardly better than if you were to burn it. But occasionally you'll make a couple extra bucks and feel like you hit the jackpot! All through this, you'll find yourself mostly on the edge of starvation and hunger; discovering, it's often best to risk eating food off the ground than spend the money at a vending machine.

This game is visually overstimulating at all times.

Luck and Religion

Religion plays a major role in the world of Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor. The city is centered around worshipping goddesses for luck. Most NPCs will talk about it, and many of the merchants are selling items involved in the worship of the goddesses. So, what does luck do? Practically nothing. Having more luck does not make your game easier, nor does having less luck make it harder. In practice, it turns into a superstition for the player, where NPC dialogue and sound queues reinforce that it is good to have high luck and that you should fear bad luck.

To my mind, this is more of a parody of the society we live in. The game appears to be poking fun at you for spending so much time and effort to invest in a score that does not appear to have any tangible effect on your everyday life. Beyond what NPCs say, you are never given any reason to buy into this system.

Yet, it makes you feel good to know that your luck score is very high. Perhaps this is a knock on the superstitiousness that pervades our society, from self-help and new age to prosperity and manifesting. The game seems to be saying, " This is the only real comfort you can find in such an uncaring world, and even that amounts to little more than good vibes.

Story and Atmosphere

It is an exotic world, silly and full of surprises. The colorfulness and fun of the spaceport contrast with your own mediocre place within it. Your character's lack of motivation speaks to the apathy of youth. Your character is surrounded by potential for adventure, even at times receiving a direct call to adventure, yet through it all, they choose to remain the janitor. Your character seemingly does not realize the agency they possess. You, as the player, are tempted by the allure of the swords and armor on display, magic items ready to be used for fighting monsters, and the promises of something exciting and new around the corner! Nonetheless, you are confined to the dreary path set about by the game's protagonist.

The main quest involves putting together 3 parts of a magic tablet that will rid you of the cursed skull that follows you through the game. The quest requires you to buy items or find the required items littered on the street. Even when the protagonist accepts adventure, they cannot see beyond their lowly place in society. They are unable to rise to the level of an adventurer and must complete their quest as consumers and workers.

An interpretation

Everything reinforces the idea that your character is trapped. Perhaps, more mentally than physically. At the start of the game, they certainly do not have the means to escape. But, even if you are shrewd and clever with money, there is never an opportunity to do anything other than wake up and burn more trash.

In my opinion, the protagonist's true dilemma is not that they are poor, young, or cursed by a magic skull, but that they seem unable to see the opportunities that open before them. When given a chance to rid themselves of the curse, the only path available towards completing their quest of finding the tablet pieces is to burn more trash.

They live on a planet filled with adventurers, where they find swords and magic items on the ground every day, yet it never occurs to the protagonist to step outside their role as a janitor. They are more concerned with returning to the mundane than embracing a new life. More worried about finding a comfortable role in society than embracing the unconventional life presented to them.

To me, this speaks deeply to what I see in our society. People are terribly concerned with fitting in and finding their place. We understand that, in theory, you could pack it all up and try something new, but hardly anyone does. We are convinced that it is better to sedate ourselves and fall in line, hoping to hit milestones like a good job, a good home, and a good spouse at the right times.

Our janitor in this game is trapped, convinced that it's too scary or too dangerous to be adventurous. To step into the unknown and to be uncomfortable. Convinced that they lack the resources or know-how to stand on their own feet in the face of likely failure.

Final Thoughts

Is this a fun game? I would say it’s a 5/10 in terms of fun. Is it entertaining? I believe it's very entertaining. Is it a bit glitchy and annoying? 100%, I didn't even get into that here.

Is it a bit on the nose with social commentary? Absolutely, though this isn't a bad thing. This game's strongest aspect is that it can be interpreted in so many ways. You can examine how it views religion, sexuality, class warfare, race, or anything else you can imagine. Diaries of Space Janitor is a canvas upon which you can place so many ideas and theories. It’s cryptic and confusing, which invites a bounty of interpretations.

I think this is where the fun of the game lies; you can see whatever you want to see in that maze of a spaceport.