Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor (PC) Review

It's easy to tell when a video game is a weird breed, when its graphic quality settings are 'Bad' and 'Worse,' its protagonist is a transgender girl-beast, and the whole thing is labelled an anti-adventure - which is logical, since cleaning a spaceport from nine to five can't be considered an epic quest. Yes, don't be surprised. That's exactly what the concept here is; clean, grab a bite, have some R&R at the end of the day… and then start all over again. The weird thing? This actually works to the benefit of this bizarre indie creation, by giving it a special charm that it's hard not to feel.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor masterfully manages to make you "be" this hopeless creature, since her experiences in this place are quite realistic, and will thus resonate to the heart of the player. Her job is boring and the pay is never enough, the junk she collects can't be used, and if sold she will just receive a few measly coins. Additionally, she will get hungry, she will get tired, and she will even get gender dysphoria, forcing her to take some "drugs." Most of all, however, she will get desperate to leave this Havalana-forsaken planet… and you will get desperate with her.

It must be mentioned once more: the "realism" of it all has a very special charm that's almost impossible to find in other games. The life of this cute beast-girl is painfully boring, her dreams of leaving the planet feel like nothing more than dreams, and her one simple "luxury" is the diary that she can write on at the end of the day. The thing is, though, that, despite this unique immersion technique, video games are all about escapism, and this will soon get really, really boring after a while… After all, it's hard to imagine a real-life janitor going home to play this.

In other words, the player will need some sort of "quest" in order to get the incentive required to continue keeping the spaceport squeaky clean—so the heroine gets out of her measly apartment in search for some adventure! And this is the time to talk about the place she lives in. This weird locale has a fantastic city atmosphere that not even the Grand Theft Auto series has managed to capture. It's a world bustling with an insane variety of extra-terrestrial life; a world that is noisy, colourful, and extremely easy to get lost in.

What can be done in this place, though? Unfortunately, not much. Her main task is divided between a small number of missions, which turn out to be nothing more than a couple of excruciatingly grindy fetch-quests that just add more time to what is actually a tiny odyssey. To be more specific, the main character will have to bring several items to some NPCs, but, in order to do so, she must use a lot of her hard-earned coinage - and since money doesn't grow on trees in this universe, the action returns, once more, to collecting garbage.

…And that's the problem with Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor. It gives the feeling that the gargantuan world it offers has lots of secrets behind its many back alleys; it makes you feel as if all its weird denizens have something to say; it makes you believe that there's something more underneath this veil of the everyday and the mundane. The truth? 99% of this game is all about collecting junk, collecting junk, and then collecting some more junk.