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A Little Report on Life in A Spaceport

By Omar (@siegarettes)

• Diaries of A Spaceport Janitor
  
• Developer- Sundae Month
  
• Publisher- tinyBuild
  
• PC (itch.io, Steam)
  

Am I being punished for my hubris? I woke up after my first day in this spaceport feeling hungover and disheveled, in a not exactly luxurious apartment. I’d be so excited to be in a new place I jumped right in, seeking adventure and now I’m penniless, with a bothersome little skull following me. The fortune teller outside my house tells me it’s a curse I picked up for my premature adventure. Now all I can do is clean the trash around this place, and try to earn what little money I can until I find a way to break this curse and get out of here.

Welcome to Diaries of A Spaceport Janitor, an “anti-adventure” game, by Sundae Month. Imagine the hub world of grand RPG, pepper it with detail and strange denizens and you’re not far off from the image of the bustling spaceport you’ll spend a lot of time getting to know. And you’ll do this by laboriously picking up trash and finding people to trade with, all while trying to take care of your basic needs.

What’s remarkable about Diaries is how much these simple tasks and needs draw you into the world. There aren’t many game worlds with this amount of detail, and the ones that do have tend to usher you quickly past them. They might have you deliver items from one end of the city to another (and to be clear there is a little bit of that here), but they generally do it in a way that encourages you to run from location to location in order to fill out a checklist. Here, work is a daily routine that by necessity requires you to wander the city and talk to its inhabitants.

With little direction, and entirely broke, I found myself feeling alienated. I looked around stalls, coveting the grilled foods on display, picking up menus for restaurants I could never afford. When night feel and I had exhausted myself, I panicked a bit, unable to find my way back home. I finally found a set of arrows that pointed the way home, and noted the color of the sector I lived in. I crashed, finally getting rest after a long day. When I woke up and made my daily prayer, I found my luck to be entirely rotten, and the trash that I had collected to be worth barely anything.

While I eventually began to find my bearings (in part thanks to finding the hand drawn map in the manual), the anxiety of that first day never went away. Resources always remained scarce, and the merchant stalls lining the streets continued to confound me and remind me of how little I had. After a particularly desperate day where I ate a grub off the floor, I found a way to quell my everyday hunger, but it involved a daily meal of nutritional shakes out of a vending machine. The grimy texture of which wasn’t entirely pleasing.

From there I settled into a daily grind, and learned a bit more about my cursed situation, and I had almost thought I could ride it out. Then I began to become periodically hit with sickness (communicated by the corruption of text, distant camera, twisting of the screen) that required me to buy gendershift drugs to stabilize. Then a creature with a gun ate some of my damn money.

Diaries, if nothing else, knows what it’s like to work a thankless, menial job. I get the feeling that someone on the team either spent some time doing one themselves, or otherwise putting a lot of thought into how poverty functions. While not explicitly a game about it, there’s quite a few moments in Diaries that had me thinking about the way being poor changed my own perspective.

There’s also a smart move in making luck a visible, tangible number. I’m not sure if it does actually change anything, but seeing it made me constantly aware of it, and having few resources meant that I’d take any advantage I could get. I prayed every day, kept luck charms on me and left offerings to the goddesses to increase my luck. When a loading screen tip told me not to step on spirals (it’s commonly known that’s bad luck) I went out of my way not to. I added lottery machines to my daily routine (you never know what it might give you). Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor made me into a superstitious person.

There’s a kind of absurdist humor to being put in that situation, and as much as tedium become a daily part of Diaries, it’s flourishes like this that kept me coming back. Even the moment where my money was eaten, while stressing, was absurd in a way that still makes me laugh about it. Even as I think about the desperation that made me eat food off the floor and puke on my bed, I laugh at the way I picked it up the next morning to burn it for credits. The job itself also had me slowly appreciating the variety of vendors at the spaceport, learning the faces of the creatures that lived there, and building a familiarity with the city. I learned to tell sections of the city by the music that played in each of them, marveled at the buses full of travelers, and took to the monument near the adventurer’s sector for peace away from the curse that followed me. Even the gender sickness was amusing, letting me try on genders such as ARTISANAL FEMME and PHOTONIKA and be told that I now had horns or cooling blue skin, or could generate energy from the sun.

All of this I recorded in an actual diary, which is opened up to you at the end of the day for you to write a short passage about what happened. It changed the way I thought about everything that happened to me, made me role play and reflect on my personal realities. As much as Diaries is an “anti-adventure” it helped me find novelty in the situation and charms in the toil of daily life. Being a spaceport janitor might be a thankless job, but it can be a beautiful one sometimes as well.