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I got Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality way back in 2020. I had been meaning to play it for a while before then, I'm pretty sure. It still took me until November 2022 to finally get around to it, and I am very glad that I did.

I launch the game for the very first time. The default options in the Unity settings thing are a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 and a graphics quality of "Worse". I go to change the graphics quality and the only other option is "Bad". I send a screenshot to the group chat with the description "this is going to be a real banger", which turns out to be a good prediction.

Every day-night cycle, the game asks you to write a diary entry about what you did that day (which is almost always mostly just "picked up trash"). I'm sure you could just write gibberish and it'd let you continue, but I always took the request seriously, and it turns out that writing in-character is a great way to get in-character. I'm reminded of the time I played the adventure game 80 Days in real time and wrote Jean Passepartout's journal as I went. Getting sick in 80 Days was always a bit comical, while the (very frequent) times I threw up in Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor made me feel a bit ill in empathy.

The game seems to encourage developing superstition around "luck", which I certainly do, but most of that superstition is a complex set of rules about what foods, and from where, are safe to eat.

The goddesses in this world are, more than anything, pranksters. In a bizarre way, this game is legitimately funny! Multiple times in my playthrough, something happened that I definitely, 100% should have seen coming, and yet didn't, and even if it's something terrible I have to respect the prank. Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is very clever in how it always seems to make unfortunate things happen at the best moments, but occasionally gives you something nice just so it doesn't get too predictable.

I find a lost bag outside in real life, and have the momentary thought that it's something which I "probably shouldn't burn".

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor does a really good job at worldbuilding. Most of the text you encounter is in the descriptions of trash you find, or shop items you definitely can't afford. These little item descriptions give just enough detail to describe both a whole world outside the game, with its own set of alien species, foods, customs... and a whole second game, with combat and crafting systems and stats. Even if I'll never be able to see that game, which is apparently much more action-packed, there's still something nice about the endless drudgery of picking up trash.

I always sing along to the Theday music as best I can.

There's this one detail that I really love: all the different aliens have their own unique little gibberish dialog noises that they make when you interact with them, which is fairly typical of RPGs. But, and this took me a long time to notice, some of these very different noises made by different characters are the same words. They're not just Generic Speech Noises, they're parts of a language - I know the language doesn't really exist, but I found myself repeating the words at the NPCs as I played.

I notice that I'm writing diary entries in the game in a very similar way as to how I write them in real life.

There are Steam reviews for this game complaining of some game-breaking bug that makes it impossible to complete the story. I certainly encountered bugs, but nothing that bad. Is the Itch build different to the Steam one, or did I just get lucky? I picked Beb, the goddess of luck, as my favourite at the start of the game, so that would make sense. Probably.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is messy, and flawed, and at least slightly broken.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

I do wonder if it's really fair to write a review without actually talking about the parts of the experience that I didn't really like. And I also wonder if there's anything I could say here that hasn't already been put better by somebody else back in 2016. I think it's okay though because this review isn't real! I don't even have a Backloggd account!

...But I really do think that Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is worth playing. I'm not sure sticking with it to the end would be for everyone, but it's rare that I end up thinking about a game outside of it this much (to the extent that I write an incredibly wordy semi-review), so, especially if you technically already own it, it's probably worth a try. Good luck.