Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor pits you, an underpaid sanitation worker with a portable incinerator, against noise, entropy, and color. You start any given “Onday” or “Theday” with your work cut out. The console in your bedroom awards you money each morning for objects incinerated during the previous day. The same console can also tell you how lucky you are—numerically. One rainy morning, having incinerated 33 garbage the day before, I found out that my luck was -14. I was in the red. The floating skull following me laughed. Of course he had some hand in this, curses being as they are. The young woman living on the street outside my apartment told me I could be rid of this skull, who attached himself to my person after I ate an eyeball and explored the sewer dungeon, if I could collect 3 pieces of a tablet and join them. How? Why? What? No. None of that. Go with the flow.

You are forced to go with the flow. You scrape together enough credits to buy a fried blue egg or purple street meat, so that you can sleep at night, so that you can start with your incinerator freshly charged in the morning, Onday morning. There are no days off but your job is freeform, allowing for sporadic visits to deific statues, vendors, the bank. Really whatever strikes your fancy, so long as you’re collecting trash. But this isn’t Subnautica or Rust, and these bits of trash don’t exist in an interlocking economy of usefulness. In fact, much of it is just useless garbage. That plays a funny trick, since we’re used to rusty swords becoming legendary with orichalcum. Disabuse yourself. We’ve got a limited inventory, a small backpack without space for unnecessary things. Necessity is determined by the whims of Spaceport’s citizens, some of whom enjoy empty containers. Some trade in magical swatches. One really likes smut mags.

Your interactions with these alien city folk happens in a tizzy. The headlong player perspective resembles a filmic push-pull, like in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. You do feel at arms-length piloting the janitor, and sense that the scenery, all this space-age cosmopolitan happening, is more the point. Our janitor, an androgynous presenting blue pixellation with a yellow hat, only makes herself known through distracting visual glitches when she is exceptionally hungry, or when she must change genders. Changing genders is accomplished via a kiosk that sells 4 options, each of which have semi-random results. The second time I ate a gender sigil my gender became “SUSAN SARANDON.” The soundtrack’s guitar noodles and winces, an airy synthetic guitar, and I strut as Susan with a newfound clarity.

Pressing ‘E’ (our context button) allows you to speak with aliens, many of whom roam our titular spaceport, a disorienting hub of lean-to’s, ziggurats, street vendors, and garbage. Pressing ‘E’ also allows you to pick up garbage. In Spaceport, garbage comes with flavor text. The flavor text can be useful: such as when it tells you that perhaps it is unwise to eat an “infested” apple. Infested with what? Doesn’t matter. It makes you vomit. You can also pick up this vomit with ‘E,’ and then incinerate it as part of your quota. I would do this because an advisory note in the game’s title menu told me not to worry about “losing” or “progression.” This advice worried me and pushed my mindset towards nadir, the common pitfall of a broken-in worker drone. The city guards tell me I am this, a sanitation drone, after they finish eating my money.

This note of despair, endemic throughout, is an offense. Spaceport does well to present the chaos of low-income urban life: the scraping by and hurried disorientation. But it’s a flatline. There’s never a ramping-up, or a sense that the player, having grown savvy, will transcend. And this is, for Spaceport, the objective. The game tells you not to bother and means it. It sings a sour note loudly and colorfully.