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It takes a lot for a game to pull that "you made the choice to play this, you could have walked away at any time" card and make it work for me. Spec Ops: The Line didn't do it, because ultimately there was never a choice in the matter. You either commit atrocities, or don't finish the story.
Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor goes the complete opposite direction.
There's no story to finish. You're a municipal janitor, at a spaceport. You also happen to be genderfluid, but thankfully there exist readily-vended patches with which to swap out your genders as needed to stave off the effects of dysphoria. You're still doing municipal cleanup work for a pittance of a wage, in a spaceport where nobody cares, where the world happens AROUND you but rarely TO you, where you're treated like a third-world citizen just because you exist.
To say this game is Too Real is understating things, is what I'm saying. It's about the Daily Grind, the routine day in and day out. It's about how attempts to deviate from the norm may not change things all that much, or maybe they will. The one mandatory thing in the game is that you find a dropped treasure map early on, dive into the spaceport's sewerdungeons... and end up with a cursed skull floating over your head screaming at you from that point on. It doesn't do anything, except scream and sap your luck. After the first few days it's just another source of background noise like everything else.
You, meanwhile, have to scrape enough money together to eat, and to keep yourself sane. The world happens AROUND you. There's a story here, but it's not yours. Amongst the debris and refuse of the spaceport that you shovel into your handy incinerator, you find things like alchemy ingredients and magic enhancement accessories. You can't do anything with them; you're a janitor, not an alchemist or a mage. If you're lucky, you might find a rusted piece of armor. You can't do anything with it, you're not a warrior. Everything at this spaceport happens out of your view; you merely exist, and pick up the trash.
The moral dilemmas, thus, become far more innocuous and inconsequential, but in a way that still makes you think about them. Do you buy the cheapest thing possible to keep yourself fed, do you splurge for a really good meal, or do you eat whatever you find on the ground and use the inevitable food poisoning as an excuse to artificially inflate your work numbers by cleaning up your own puke? Do you keep patching your gender, or do you just let the dysphoria overtake you, leading to you not being able to focus on or comprehend anything to the point of it destroying your HUD? After all, it's merely a cosmetic effect. Do you cart around that rare-looking artifact or trading card in your woefully limited carrying space, looking for just the right vendor willing to pay more than pocket change for it, or do you chuck it in the incinerator for your Municipally Approved Pay? None of it really matters, none of it changes the game's end result, but it's still choices you make. The choices change the gameplay, but they still change nothing at all.
Also, the spaceport is huge. Labyrinthine, and non-euclidian. It wraps around on itself in ways that bend space, but also it's impossible to orient yourself, and the game provides no map whatsoever in-game, and only a cheap mockery of one in crayon in the manual. Instead, you'll have to learn to figure your way around by the colored arrows on the ground, each pointing you towards the centerpoint of that colored district. Why do you need to get to one district or another? Well, you don't really, unless you're trying to do something. But none of the choices really matter, so it's just a personal achievement thing of learning to navigate on your own.
Oh, right, I mentioned a luck stat. You do have one of those. It's raised by praying to any and all of the nine goddesses of the spaceport (one for each day of the week, you see) and lowered by burning religious items, lucky charms, or dealing with cursed items. (Like the floating skull following you around, constantly). Ostensibly it affects what kind of debris you find on the ground, but ultimately it's just a number. Luck is what you make of it, and you're a janitor with no respect and even less money.
This is a game about monotonous grind, about the attempts to escape that grind being largely futile, and about simply existing in a world that doesn't give two shits about you.
Eventually, if you manage to fight the tedium and go on your own personal exploration to find the items needed to cure you of Cursed Skull, you wake up that very night, face to face with said skull, who goes "oh hey, sorry about the screaming constantly and hanging around you like a dark cloud thing, it's just how curses go, but i'll tell you something. I've seen how you live and the real curse is this rut you're in. You can get out of it if you try, but you'll never actually be happy until you do."
It's a strangely powerful message, in a game centered around the exact opposite of that message. All at once, the denouement of the game is basically the game itself telling you "yeah, I know this is miserable, but if you don't want to, you now have the power to walk away at any time you like. You always did, of course, but now it's something you can do without just quitting the game."
Symbolically, of course; you still have to exit the game to stop, but that's the end of anything resembling a narrative in the game. It's let you go, and if you keep playing, that's on you. There's no more to see if you want 'adventure', or an experience even. It's just more monotony for goals that are pointless to achieve. And some people want that, and some people don't.
This is not a game for everyone, and in a lot of ways it's soul-crushingly bleak. But that's by design, and I'm ultimately glad I played through it.
Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor goes the complete opposite direction.
There's no story to finish. You're a municipal janitor, at a spaceport. You also happen to be genderfluid, but thankfully there exist readily-vended patches with which to swap out your genders as needed to stave off the effects of dysphoria. You're still doing municipal cleanup work for a pittance of a wage, in a spaceport where nobody cares, where the world happens AROUND you but rarely TO you, where you're treated like a third-world citizen just because you exist.
To say this game is Too Real is understating things, is what I'm saying. It's about the Daily Grind, the routine day in and day out. It's about how attempts to deviate from the norm may not change things all that much, or maybe they will. The one mandatory thing in the game is that you find a dropped treasure map early on, dive into the spaceport's sewerdungeons... and end up with a cursed skull floating over your head screaming at you from that point on. It doesn't do anything, except scream and sap your luck. After the first few days it's just another source of background noise like everything else.
You, meanwhile, have to scrape enough money together to eat, and to keep yourself sane. The world happens AROUND you. There's a story here, but it's not yours. Amongst the debris and refuse of the spaceport that you shovel into your handy incinerator, you find things like alchemy ingredients and magic enhancement accessories. You can't do anything with them; you're a janitor, not an alchemist or a mage. If you're lucky, you might find a rusted piece of armor. You can't do anything with it, you're not a warrior. Everything at this spaceport happens out of your view; you merely exist, and pick up the trash.
The moral dilemmas, thus, become far more innocuous and inconsequential, but in a way that still makes you think about them. Do you buy the cheapest thing possible to keep yourself fed, do you splurge for a really good meal, or do you eat whatever you find on the ground and use the inevitable food poisoning as an excuse to artificially inflate your work numbers by cleaning up your own puke? Do you keep patching your gender, or do you just let the dysphoria overtake you, leading to you not being able to focus on or comprehend anything to the point of it destroying your HUD? After all, it's merely a cosmetic effect. Do you cart around that rare-looking artifact or trading card in your woefully limited carrying space, looking for just the right vendor willing to pay more than pocket change for it, or do you chuck it in the incinerator for your Municipally Approved Pay? None of it really matters, none of it changes the game's end result, but it's still choices you make. The choices change the gameplay, but they still change nothing at all.
Also, the spaceport is huge. Labyrinthine, and non-euclidian. It wraps around on itself in ways that bend space, but also it's impossible to orient yourself, and the game provides no map whatsoever in-game, and only a cheap mockery of one in crayon in the manual. Instead, you'll have to learn to figure your way around by the colored arrows on the ground, each pointing you towards the centerpoint of that colored district. Why do you need to get to one district or another? Well, you don't really, unless you're trying to do something. But none of the choices really matter, so it's just a personal achievement thing of learning to navigate on your own.
Oh, right, I mentioned a luck stat. You do have one of those. It's raised by praying to any and all of the nine goddesses of the spaceport (one for each day of the week, you see) and lowered by burning religious items, lucky charms, or dealing with cursed items. (Like the floating skull following you around, constantly). Ostensibly it affects what kind of debris you find on the ground, but ultimately it's just a number. Luck is what you make of it, and you're a janitor with no respect and even less money.
This is a game about monotonous grind, about the attempts to escape that grind being largely futile, and about simply existing in a world that doesn't give two shits about you.
Eventually, if you manage to fight the tedium and go on your own personal exploration to find the items needed to cure you of Cursed Skull, you wake up that very night, face to face with said skull, who goes "oh hey, sorry about the screaming constantly and hanging around you like a dark cloud thing, it's just how curses go, but i'll tell you something. I've seen how you live and the real curse is this rut you're in. You can get out of it if you try, but you'll never actually be happy until you do."
It's a strangely powerful message, in a game centered around the exact opposite of that message. All at once, the denouement of the game is basically the game itself telling you "yeah, I know this is miserable, but if you don't want to, you now have the power to walk away at any time you like. You always did, of course, but now it's something you can do without just quitting the game."
Symbolically, of course; you still have to exit the game to stop, but that's the end of anything resembling a narrative in the game. It's let you go, and if you keep playing, that's on you. There's no more to see if you want 'adventure', or an experience even. It's just more monotony for goals that are pointless to achieve. And some people want that, and some people don't.
This is not a game for everyone, and in a lot of ways it's soul-crushingly bleak. But that's by design, and I'm ultimately glad I played through it.