"Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor" Review - You are what you pick up

I feel that I cannot be a critic worth anything if I am not upfront with you, dear reader. I played maybe a few hours of Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor before I quit. Why? The answer is simple:
It gives Brink a run for its money in the "worst game I've ever played" department. Seriously. In my life, no movie tie-in game or cheap cash grab has been worse than Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor.
My attention turned to this game for the first time a couple of months ago when my brother saw it on steam. It looked like your average charming little indie game, that is to say, a strong story experience with perhaps one small gameplay mechanic that really only exists to drive the story forward. The reality is less pretty, however.
Look, I hate bashing indie developers. I hate criticizing the work of small-time developers, especially when I can tell that passion went into a project as I can in this case. It is obvious to me that the developers behind Diaries made this project with love...it is just such a shame that they didn't make it with intuitive game design.
It is with games like this that I am thankful that I don't do review videos, because I would be screaming my throat out the whole time. I had to actually have mercy on this game in the interest of keeping its final score from going into the negatives, so just know that going in. I will be grouping certain things together in the point deductions in the interest of being fair. Mark my words, though, the incredibly low score that this game is going to get is far too high, and its currently reduced price of $7.99 is far too high a price.
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Things start out intriguingly enough in Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor. You play as, you guessed it, a Janitor at a Spaceport living paycheck to paycheck and hoping for a better life. On the first day that you are in our hero's shoes, you descend into the dungeons of the spaceport and fall victim to an ancient curse that only really amounts to a skull following you around and yelling at you every now and again. As far as I know, the rest of the story is you doing menial fetch quests in order to find bits of the skull's tablet to break the curse. All it really amounts to is complete chance.
Where to even begin with this piece of crap game? The gameplay? Fine, the gameplay is essentially just walking around the spaceport picking up trash or incinerating it. To progress in the story you comb the city for specific items that will be placed on the ground at random. Even though this is the most asinine gameplay mechanic a developer can use, it is simple enough. However, even this simplest of things is royally screwed by the putrid design.
First off, as if there weren't enough of this crap on steam, there are survival elements. You have to remain fed and...gendered (essentially you have to go to a gender station to get a new gender every so often) every single day. Unlike other survival games, however, it is impossible to fail this game, so they are really only there to block your progress. There are legitimately no effects on you (save for text getting blurry when you need to switch genders) depending on how hungry or whatever you are. There is no incentive for you to remain well-fed or switch genders at all! There is no real balancing act to contend with! What this game sorely needed was a series of challenges that would be compounded onto the player as they got progressively hungrier. The game could still make it so that you could never fail, but having some complications tossed in with the survival aspects would have made the premise so much fresher.
Let me ask you something, though: If there isn't any fear of failure or tension of any kind, then what exactly does the presence of survival aspects accomplish? The answer to this question is: to pad out playtime and be a roadblock to progress. You see, you can't go to bed if you are the least bit hungry, and because this game boneheadedly decides to only give you one status summary at a time, if you have any other status problems you can't tell how hungry you are. This results in you getting to your apartment at night and realizing that you are too hungry to sleep. So you have to turn right back around and find out which of the millions of shopkeepers is selling food, and at which completely random price they are selling it for today (more on that later).
At this point you've travelled around the spaceport looking for food you can afford so that you can go to bed and start the next day...but then you'll have trouble doing even this because it is impossible to navigate the spaceport! The developers put colored arrows on the ground to guide you to certain color districts, which I will admit is a neat idea, but they don't actually do their jobs here. You'll follow a red arrow, end up at an intersection half a minute later (having seen no more red arrows in that time), and have no idea which of the three directions to go. Admittedly the map is relatively small, but it is incredibly easy to walk around in circles without even realizing it. Would you like to know what would have made this whole process easier? I'll give you a hint: It is something that requires very little effort to make and that even the most basic games since the late 80's tend to have. You guessed it! A Map!
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The fact that a game such as this lacks a map is unforgivable. I am all for games that force you to familiarize yourself with the location; that isn't the issue here. The issue here is the story characters and shopkeepers are in random locations that change every single day. I might be praising the developers for making characters that tend to travel the spaceport were I not so pissed off by the fact that sometimes entire days are spent tracking down said characters and shops. What's worse, if you don't end up finding who you're looking for in a day, they will be in an entirely different area the next day! Yeah, I suppose anything is findable if you're willing to make your character tired enough, but the fact remains that I shouldn't have to spend an entire day's worth of gameplay in order to find a character or particular shopkeeper. The developer could still have the randomized locations if they really wanted to, but this game needs a map! This game needs a way to find people!
Character locations are not the only things that are randomized in this game, however. Everything having anything to do with money is completely random as well. The one thing this game had going for it was the idea that you get paid at the end of the day or beginning of the next day for the trash you incinerated, but even this is rendered pointless by the sheer ineptitude of these developers. You see, one day you may be paid 50 credits for incinerating 20 pieces of trash, and the next day you may be paid 10 credits for exactly the same amount of trash. It takes away any incentive to burn as much trash as you can when you have no guarantee that you'll be paid proportionally for it. What makes this worse is that prices for just about everything fluctuate every day. At one point in the story you need to purchase something for a character (who, thankfully, is in the same place every day). Every day the prices of the relevant shopkeeper's wares was different. Some days the most expensive item was 64 credits, the next day it would be 58. Prices seem to increase whenever you get a larger paycheck, which would have been an interesting enough concept had it not been so asinine in practice. What it amounts to is just another roadblock on your progress.
Oh, and did I mention you can only burn a certain amount of trash in a day?
Because it's true.
Once again, these developers shoot themselves in the foot with bad game design. Your incinerator has a limited battery amount that is only rechargeable with sleep. I get that without this the player might be able to grind for a whole night and the developers wanted to quell that, but why not just have the player pass out after they get tired enough? Once again that would make the survival elements fresher and it would also have given the player incentive to take the garbage incineration at their own pace, but give them a time limit instead of a use limit. Now, it could be that the battery just runs out around nighttime and I just haven't noticed because my pace is relatively consistent. If that is the case, then it is still asinine to cut off the player's ability to make use of the one existing game mechanic while still giving them agency to end the day.
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So, the gameplay is awful and asinine and the story is pretty much nonexistent...does this game at least have that indie game charm?
NO!!!!!!!!!!!
For starters, the user interface is terrible. It is a basic aspect of basic user basic interface to basically ask the basic question: "can I lower the number of clicks required to do this thing?" The developers of this game obviously did not ask that question of themselves. As it stands, you click on something in your backpack, go to a separate screen with your options dealing with that item, then it is back to the game screen. If you happened to click on the wrong item, you must do all of this again. It is just one aspect of this awful UI, but it is a great representation of the kind of experience you'll have: everything is infinitely more complicated than it needs to be.
As bad as the UI is in this game, even it could have been forgiven if it were at the very least NOT NAUSEATING to play!
The graphics are just plain ugly not because they are pixelated, but because it is just a bunch of murky clutter rendered in a pixelated style. Everything in this game seems to move at a different frame rate than everything else. The consoles run at a faster frame rate, you run at a pretty standard frame rate, when you move the camera the frame rate slows down a little bit, etc. I either got nauseated or got a splitting headache every single time I sat down to play this crap.
This is all accented by the fact that the soundtrack is just five beats of a song that are played over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Playing this game feels like psychological torture, and unless you are into that kind of thing, please do not spend your hard earned money on this game.

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Those of you reading may now be asking yourself something along the lines of, "well, does it at least work properly?"

NO AGAIN!!!!!

There are constant small, technical bugs that tend to add up. Menus stay up even when you close them, the character sometimes won't stop walking even though you try to change the direction, etc. That is to say nothing of frame rate drops and the camera getting stuck in bits of scenery. 

All of this culminates in the most unforgivable technical problem I've ever come across.

THE GAME WILL SOMETIMES DELETE YOUR SAVED PROGRESS AT RANDOM!!!!!

WANT TO KNOW WHY I REALLY QUIT THIS GAME?

I LOST EVERYTHING!

Every last bit of progress I made in this putrid mess of a product was tossed out the window at random one day. My brother got even further in this game than I did, and he, too, lost everything. 

These developers are so incompetent that they couldn't even ensure that your game data wouldn't get wiped at random. Screw Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor. 

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I sincerely hope that I convinced you not to purchase this game. The only things that keep Diaries from getting a zero or a score in the negatives is my own restraint and the fact that the game hasn't yet crashed. I don't care if you're an indie developer. I don't care if you have a game in early access (which this one is NOT). I don't care if you are a big name publisher. If you put out disgusting garbage like this and dare to demand that people fork over money for it, you will never see my business again. It doesn't matter if tinyBuild makes something fantastic in the future or if they made something fantastic in the past. It doesn't matter if they put out a significant patch for this game at some point. tinyBuild will never get so much as the filthiest penny that I find in my shoe. If they gave this game away for free, your time would be better spent doing something like sawing your own fingers off. Don't you dare tell me, "but there is an optional manual on steam! Why didn't you read it?" I shouldn't have to quit a game once I launch it, go into some deep dark part of steam and read a manual in order to have a basic grasp of a game! Does this manual have tips on how to keep your progress? Does this manual have tips on how not to be nauseated by the game's terrible visual style and music? Does this manual have a secret map inside of it to make finding characters in a completely random location any less asinine?! No?! I didn't think so! So don't you dare try and justify this game with that. If you want to justify this game because you really liked it, then good for you! I'm glad you enjoy it! I question your sanity, but to each his own. As for me, though, this experience was just awful from very early on.

Let us review the many, many negatives. 

Roadblocking survival aspects - 1.0
No Map - 1.0
Randomized aspects - 1.0
Limited waste disposal ability - 0.7
Terrible quests to drive the story forward - 1.0
Poor user interface - 0.5
Nauseating to play - 1.0
Terrible music - 0.5
Poor technical performance - 0.5
You can lose all your progress randomly - 1.0

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor gets the lowest score I've given since starting my new scoring system, and for this game I'm going to be bringing back the dishonorary seal of failure. Everything about this game is a travesty. Do not buy it. Do not even give it your attention. The fact that it has mostly positive reviews on steam means that the neckbeards have gotten to it...you know the type, the neckbeards that buy million dollar gaming PCs just to play pixelated retro-style sidescrollers and will instantly score a game 10/10 if it has a pixellated style.

The final score for Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is...
1.8/10 - Garbage

Shame on you, tinyBuild, shame on you!