Chunky pixels, a Morte-style floating skull companion, and a vibrant, alien 3D world—these are just some of the reasons I'm looking forward to Sundae Month's Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, which is out next week. It's an "anti-adventure game about picking up trash in an alien bazaar", and this new trailer shows what one of those looks like:
You're the Janitor, "an Alaensee girlbeast with a municipally-subsidized trash incineration job and dreams of leaving the planet of Xabran's Rock far behind her".
Your job is to poke around a spaceport's nooks and crannies in search of rubbish to burn, but if you want to deviate from your routine—"do not deviate from your routine", says the Steam page—it sounds like you'll find all manner of delightfully strange alien stuff, along with, possibly, a way off the planet.
Have a read of the whole description on the Steam page: it uses words like "lottoshrines" and "scentflaps". Speaking of which (the Steam page, not the, er, scentflaps), here's a news post announcing the release date: Friday, September 16.
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.