Thoughts on the ending

[eternityreaper0]

So, after playing through the game, I absolutely loved it, and I really really enjoyed my time with it. However, the ending is a touch ambiguous, so to my perspective, there are two ways that I've been able to interpret the cutscene, a more uplifting one, and a more depressing one.

Depressing:
The entire game was the Janitor's fantasy about her wanting to have an adventure and escape the boring, soul crushing monotony of her life. She states at the very beginning of the game that she hates her job, and that she’s desperate for any sort of escape, so when she finds the treasure map at the beginning of the game, she start's to imagine what might happen if she actually went into the dungeons, and would start to imagine herself going on this massive journey all across the city for her to escape the monotony, but in reality, once the journey ended, she'd end up exactly where she started, in her apartment, alone. The ending cutscene of the game (where the skull wakes you up and encourages you to try to escape) is just her dreaming of the ideal way for her story to end, and it explains why she's able to walk off the edge of the cliff at the end of the game, because it's all a dream, and now that it's over, she has to go back to work. The entire plot of the game was her fantasizing about a more exciting life while she worked her dead-end job, and once the story was over, she had to just go back to work once more, without that fantasy to escape to, since it was all over.

This would also be somewhat in line with some of the game’s themes, of being "stuck" in a dead-end place, and you are trapped scrounging just enough to get by, unable to really get anywhere in life. The entire game, you are barely skirting by, and making money is incredibly slow, because you have the expenses of food and the like that make your already depressingly small wage low. It's made clear just how little you make each day when on average, you'll only make about 30 credits via incinerating trash, and the bare cheapest food you'll get is about 7-12 credits, and it’s made pretty clear that the food you eat for those prices are on the extremely low end of the spectrum, because the average foods often cost anywhere from 50 credits to very well into the hundreds, and it's actually common to see some prices in the thousands. The foods that you'd want to be eating, the food that are at better quality, are much more expensive than the 12-credit meat you bought from a vendor.

Uplifting:
At the end of the game, the janitor chooses to climb onto the adventurer's ship, and flies off to escape her dead-end job and hellishly dull and monotonous life. Everything that happened over the course of the game DID actually happen, which isn't unrealistic for the games setting. It's made pretty clear that magic, spells, and curses are real things in the game's world, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that such a thing might happen. The Skull curse is in line with the established world that the game takes place in, so it’s not a stretch to imagine that the course of the game did actually happen. If we follow this train of thought, then the ending can be taken as literal, you choose to follow the skull's advice and escape the planet that had become your prison.

Evidence from the game does support this as being equally as likely as the more depressing interpretation, fortunately. The title screen of the game depicts the janitor and the hero’s spacecraft circling the planet below, so it's very likely that this entire game is the janitor reflecting on the events that brought her to that moment. This would make the entire game a flashback, and it's likely that the janitor is reading through her diary entries that we've written over the course of the game. For those who haven't played, at the end of every in game day, you are prompted to write a diary entry about the events of that day, and while you could choose to write nothing but gibberish, I decided to use it to try to write from the perspective of the janitor, reflecting on the events of the day, and treat it like an actual diary. It's not difficult to imagine the janitor is reading through her diary while on the adventurer’s spaceship and reflecting on the adventure she'd had while looking forward to a new one. This would also explain the name of the game: "DIARIES of a spaceport janitor", with the entire game being the events written down in her diary.

At the end of the day, you can imagine the game's ending however you like, as the ending does seem to be left open to interpretation, but these are the two that I thought of after finishing the game, but I'm sure there are even more ways to imagine the games ending. I'm choosing to believe the more uplifting ending, as I'll admit, I grew quite attached to the janitor over the course of the game, and I'd like to see her get her happy ending, and it also feels like it makes sense within the games theme. The janitor has been stuck over the course of the game, absolutely, but it's when she decided to break the monotony for the first time, by following the treasure map, that set off the chain of events that would allow her to eventually break free. Some people ARE stuck, but it's up to that individual person to look for adventure in order to break free, which is just what the janitor did.

[Namraets /ᐠ｡ꞈ｡ᐟ\]

Those are some pretty interesting thoughts on the end that you have. I really liked your idea of the diary, as I always wondered why I had to make an entry when nothing was to come of it. I was always waiting for a "Moirai" moment where it will come back into play somehow- but it never did. So your idea of it being a flashback- made sense to me.

[Sauce_Saucisse_Sans_Sel]

Am I the only one that noticed the double bed at the end of the game? Must have a meaning...