Hi there!

I'm one of the 6 judges for this RPG Maker Game Jam 2025. I was one of the 2 judges assigned to your game, and we have been assigned to rate your games according to each metric highlighted on the game's main jam page, and submit these ratings to the organisers, who will then appropriate what happens with that. Please contact them in the Q&A if you have any further questions about the judging process. The judges will work on different time schedules, so even if I may have finished playing your game, the entire process might not be finished as of yet. Many of these reviews I am posting while still judging.

All that aside, I'd like to share my VOD of me playing your game, which contains up to an hour of gameplay, and some final thoughts at the end! Depending on whether I stopped the VOD early or not, it will also contain many of the thoughts that I say to you below, which may cause repetition. So just be aware of that.

I will also attach a review below this VOD. I will not disclose my ratings for each category as of yet, but those will be revealed in due time. Not all judges are required to post a review or VOD to each game, but many will do so even if it's optional, including myself.

Here's the VOD:

Hi there! I played Janitor's Station and it was quite a ride. There were some parts that I'd consider buggy, but I think it had a lot of promise.

Firstly, I do think that those environments with the train station and the hall down the bottom and the cave and up top the sky and stuff... it looks quite nice! I do like the look of the main overworld... the pixel art, and stuff was very cute. I do think there was a strange melding of the different kinds of art (namely custom and RTP, for example).

I liked some of the storytelling and dialogue, and the characters and their portraits - namely the main two characters. They had some fun interactions early on, and I enjoy the concept of going around and cleaning as a new janitor.

There were, however, some aspects that confused me. A timer on the top right that I *think* counted each day? I didn't quite understand the time system but apparently there was one?

And then I think maybe once it started to go into the cavern with all the battles, it ended up into a bit of a slog after that. The chores in the first half of the game were much crisper, and cleaning up felt grounded, although it was easy to come across glitches all over.

The story even had promise, but I felt that the many hitches in gameplay and direction detracted from my will to continue. I can see a much better game in a much more polished version of this. But as it is, the gameplay is just a little bit of a mess due to the all-present bugs and the transition into the repetitive battle loop with dungeons that felt partially generated by the dungeon generator - which usually makes less interesting dungeons than one might think, when left to its own devices. So the engagement waned pretty quickly, sadly. But there is a better game in here if polished.

The graphical style wasaA mixture of some really funky and cool styles (especially the characters and overworld) with some very unmodified RTP generated dungeons (the RTP stuff sticks out like a sore thumb in an otherwise interesting presentation). If it would've gone for the full cartoony style throughout, it would've been so much more visually striking, I feel - I loved that style. But the inconsistency really pulled that back.

So in short, I think it's a little bit of a mixed bag, and I liked the stuff that leaned more towards the custom graphics janitor stuff - if it had all the bugs wrinkled out. I liked less so the RTP graphical dungeon with endless battles type stuff.

So yeah! Keep making games. Every game's a gift. <3

Buggy, but fun.