Phobos: A Galaxy Jones Story

Note: I've decided to make my rating not count towards the game's average because while the rating reflects how I feel about the game, I did not exactly play it in the spirit the author intended: That is, I took the easy way out with almost every puzzle.

We play as Galaxy Jones, a heroine clad in a high-tech suit. She’s on a mission to save Mars from being destroyed by its own moon, Phobos.

Gameplay
Background: There are two factions present in the story. Humans and the Sirius Syndicate, a collective of alien cyborgs who have a touchy history with humanity. The Syndicate has decided to weaponize Phobos by sending it on a collision course to the red planet.

The game takes place on a (mostly) evacuated Sirian base located in Phobos’ Stickney Crater. Gameplay is centered on bypassing colour-coded doors through hacking. To do this, the player solves math-oriented puzzles. I can’t say this was my cup of tea. Math is not my strong point. My hat is off to those who excel at math, but me? It went over my head.

Thankfully, you can always smash through most of these doors with your powered Smart Suit! The catch is that you don’t get any points for doing so. (For what it’s worth, the (Spoiler - click to show)purple door can’t be smashed, but I ended up enjoying the puzzle to bypass it. It’s a translation puzzle where you match numbers with symbols to input the door’s code.)

I’m glad that the game provides a way for anyone to finish the game so they can see the story to its conclusion. My high score?

There are also materials written in an alien language that can be partially translated, and our translations steadily improve the more we translate. We even start to understand the intercom messages, revealing that the facility is counting down to when Phobos gets fired at Mars. This adds urgency without rushing the player since the game is extremely generous with this time limit.

I will say, Phobos: A Galaxy Jones Story is rather sparse in content. I understand that the focus is on the door puzzles. But the rooms seem so… empty. Their descriptions are brief and miss the opportunity to create atmosphere and/or worldbuilding which could be done without taking focus away from the puzzles.

Story
At first it seems like Phobos: A Galaxy Jones Story is going to be a stark binary of humans (good guys) vs. irredeemable cyborg alien race (bad guys), which is common in science fiction. The game goes in a different direction.

A more accurate way of putting it would be, (Spoiler - click to show)“humans are jerks, and the aliens are tired of their crap,” prompting said aliens to lash out by slamming Phobos into Mars… killing innocent people. Both sides have a hand in the mess that Galaxy Jones is trying to resolve.

There’s not much meat on the bone in terms of backstory. What I gathered was that (Spoiler - click to show)the aliens lived on a temperate planet until their star, Sirius, destroyed its solar system with a solar flare. Humanity came along and offered sanctuary and assistance, only to take advantage of aliens’ desperation by strictly controlling their way of life.

The Sirians have had enough…

…and yet, (Spoiler - click to show)they aren’t the unwavering anti-human faction they seem to be when we first step foot into their base.

Characters
For such a cool character, Galaxy Jones gets little attention in this game, which is in line with the game’s puzzle-oriented nature. I should note that Phobos: A Galaxy Jones Story is an offshoot of Galaxy Jones, a Spring Thing 2023 entry. While I haven’t played that game to completion, it seems to have more coverage on our protagonist.

There is one notable NPC: (Spoiler - click to show)a guard who is also the last Sirian left on the base.

Final thoughts
I love science fiction, and while Phobos: A Galaxy Jones Story fits that genre, I realize I’m not its target audience. It’s math-focused puzzles are the main event, and I confess that I caved with them. Because of this, I’m not able to give this game an entirely fair assessment.

That said, the game feels a bit too barebones, regardless of puzzles. I’m not asking for more characters or plot twists or inventory items. But a little more content in the room descriptions would go a long way. And yet, the game still has its heartwarming moments.

If you like math-based puzzles, play this game. And if the premise interests you, play it because you can always smash down (most) doors like I did. Otherwise, it may not be the game for you.

This was a fun game that took a (to me) unexpected turn or two early on.

In the vein of the earlier Galaxy Jones game, I had expected a classic action/secret agent scenario. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by a mathematical combinations and language translation game.

Cyborgs are going to blow up Mars using its moon, Phobos. You, Galaxy Jones, have infiltrated the base and need to stop them.

This entails two main puzzles and several smaller ones: First, you have to hack doors by discovering the patterns in their codes, and second: you have to find more of the language and translate it.

The language puzzle is, for the most part, not actual translation. Instead, we find text, scan it, and learn more of the language, which lets us automatically understand more and more words. Doing so encourages us to revisit earlier texts to see what new secrets we've unlocked.

The other puzzles are mostly math related. Hacking the doors is an exercise in number theory, a lot of the time. To me the puzzles seemed to be a much higher level of math than is usual in text adventures (outside of things like base 5 arithmetic in Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina).

The game is highly polished, with the signature Galaxy Jones logo every time you score a point and several intentional stylistic choices like no room headings.

The game has a lot of paths, unusual for a parser game, and I can think of at least three possible endings (there might be more). I thought that was pretty neat.

Overall, when I think of this game, I'm going to think of the advanced math in it, which is something I like.

This review may discuss puzzle mechanics more than plot. Other reviews on IFDB as of now focus more on the story, and I hope this one complements them, and it seems most of us enjoyed both the puzzle and the story, if in different proportions. You see, I never considered there was a way to work around the puzzles, or maybe I saw it and blew it off. (The observant player should find it quickly.) I was just glad to have different abstract puzzles make sense in the flow of a text adventure, ones that required scratch paper, but definitely not too much.

PGJ is the first in the Galaxy Jones series I've played. Given how it helped me ease back into reviewing after a two-week break during the comp to get back on track, I'm favorably inclined to check out the others. It has no walkthrough, but a walkthrough's not necessary with the skippable puzzles to unlock doors. The necessary non-door points require standard or relatively intuitive parser commands. There are two bonus points I took a couple playthroughs to get. They are nontrivial, and I questioned why you would want to do such a thing, until I re-read the logs and such. Then I actually felt kind of selfish for a bit.

You are Galaxy Jones, who best as I understand it keeps saving Mars and this time has to board a Siriusan ship to stop it from shooting Mars up with a huge destruct beam. This is a big quest, and (you'd assume) a big spaceship, but the map is hardly overwhelming. The spaceship seems empty, except for a voice over the intercom, and the how and why are revealed as you work through the story.

There are two ways to make progress, and one helps with the other. Your KIM device hacks locks. The first one needs no puzzles and opens up the spaceship. Then, the more complex ones require puzzles to solve. More important areas, unsurprisingly, have more complex locks and puzzles. A personal storage locker has four buttons, each of which twiddles some subset of four switches between blue and red. Elsewhere, you have nine. Along the way, you find different documents with Siriusan print that you can SCAN, and it helps you slowly understand their language and their motivations for wanting to destroy Mars. Not everything is translated, though. Proper names are left obscured. I like this a lot. It makes sense, because names are harder to give context to your scanner's algorithm or whatever, and there's still a bit of solving I got to do on my own e.g. "Oh, I recognize those letters as a name in another document, even if I don't know what they mean." It keeps the aliens feeling a bit alien, too.

Given that you'll probably quickly realize there's a countdown of some sort, this is a bit nerve-wracking, and it'd be nice to keep track of what documents you haven't re-read since your last successful scan. I had more than enough time, but if the author wants to add a cute feature for post-comp release, there it is.

As for the puzzles, I don't think I've used linear algebra more than once before in a game. That sounds hifalutin, as you don't have to have taken linear algebra to figure it out yourself, and you've probably used linear algebra concepts without knowing you have. (Operative Nine, for instance, they can quickly show you need to do something special with a puzzle.) So it strikes me this sort of game would be lots more fun to teach linear algebra than, you know, a 100-level college weed-out course. The TLDR is that you can say, okay, I need to push 2 of 4 of this button set, and so forth. This and other puzzles reminded me of the nice simple mix in Fred Snyder/Gamefic's 2023 entry Focal Shift, but it's more sophisticated here, with a learning curve, and the puzzles are tied into the story more clearly. So I found it fun to contrast the two. In fact, if you find PGJ a bit too tricky, you may want to play Focal Shift to warm up. It's a different sort of sci-fi, with random but simple puzzles. PGJ's are not randomized each walkthrough, but you're probably not going to remember the precise sequences if you replay to get the last point or two.

One of the puzzles takes a different tack. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit one of the doors made me wipe down my screen, which didn't need it THAT much, I swear. Why? Well, there's a puzzle that requires close inspection of the Unicode characters the author has inserted. A few glyphs are shaped like an L, each with its own diacritical mark, and most are different enough so you don't go crazy saying "oh these are the 2 L's which almost look like each other." But in my case, some of them were dotted in different places. I was unable to tell if one dot was a dirt speck. You need to figure which is which to unlock a door. So what about those quasi-L's? They're part of the Siriusan language. You may have guessed what part, based on the mysterious things you hear in the base. Solving them quickly may require backtracking a step that seems like a no-brainer to have in place, though if you were very observant and used a bit of scratch paper, you may get the puzzle right away. For which you should feel smart. I mean, smarter than if you just plain solved it. I like this use of Unicode, as it appears in the untranslated Siriusan and a critical puzzle.

One of the control rooms provides a clue of what you need to do to prevent the ship from carrying out its destructive mission, and they layout foreshadowed another plot concern: (Spoiler - click to show)you will meet the person making regular announcements on the intercom, but should you overpower or befriend them?. There's always the feeling the drama is going to jump once you open the right door, and yes, it does.

The first time through, I got 9/11 points (well, okay, 8/11 because I flubbed the first non-logic puzzle and got killed but saved Mars) which was satisfying given the other IFComp games I had to play. The final bit is legitimately different from the beginning, and it leans more towards classic parser mechanics. To launch my escape craft, I actually had to play some guess the verb, but it was oddly appropriate. Despite the countdown stalling out with each parser error, I still felt the time pressure. I enjoyed tracking my current rank as well. While I found the last two points the toughest to get, others may be leave the logic puzzles until last, using the helpful cheat. There are also several bad or suboptimal endings which are fun to page through, beyond the ship blowing up. You may wish to save at the start of a certain timed puzzle as well, just in case -- (Spoiler - click to show)you're left with plenty of time to do the bare minimum, but doing everything leaves little margin for error.

In the utterly pedantic department, there are a few hairsplitting things that would be cool to see in a maintenance release. But they are firmly in the "hey, if these pile up enough, they're an excuse for a deserved signal boost/low-risk update" camp. I feel bad listing them here. You may find them, too, but they're easy to shrug off, and I know from experience they're the sort of thing I know of but push to the back when I'm writing or testing more mainstream features.