Phobos: A Galaxy Jones Story

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.

An enjoyable camp space adventure. I didn't need any maths to solve the puzzles. If you're stumped, just experiment a bit and notice what happens. I found writing details down in a notebook helped a lot. If you bypass the puzzles you can finish in an hour, but if you stick at it with no hints, expect many more hours puzzling it out and taking breaks, then going back again with new ideas to try.

I am now off to try the author's other Galaxy Jones games!

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.