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.