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Review
(I beta tested this game)
The first Galaxy Jones game was a highlight of Spring Thing 2023, a rip-roaring sci-fi adventure that saw you foiling an evil mastermind with adrenaline-fueled displays of derring-do. This sequel in some ways works the same groove – Jones herself is just as appealing a heroine as ever, you’re up against a doomsday plot with high stakes, and making progress gets you the same awesome ASCII banner-drop. But some things are different too, and digging into those changes suggests there might be something beyond simple pulp escapades going on this time out.
These are puzzle games, so perhaps the most notable shift is the nature of the challenges. Progress in the first game often involved working through a series of action-movie set-pieces, the most memorable requiring you to climb up the side of a Martian building. But while in Phobos you’re up against an alien terrorist faction bent on using the eponymous moon to inflict mass casualties on a human colony, at least for the first two thirds of the game, you’re mostly confronted with hacking puzzles rather than zapping guards or otherwise behaving like Die-Hard-era Bruce Willis. Admittedly, you can just use one of your powered-suit’s charges to bust through any lock that’s being overly recalcitrant, but for the most part the action is more cerebral. There’s a pleasing variety to the button-pushing – some of the early challenges are simple bit-flip challenges where pushing button 1 also activates buttons 2 and 4, that sort of thing, but others are more involved – but most of them hinge on decoding the aliens’ language, and especially their numbering system, which is presented via an exotic font substitution (it was sometimes so exotic that it lead to a bunch of squinting, but copy and pasting into a text file helped me parse things).
Early on you find a helmet that provides some translation capacity, and the way you can leverage it to bootstrap an understanding of the digits makes for an elegant on-ramp to the meat of the game. But the language mechanic isn’t restricted to the hacking puzzles, because as you explore the alien base, you’ll come across a bunch of reading material; at first, you can only make out a few words, but increased facility with the language allows you to catch more of the meaning. There are some important clues embedded in these documents, and there’s thematic resonance to the way Jones’ understanding of her foes deepens as she learns more about them – hopefully it’s not spoiling things too much to note that on this adventure, going in guns blazing isn’t always the right answer. Similarly, the full picture of the aliens’ motivations is a bit more complex than the black-and-white conflict of the first game led me to expect. None of this undercuts the essential pleasure of inhabiting Galaxy Jones – that ASCII banner remains as awesome as ever – but sitting here in late 2025, with political violence ratcheting up and accusations of terrorism being thrown at people just trying to keep their communities safe, it’s satisfying to see a hero who scores points for saving lives, not killing bad guys.
