Galilee Bones and the Juggernaut of Jordan (Phil Riley)
Played on: 30th September (playing the 5th Sept update)
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Windows Git
How long I spent: 1hr 40mins to complete the game with a few hints
I had fun last year calling Indiana Jones a hack when reviewing The Reliquary of Epiphanius. Galilee Bones isn’t doing a whole lot of sound archaeology either. He’s certainly not excavating here with delicate brushwork and lab analysis. But despite his failure to adhere to rigorous preservation protocols, Galilee Bones and the Juggernaut of Jordan is pretty good!
This game is set in 1943, and we are Bones, adventurer-archaeologist-academic who parachutes to Lejjun, a Petra-like city carved out of a cliff face, to intercept whatever the Nazis have found there recently. So, yes, Galilee Bones is a text adventure pastiche of the Indiana Jones franchise, and in fact it plays the tropes surprisingly straight. Galilee is perhaps a little more petulant than Indy (his reaction to spotting an SS Guard being “Ugh. Nazis. They’re the worst.” – not untrue, but not all that eloquent either), but everything else from the Nazis to the ancient civilization to the probably-supernatural to the spunky female love interest is present and correct. I think maybe it takes the assumptions of Indiana Jones a little too uncritically, in how we treat ancient civilisations and who has the right to plunder them; on the other hand, killing Nazis never goes out of style.
We have a story running throughout which is largely background flavour. Primarily told in flashbacks, we see moments of vulnerability from Galilee as he reflects on his relationship with his Spunky Female Love Interest. These revolve around Galilee’s chauvinism and mild ineptness with women, so we have a gentle deconstruction of the masculine action hero archetype. It’s painted very broadly and it’s mostly confined to flashbacks so it’s hard to say that this game is About Chauvinism – you could largely remove it without needing to do much rewriting. (That said, keep an eye out for an extra option when you beat the game that will lead you to a playable epilogue.)
Galilee Bones the man may be a little awkward, but Galilee Bones the game is smooth as heck. The implementation is excellent throughout, with great attention to detail (for example, your description of yourself updates with bespoke text based on what you’re wearing). I never had any issues with bugs, which is impressive considering that there are some very complex objects here, such as a dictionary which can be used to translate quite long phrases. NPCs are responsive within reason, though things are arranged such that you rarely interact with them deeply (for example, half of them are Nazis who shoot you dead on sight). Few of them speak English but a footnotes extension is used to automatically translate for them, as if they’re being subtitled in the film adaptation. I think there’s a little room for more play with NPCs – for example (and this spoils a major puzzle mechanism that I’m otherwise trying to avoid mentioning because it’s too cool to give away), I think you could have fun messing with time paradoxes by releasing Fremd, etc – even if it just leads to an immediate game over, it felt like a shame to shut that avenue down out of hand. What’s there still works very nicely though.
I also very much enjoyed the puzzles. There aren’t many individual puzzles, but each one takes a bit of work. The opening puzzle, slipping past the SS soldier guarding the camp outside Lejjun, is a good example, requiring careful observation of the surrounding locations and an aha moment when you spot the implications of one description. I think Puzzle of the Comp so far is (minor spoiler) bringing the emerald home, a multi-step process with another great aha moment at the start and an amusingly morbid final trick. Galilee Bones is tough but it generally keeps you on track – it usually won’t let you get yourself into an unwinnable situation. (I think it might be possible if you let a certain enemy chase you into a dead end but I didn’t investigate thoroughly and I think it’s early enough that a restart would be relatively painless.)
I had a lot of fun with this. It’s tough enough to make you sweat, but fun and snappy enough to keep you going. This is by-the-by, but do you ever think about how stressful carving Petra must have been? Imagine being the guy who chisels too hard and accidentally demolishes one of the pillars on the façade of the Treasury. They’d have to carve two feet back into the rock and start all over again. You’d feel like such an idiot. I was trying to make this work as a cold open and couldn’t manage it, but I keep stressing myself out thinking about being the guy who accidentally shatters the Royal Tombs like that statue bit in Day of the Tentacle. Now you can too.