PHOGS! – How to Jump

While writing my review for PHOGS! I struggled to identify the game’s genre. It’s a puzzle game mostly, but there’s also areas where there aren’t many puzzles at all. I guess they could be called puzzles, since you have to “solve” them, but they’re goal is to just get you across a gap or through an area. This makes it more of a platformer, but there aren’t platforms so much as just a series of stages. And you can’t jump. Or can you? Here’s how to jump in PHOGS!

How to Jump

So yeah, PHOGS! to me is a puzzle platformer since it has all the trappings of the genre of Mario. And yet the most important aspect of the platformer genre isn’t there. PHOGS! has no jump button or jump action to speak of. And yet while playing through the game in co-op I found myself telling my partner to “jump” all the time. And they always found a way to do it, so here’s how it works.

Basically in PHOGS! you only have two actions: stretch and bark. That last one is the key to jumping in the game as barking also propels you upward just a bit. And since you can and likely will bark all the time, this will become your de facto jump. It works surprisingly well once you get used to it. While you won’t clear large gaps by barking, you can get yourself back onto a platform, jump across small pits, or clear a hurdle of some kind. The jump movement is small, meaning you still have to solve puzzles as intended, but it can often clear up a mistake or make something a bit easier.

So that’s how to jump in PHOGS! Once you get used to it it becomes second nature, just like in other platformers.