With barely a dozen hours in the employ of his new master, Jean Passepartout finds himself whisked away on an adventure to circumnavigate the world, and to do so in just eighty days. Thanks to recent technical innovations such as the opening of the Suez Canal and the Bomba to Calcutta railway, this was now a technical possibility, albeit a doubtful one which formed the basis of Phileas Fogg’s famous wager.
Inspired by Jules Verne’s classic novel, the phone and tablet game 80 Days isn’t just an adaptation of Around the World in Eighty Days and the journey taken within that story, but a deeper realisation and expansion of the world into newer and more fantastical places. You can, of course, try to follow Fogg and Passepartout’s canonical route, and there are plenty of nods to the story’s key events should you do so, but this is most rewarding if you stray from the beaten path.
Taking on the role of Passepartout, it’s really up to you to escort and lead Fogg around the globe in the style of a choose-your-own-adventure novel. Setting off from London with a small suitcase, your first port of call will be Paris – though subsequent plays will let you head first to Cambridge – and from here the route you take is entirely up to you, based on the funds you have available and how you believe the journey will unfold.
A key part to your success will be finding new routes, which can be added to the map by setting off to explore the cities which you visit or talking to people that you meet along the way. However, these interactions often lead to rather unexpected results. You might get a tip that there’s now a new route to take advantage of, further ahead of your current journey, or that visiting the markets and picking up a sabre on the cheap will let you sell it for many times more, should you manage to visit Singapore, for example. With limited funds, it’s important to make wise transactions, lest you be kept waiting for the local bank to authorise a withdrawal.
As you see the progress made by other players on your map, always pushing you to do better, you’re constantly meeting new people and finding out new information that can quickly alter the route that you had planned. Then there are the totally unexpected twists, that come about thanks to the world that Inkle were able to weave from that original adventure. The late 19th century world through which you travel is not the one that you will find in the history books, nor that of Jules Verne’s novel, but one that is filled with wonders and fantastical technological advancement that go far beyond.
You can catch a rocket shuttle from Italy to Greece or embark on an experimental ship that crosses an ocean in days rather than weeks. Human bodies can be augmented while artificers have been able to manipulate crystals and machinery to create the semblance of life – or is it life itself? – and yet its underscored by the militaristic throes of rival colonial powers and the embers of their abuses and failures.
There are moments that can stick with you sprinkled throughout, whether it’s soaring on the back of a gigantic mechanical eagle, solving a murder mystery, the frustration of being emprisoned in a Russian military town and ultimately losing the bet or the moral quandary of finding yourself hitching rides alongside slave traders, all in the name of getting back to London to win a rather trivial wager. There’s a certain self-imposed pressure to do the right thing in each situation, and the branching options within the story and dialogue can often be difficult to choose between. Though I have a favourite route and story after just a few play throughs, I’m also eager to venture in different directions and explore more of the game’s world.
However, the game also made me ponder at how far technology has come and society has changed since the novel was written. I’m not talking about the speed at which you can now travel – a number of real world journeys made over the decades after its publication easily demonstrated how fast this was coming down – but rather in how we can view the world around us.
Whereas the game centres around discovering routes by talking to train guards, paying a visit to the docks and meeting sailors or buying timetables for continental travel, the real world has long moved on. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet and mobile technology, you can avoid getting lost, you don’t need to pick up a map, you can find restaurant reviews and easily look up when the next train is set to depart. There’s no need, necessarily, to stumble into the unknown and ask for the help, advice or recommendations of strangers.
But one thing hasn’t changed, and that’s the power of word of mouth, which is to my mind stronger than ever before. Even though critically acclaimed when it was released last year, I’d not heard of 80 Days until just last month when talking with a friend, and depending on the circles in which you find yourself whether on Twitter, Facebook or, more classically, gathered around the water cooler, it can be hard to escape the excited chatter over the latest Big Thing.
Today it’s the new Mad Max film and The Witcher 3, with an undercurrent of people overjoyed or despairing at the latest fancy gun they got out of Destiny’s House of Wolves expansion. A little while back it was Daredevil on Netflix, and I’ll bet everyone will be sowing their seeds of content or discontent about the second season of True Detective or Jurassic World in a month’s time.
80 Days and the novel which inspired it – which I would heartily recommend picking up from Project Gutenburg for free – are a snapshot from a very different world that was still evolving to the constantly interconnected one in which we now live. The ability to explore the unknown might have diminished as time has passed, but the ways in which we communicate and are bound together are stronger than ever.
