80 Days

It’s rare for a game to not only faithfully adapt its source material but to transcend it. Inkle Ltd, with its September 2015 release of 80 Days, accomplished just that. This is a complete and brilliant reimagining of Jules Verne’s novel, not a version dressed up with interactive elements. The game casts you not as the audacious Phileas Fogg, but as his resourceful and perpetually stressed valet, Jean Passepartout. The premise is simple: circumnavigate the globe in 80 days or fewer. The execution is anything but. This is a game about logistics, relationships, and the stories that happen between destinations.

From the outset, 80 Days establishes a tone of quiet urgency. A real-time clock ticks away, indifferent to your planning or peril. Every moment spent in a city, every conversation, every purchase, costs you time. The world itself is a marvel of speculative fiction—a steampunk 1872 where Artificers Guilds have revolutionized travel. You’ll chart your course via submersible trains, mechanical camels, and rickety airships, all while managing a budget, Fogg’s delicate health, and a suitcase of useful items. With a script running over half a million words and more than 150 cities to explore, a single journey reveals only a fraction of the world Inkle has built. It’s a showcase of the power of choice-driven narrative, a work that respects the player’s intelligence and rewards their curiosity with one of the most dynamic and replayable adventures in modern gaming.

• Massive Branching Narrative: The game’s core is its staggering number of choices. Every route taken, conversation had, and city explored opens and closes countless narrative doors. With hundreds of thousands of words of text, no two journeys are alike.
• Strategic Resource Management: Success hinges on more than just picking the fastest route. You must balance your limited funds, purchase items to open up new opportunities or speed travel, and monitor Phileas Fogg’s health, which falters with hardship and neglect.
• The Living World Clock: Unlike turn-based games, time in 80 Days is a constant pressure. It marches forward as you travel, explore cities, and even as you read, creating a persistent tension that makes every decision feel consequential.

The Valet’s Burden

The most brilliant decision Inkle made was to frame the entire experience through the eyes of Passepartout. You are not the gentleman adventurer making the wager; you are the hired help, the fixer. This subtle shift in perspective is transformative. The grand strategy is Fogg’s, but the execution—the frantic deal-making in a bazaar for an earlier train, the decision to pawn a prized coat for a few extra pounds, the conversational gamble with a revolutionary—is all yours. This creates a fascinating gameplay loop where you are simultaneously an agent of Fogg’s will and an independent actor with your own secrets, motivations, and even potential romances. You are managing a journey, but you are also curating a story.

Writing as a Gameplay Mechanic

In 80 Days, the prose is functional, not just descriptive. The game’s text is the interface. Choosing to “explore the market” isn’t a simple button press that might yield a random item; it triggers a vignette where your choices directly influence your inventory, bank balance, and relationship with Fogg. The writing is sharp, evocative, and remarkably efficient. It sketches out entire cultures, characters, and political intrigues in a few deft paragraphs. You learn that a certain route is dangerous not through a pop-up warning, but by hearing sailors whisper of pirates. You secure a spot on an experimental airship by successfully navigating a conversation with its proud Artificer. This makes the narrative the central mechanic, turning reading into an active, strategic pursuit.

A World in Motion

The game feels alive because it is constantly in flux. Routes open and close. Your health and finances are in a perpetual state of decay, demanding constant attention. This dynamism, powered by the relentless clock, forces you to make difficult, often irreversible decisions. Do you wait three days in Hong Kong for a reliable steamer, or risk passage on a smuggler’s junk that leaves tonight? Do you spend a day nursing Fogg back to health, or press on toward a connection you can’t afford to miss? This is the core tension of 80 Days. It’s a game of calculated risks and contingency planning, where your best-laid plans can be undone by a mutiny or a broken-down engine, forcing you to improvise a new path across continents. The result is not frustration, but exhilaration. Each completed journey, successful or not, feels like your story, a unique anecdote carved out of a world of possibilities.

The aesthetic is one of elegant minimalism. The game presents its world through a striking, almost Art Deco-inspired art style. A clean, parchment-like UI is overlaid on a 3D globe, with routes traced in stark red lines. Cities are represented by silhouette icons, and characters are largely unseen, leaving their appearance to the player’s imagination, guided by the text. This is a case of perfect synergy between art and design. The visuals provide vital information—weather, Fogg’s health, your location—without ever distracting from the narrative. It’s a design that understands the text is the star. A game of this scope, built around literary depth rather than graphical horsepower, is light on hardware by design.

80 Days began its life on mobile, and it shows in the best way possible. On iOS and Android, the touch interface is built for the platform: tapping a route, dragging the globe, and making choices feel tactile and immediate. It is a natural companion for travel, structured for short, satisfying bursts. On Steam, the experience translates well to a mouse and keyboard, with the larger screen allowing for a greater appreciation of the world map and making long reading sessions more comfortable. The Nintendo Switch version might be the ideal synthesis, offering the excellent touch controls of the mobile version in handheld mode and a comfortable, big-screen experience when docked. The game’s pace and structure feel perfectly at home on a portable device.

80 Days is a landmark achievement in interactive narrative. It demonstrates a profound understanding of player agency, using elegant prose and simple mechanics to create a startlingly complex and emotionally resonant experience. Years after its release, it remains a high-water mark for the genre, a journey built to stay just as thrilling on a tenth run as on a first. We rate it Outstanding: a brilliant, essential experience that proves the oldest form of entertainment—a well-told story—can be the most powerful of all.