80 Days is a string of pearls. But it requires a bit of patience to get from one pearl to the next.
At its core, 80 days is a collection of vignettes and novellas, wrapped into the bare bones of the plot of the well-known Jules Verne novel, with the steampunk elements and colonialism criticism dialed up to eleven.
It’s main gameplay loop is quite simple: depart from a city, read the80 Days is a string of pearls. But it requires a bit of patience to get from one pearl to the next.
At its core, 80 days is a collection of vignettes and novellas, wrapped into the bare bones of the plot of the well-known Jules Verne novel, with the steampunk elements and colonialism criticism dialed up to eleven.
It’s main gameplay loop is quite simple: depart from a city, read the novella occurring during travel, arrive at the next city, read the short story occurring in that city, procure funds via the market or the bank, plan your next trip, take it. And over it all the famous challenge: make it across the world in 90 days. There is a little challenge in planning the trip, because you' always have to keep the time limit in mind and procuring funds is an issue that actually has to be addressed now and then, but you have to want it pretty bad to actually fail the game. It's hardly engaging on its own.
There is a lot of towns you can visit during your travels: Every city I ever heard of and quite a few I never heard of are here, all of them with their unique splash screens and stories, but while the art style is striking and different, the vistas aren't exactly breathtaking, and while every scene is filled with lots of little details, over time the different cities start to blend into each other. Same with the splash screens symbolizing the different means of travel. The soundscape is sparse, but appropriate. The music does it's very best to evoke the atmosphere of the Jules Verne books and mostly succeeds, but the production values don't supply a stand-alone reason to play this game either.
The main reason to engage with the game is the writing then. And there is quality writing here: Some of it is delightfully playful, surprising, touching, some of it even delivers biting social commentary. But everything is bite-sized: As soon as a scenario presents itself, it is resolved, and we move on. As soon as we get to know and like a character, we leave him or her back in the dust of the road. The through-line of the challenge to circumvent the globe in 80 days is barely addressed, let alone developed. The only characters that stay with us are Sir Fogg and Passepartout, and only the latter gets any kind of development. I must stress this: Even Phineas Fogg, the deuteragonist of the story, remains a shadowy ill-defined figure during the story. That's a problem.
All in all, this game is a book with music and a soundtrack and some pretty, if same-ish pictures, and it is designed to have it's chapters read out of order so there are almost no proper arcs. A few storylets have multiple chapters, but even those only add up to a quite short short story. The quality of these tiny pieces of prose is good enough to keep me engaged for two playthroughs, but in the end, I would recommend this only to hardcore Jules Verne fans who won't play anything that doesn't have a link to Victorian Adventure. There is writing just as good in better games out there.
TLDR: If you have 5 minutes now and then and you want to read about a short adventure of Phineas Fogg and Passepartout, get this game. Everybody else, look elsewhere.… Expand
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