80 Days is an intricate interactive fiction game made by Inkle in 2015, loosely based on Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). The player takes on the persona of Passepartout, manservant to Monsieur Phileas Fogg, who has placed a wager that he can circumnavigate the world in 80 days. The player has immense amounts of freedom to choose their own route, and each journey and city contains unique content. The player must manage Fogg’s finances, health, time, and buying/selling items during their journey.
I was not able to finish the game – I stopped after clocking in around 2.2 hours, which left Passepartout and Fogg in San Francisco about 60 days into the journey. I went into the game not having read anything about it, and started building up a strategy along the way that looked a little like this:
- First, buy/sell at the market first if open (if closed, explore)
- Then, explore whenever I can to find new routes and more narrative content about the city and game in general
- Finally, plan routes
I realized that I started optimizing money very early in the game, the reasoning being that I did not want to be stranded in a city with no money to buy a route out. I tend to play it safe when I first start out in games, gathering and hoarding resources as much as I can “just in case”. Many times, I made decisions on which routes to take according to which markets I could fetch high profits at depending on the items I had in my travel bags. I would buy an item that would fetch high returns in another city and then deliberately plan my routes to reach that particular city, as long as that route brought me even slightly eastward. It definitely made me lean into the capitalist mindset for sure – when I stopped playing, I had around 20,000 pounds in funds. However, I would sometimes forget to sell an item in the city I was meant to sell the specific item in, and only realize after I left; I was surprised by how much annoyance I felt when this happened.
One thing I think the game could have done better is the sound design. Audio, soundscapes, and music are the main things I notice first when I play a game for the first time. Though I appreciated that each city had different ambient soundscapes, I think it is also important to note the power of silence. When I took a train through a war-torn city that Passepartout remarked to be a “ghost town”, I expected a change in the accompanying ambient soundscape (perhaps an eerie quietness, or an unnerving, subtly dissonant soundscape) but there was none – moments like these jarred me out of the narrative a few times. The game always has some sort of sound, and I think silence would have been an incredibly powerful tool to employ, especially at key points in the narrative (perhaps accompanying a ship’s mutiny, when Passepartout is kidnapped by the Sisters of Didacus and the player is filled with suspense, etc.).
One thing I learned a lot from playing 80 Days is the swath of player freedom it provided. Though player freedom and agency is an essential piece of interactive fiction games, I struggled with this terribly when making my first interactive fiction game last quarter in CS 377G. Playing through 80 Days reminded me to let go of my pride, tendency to control, and habits I built as a writer writing for stories rather than for games. Interactive fiction designers must know that players will likely only experience a fraction of their entire work, and they must let the player wander and experience for themselves, instead of wanting to show them everything the game has to offer.
A few miscellaneous notes now about 80 Days… I liked the strong female characters I came across – the female pilot who serves the Japanese emperor and wields a katana against her family’s wishes, Madame Goh who swoops in to save Captain Goh’s destroyed ship and crew despite the crewmates describing her as some pish-posh “land woman”. I loved the world building as well – it was patient in its delivery. I didn’t realize that there were automatons until I had to wind up a carriage driver so that he would not lose power. I also enjoyed being able to take up the persona of a fictional character and make choices I would not normally do in real life – splash water on Fogg in spite, have a spat with a stranger for no good reason, etc. Lastly, I was surprised by the heavy presence of politics, and appreciated how 80 Days straddled the familiarity of the world people are used to while being able to superimpose a fictional component to it as well.
I thought it was interesting that you mentioned the importance of sound design! I think that we tend to focus a lot on visual cues as designers, but the sound definitely reinforced or changed my mindset on my actions in the game. I also thought that the sound design could be improved to key in on places, but at the same time, what should a certain city, place, or interaction “sound” like is a question I’m curious about…
While I also enjoyed the strong female characters and learning about the politics in various places, I felt like the game could have done more to make us engage with these female characters and the politics. My main concerns throughout the game were making money, monitoring Fogg’s health, and making it around the world in under 80 days. The game gave us an opportunity to hear people’s stories, but it ultimately did not encourage me to care very deeply about them. I wish that the story element had somehow been more important to being successful in the game.
I definitely agree with your thoughts on the sound design for this game. While there are certainly many locations, taking the time to come up with an even slightly more diverse and appropriate library of sounds would have made the experience so much better. I personally recalled a moment where I had to take my attention away from the game for a while, and was annoyed that the sound was just city noise and the relentless tolling of a bell. It would certainly add more dimension to this IF if the sounds were unique to each region!