80 Days is an amazingly innovative game by the same people who were responsible for the videogame adaptation of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! Inkle specializes in narrative game like these and if how much I liked this one is any indication, I have a feeling that I will be buying many more games from them.

As you might surmise this game is based on Jules Verne’s famous novel. You take on the role of Jean Passepartout and must accompany your master Phileas Fogg as he attempts to circumvent the globe in eighty days or less. In practice, this means that you pretty much have to do everything including deciding where to go, how to manage the money, pack the bags and take care that your master is comfortable while all he does is frown at you if you’re not doing a good enough job. Since this is an interactive fiction game, the story is told through text but you do get to choose which city you go to next on a globe.

I found the balance of narrative and game mechanics to be pretty much perfect. For example, you pack your possessions in bags just like any other video game but different means of transport may impose limits on how many bags you’re allowed to bring so you just can’t tote everything with you. Goods can be bought cheaply in one city and sold for ridiculous sums in some other city to fund the trip. Many items, such as a travelling coat, will alleviate your master’s comfort significantly during hard journeys. Indeed some trips may not be allowed or survivable without proper gear. Having the right items at the place and time can also unlock very interesting encounters and special events.

This captures the feeling of being a character in the story very nicely indeed. Spend too much time fussing over your bags and you could very well miss a train. Expect hazards and route changes at the most unexpected moments. At the same time, the game does reward boldness and having a sense of adventure. In many cases, you can simply choose the safe option and nothing happens. But you would be missing out on some amazing experiences and perhaps even a valuable shortcut. The writing is fantastic, both in its quality and how much of it there is. You are never confronted with huge walls of text. Instead there is just enough of it, delivered a line at a time, to prompt your imagination and put you at all those fantastic locales.

The game is set in a steampunk version of the late 19th century so there are plenty of fantastical inventions and methods of travel. Indeed, at times I felt that there are too many weird things. It may be wondrous to read that the train from London to Paris travels under the channel the first time but you soon realize, as the text itself states, that the world is filled with wonders. This also means that once you understand how the game works, it’s quite trivial to complete the trip in less than eighty days. Between the airships, submersibles, gyrocopters, rockets and other contrivances, the world surely doesn’t feel as big as it must have in Verne’s time!

Needless to say, I loved this game and played it many, many times. The replayability is greatly enhanced by having events and even routes that only open up in subsequent playthroughs. Random events mean that even with a thorough knowledge of the game, you can always be surprised. The number of events, storylines and possible endings is simply mind-blowing. Plus it can be great fun to try to earn ridiculous sums of money doing the right trades. I don’t know who had the bright idea of making a narrative game based on this but it was a stroke of genius and I can certainly say that this is one of my favorite games of the year.