80 Days review

80 Days was my go-to game over the summer, though lately I have switched back to Faster Than Light. I haven’t had the chance to play the updated game, though I have installed it on my iOS devices. This paragraph, from Christian Donian’s review on Eurogamer.net, really impressed me. Great writing, and a great explanation of what kind of game 80 Days is.

It’s interactive fiction at heart, each moment in the journey unfolding as a few lines of text, compact yet elegant, taking you further along your route or burning up precious minutes in a diversion. You talk on the road, and you talk in towns where you hole up between departures, either exploring the streets and getting into mischief, selling or buying items for strategic advantages, or haggling with train companies and boat companies and people who run steam carriages, asking them to move departure dates forward. Always forward! Every stop in a hotel feels like failure, but even this has value in truth, as Fogg’s health takes a beating as he travels, and sleep, along with the occasional grooming from his valet, can restore it. You are not Fogg, of course. You are Passepartout, and nobody cares enough to monitor Passepartout’s health. Fogg does nothing of use an awful lot of the time, and yet he is at the center of everything all the same, judging your actions, appraising your abilities. The whole thing is a delicate escort mission, a survival horror that frequently hinges on icy social niceties rather than monster closets. —Eurogamer