Adventures in Storytelling: The Maker’s Eden, 80 Days
80 Days
Scott Bruner
A number of companies have tried to adapt interactive fiction-style adventuring to the lucrative mobile market – such as Choice of Games’ gamebook stories – but no company has had as much success as Jon Ingold’s UK-based company inkle. A year after releasing a mobile version of Steve Jackson’s first Sorcery! gamebook, inkle’s newest release, 80 Days, continues to evolve their model for interactive fictional narratives, and has scored an equally impressive success.
80 Days – not to be confused with the 2005 Frogwares adventure by the same name – is a very liberal adaptation of the Jules Verne’s classic Around the World in Eighty Days. Although the game is billed as the next technical evolution of the Sorcery! engine, it’s much more than that, providing a singular, interactive literary experience that showcases inkle’s rare talent for pushing the envelope in showcasing new ways to relate to stories through digital media.
The best word I can use to describe 80 Days is elegant – from the interface to the music to the frequently compelling and faithful text, every element of this game works flawlessly to make you experience the immersive story and feel as if you are personally exploring its multitudinous assortment of exotic locales and destinations.
The game combines its wealth of text and sparse but evocative graphics very well. Each location has a number of icons (such as the bank or market) which correspond to your available actions and a silhouette that captures the spirit of the current city – if you decide to spend the night, a sun and moon will rise behind this silhouette to mark the passage of time. When it’s time to travel to your next destination, a global map appears and tracks your movement Indiana Jones-style across it. A stark black and white shadowed image of your current conveyance is also shown as you travel, illustrating the wealth of vehicular options at your disposal. Even the text itself, the main attraction of 80 Days, is attractively highlighted during your adventure, displaying white letters across a black canvas.
80 Days follows the basic plotline of Verne’s masterpiece: a British eccentric by the name of Phileas Fogg has accepted a bet that he cannot traverse the planet in 80 days. Like the novel, his journey to win that bet is aided and abetted by his French manservant, the properly appellated Passepartout. Unlike the original story, 80 Days is told in the first-person, and the player takes on the role of Passepartout, in charge of the major decisions for the duo’s jaunt across the globe.
In Sorcery!, you traveled from one definitive location to the next while making some minor choices (paralleling the Choose Your Own Adventure style of the original book) about which linear direction to take and how to overcome puzzles and obstacles at each location – which often used the original gamebook’s roleplaying mechanics to resolve. But 80 Days is tied only to the original narrative premise of Verne’s classic, and writer Meg Jayanth has taken advantage of this freedom by creating a larger world which stays (mostly) true to the spirit of the original.
There does need to be one word of caution here: Jayanth and inkle have taken one rather significant liberty with the original tale. Although Verne was also an accomplished science fiction writer of works such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days takes place very much in the world, time, and technological capabilities of the year (1873) in which it was written. The original Fogg and Passepartout traveled by train and boat on their trip. Jayanth has gone the steampunk route and allowed the pair to have access to steam-powered pneumatic horses, glimmering metal air carriages, and even trains which transform into submersibles. Although Verne’s own science fiction predictions became one of, if not the biggest, influences on the steampunk aesthetic, it’s a very steep departure from Around the World’s realism, and I still have a few reservations about it. Inevitably, it changes the journey from one that was originally intended as a showcase for the fantastical locations of our real world into one that is now actually just a fantasy. But as its own work, it’s absolutely engrossing.
So how does 80 Days play? It’s a rather clever mix of gamebook, resource management, and open world exploration. After leaving your starting location of London for Paris, you must decide on each successive location that you will travel to – with a wary eye on the timer ticking down the 80 days you have to traverse the world and return in time to win Fogg’s bet.
The number of locations you can visit during play are astounding, and each offers new opportunities for adventures and mini-episodes that you can take part in or ignore as you (feel Passepartout would) see fit. Expanding on Verne’s 8 original destinations, Jayanth has provided over 150 locations to visit, from Sub-Saharan Africa to South America and even a number of American cities.
At each location, you have a number of options available to you: you can visit the bank if the funds needed to book voyage have fallen low (such funds usually take a number of days to secure, which can stall your journey), explore the local area, visit the marketplace to purchase items for your limited inventory (which might prove fortuitous during your adventures) or maps to find new travel routes, and you can check the global map to begin planning the next leg of your travels.
Along the way, you’ll also need to manage the duo’s inventory and Fogg’s level of happiness. Some of the items you can buy at a market not only open new avenues of exploration or conversation options, but a train timetable might even provide new routes to travel when it’s time to disembark. However, each method of travel usually has a limit to how many items you can travel with (based on the number of “suitcases” allowed) unless you wish to pay more to get extra space (and cut into your finances). There’s also the option of selling items in your inventory to make a profit – an American outfit might be selling for pennies in Europe but worth serious dollars in the States – and keeping an ear out for tips on potential opportunities during your explorations can be profitable.
Keeping Fogg happy usually means playing a round of Whist or appealing to his creature comforts from time to time. He has a rating that begins at 100 but dips depending on the harshness of the traveling options you’ve chosen. It’s easy enough to take care of Fogg, but it usually means you have to decline exploring a city or having a conversation with another passenger. I didn’t find managing these resources particularly challenging – I never let Fogg dip below 80 (though I likely sacrificed a few adventures to do so) and at one point, I simply sold all of our current items to save on travel expenses, which didn’t seem to have much of an effect on our ability to make it back to London.
Exploring each destination in 80 Days is perhaps the greatest joy of the game, because each locale, whether exotic or familiar, usually offers a number of captivating characters, places to visit, and encounters that Passepartout can interact with. Mechanically, exploration is handled the same way as most gamebooks: you read the description of each location and are offered a handful of choices on how to proceed. Player agency is somewhat limited in the style of a gamebook, but often the choices are rather imaginative, allowing you to not only choose avenues to pursue, questions to ask, or actions to take, but might also determine how Passepartout even feels about an encounter, or flesh out the details of his own past, personal experiences.
The types of mini-adventures that Passepartout can take part in are equally imaginative. He might become embroiled in military actions in the Ukraine, visit marvelous scientific exhibitions at the World’s Fair, or become involved with a political uprising in South America. These episodes can range from the merely curious to complex and convoluted affairs, but each works to create an impressive sense of verisimilitude, and Jayanth’s rich text is very much responsible for making such a fantastical representation of this world feel so remarkably real.
Even after Fogg and Passepartout embark for their next destination, more unexpected events can occur en route. When you are in the middle of travel, you can elect to read the newspaper (which will often include mention of an event that you have been involved in or witnessed), converse with people on board your current conveyance or take care of your master’s needs. Often chatting with passengers can lead to new narrative opportunities. I met several fascinating characters whose familial backgrounds and stories provided even more depth, as well as chances to see if I could bring their personal stories to a satisfactory conclusion. Like many of the adventures throughout the game, I had mixed success – but I found that even if I wasn’t successful, these possibilities were just as enjoyable.
I’ll admit that I had such an anxious eye on the clock ticking down on my first playthrough that I visited only a fraction of the possible destinations, and experienced only a taste of all the adventures available. Meeting the deadline doesn’t seem particularly hard, however, as I was able to land back in London proper with 6 days and a lot of cash to spare. In many ways, that’s the point. The sense of wonder isn’t necessarily about reaching a final destination, but rather about the travel itself. After I had reached London again, I felt much poorer for the adventures I had missed – and promptly began a new journey to go back and see what I had missed. Indeed, 80 Days isn’t designed to be experienced only once, but rather as a puzzle box to return to and see what other possibilities are available. You won’t be able to reach every destination, or experience every adventure on every trip – meaning each journey is its own singular adventure.
It’s also important to note that even if you do miss the deadline, the game doesn’t end. You can continue on your way home at your leisure, but you’ll have to contend with a very ornery Fogg, unhappy that you’ve lost his considerable bet. In addition, it’s been reported that there are a number of Easter eggs hidden throughout the game, as well as a number of “secret endings.” I haven’t found them yet, but I’ll keep looking.
That’s perhaps the most impressive success of 80 Days: that it succeeds not just as an enjoyable game of managing resources and decisions to reach a goal, but also as a fully accomplished story that offers multiple levels of excitement in revealing each layer of intrigue, exploit, and thematic element. It’s a game where a failure, either in reaching the meta-game goal or in bringing particular episodes to a satisfying resolution, is just as compelling and fun as each success. The adaptive story that you create is ultimately the most gratifying element of the game’s journey.
My only other complaint about the game is that the ending, despite all of the varied adventures I had taken part in, felt very anti-climactic. I wanted to know what happened to all the people I had encountered – and if my actions had had any effect on them or the world, but the game didn’t provide any insight, merely recounting the statistics (time and money spent) of my journey. This decision seems rather strange in a game so intent on delivering such strong and intriguing stories throughout.
Minor disappointments aside, every piece of interactive fiction aspires to produce the kind of experience that 80 Days has created so deftly – and so innovatively. The challenge of keeping text-based adventures viable, exciting, and accessible for a market used to the graphic eye candy of our new machines is no small feat, so it’s a welcome surprise that inkle have been so successful in adapting text adventures to our new mobile media. Their discovery of Jayanth is also a noteworthy achievement, as she is the muse who guides 80 Days as a revelatory work and a gripping, exhilarating experience. Available exclusively for iOS, this is a game that should not be missed by any interactive fiction fan.
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