Put your money where your mouth is, a ridiculous wager… Around the world in 80 days?
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, Steam
Players: 1
Genres: Strategy, Adventure,
Developer: Inkle
Price: £9.99 (Switch Version)
Review key for 80 Days for Nintendo Switch was provided to us from Inkle
What’s It About?
I’d hazard a guess that most people have heard of Around The World in 80 Days? Even if you’re not familiar with the finer details such as the author (Jules Verne) or when it was published (1873, Thanks Wikipedia). If you haven’t the novel was about Phileas Fogg of London making a wager of £20,000 that he could circumnavigate the globe in 80 days.
80 Days takes that premise and has you play as Fogg’s newly appointed French valet Jean Passepartout in one of the greatest adventure novels of all time.
The game revolves around you plotting out the journey, managing destinations, funds and finding the best routes to take by conversing with people from cities or on the particular mode of transport you happen to be on at the time.
Management Simulator?
Well kind of yes. While the novel tells you of the route the 2 titular characters take to achieve this wager, the beauty of the game is that all this is now up to you.
You depart from London to Paris and from there it’s your journey to plan. You stop off in cities and can explore them interacting with people or investigating items or areas of interest. There are markets which sell trinkets that are worth more in other cities and areas of the world. Which might sway you to head a particular route to get a nice payment from them. But you’ll need to consider is it worth it financially as travel isn’t free or cheap for that matter. Your funds need to address travel, accommodation costs and even general well being. A change of clothes and shave can ensure that your well being and morale improve.
Other things need to be considered such as are you particularly well dressed and wearing comfortable clothes for a long cold train journey across Russia? Would it be better to take a longer but more comfortable boat trip around to India? As you progress further around the world and more routes become apparent, more things have to be taken into consideration.
While it sounds stressful in that regard, it really isn’t. The one bit of advice I can suggest is not to bribe trains to leave early. Money is much more important than time from the attempts I’ve had thus far. Being stranded on the Eastern most part of Russia with no money woke me up to this.
Look & Feel
As to be expected from the source material, there is a lot of text in this game. You are essentially playing the novel out. In fact there are over 750k words and the game is almost 12 times the size of the original novel.
The game in that regard is almost akin to a text based strategy game, but with the bonus of rather nice artwork to accompany your choices and conversations.
If you remember those old choose your own adventure novels you’d read when you were younger… “Turn to page 74” etc, this is pretty much the equivalent. While I’ve not completed the game the recommended 3 times, I can see that there are a plethora of options and sub stories available in this game that’ll result in a huge amount of replay-ability and if you’re a completionist… you’ll be addicted.
Conclusion
80 Days is an incredibly smart, witty and fun text based strategy game blowing the source material up massively to create a huge addictive and very re-playable game. You don’t need earth shattering visuals to compliment this game, the art choice is perfect. For £10, you’ll get plenty out of this title, and it’s perfectly suited for the Switch to pick up and play when you feel like progressing to the next city on your adventure around the world.
