After playing 80 Days, my perspective on this has changed, as this is most certainly a game (and a story, at the same time). I have to admit that a few weeks ago, I did not understand how a choose your own adventure story could be a game.

You see what 80 Days is an interaction fiction game, like a choose your adventure novel, only with multitudes more choices of directions to take in the game that lead to different plots and narratives. How wrong I was in my initial assumptions! While I did get a game filled with adventure, mystery, and intrigue with 80 Days, I got those things in a very different way from what I was expecting. These are all things I discuss in this video on my first impressions of the game. I just wasn’t quite sure how she was going to do that and maintain historical accuracy. I discuss these trepidations in my initial game log and my glimmer of hope that possibly the female writer of the game, Meg Jayanth, who while British, was born in India, had found a way to craft a more worldly perspective on a story of two European gentlemen that was set in 1872, rather than disinterest or as Ian Bogart frames it in How to Do Things with Videogames, a disconnect between violence, sexism, racism, classism, and empathy. The Presentation / Perception of Women and Different Cultures Around the World – this game was after all based on Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in 80 Days, an adventure undertaken by two European men in 1872 at a time when the British Empire saw themselves as the white saviours and women were portrayed as the weaker gender, who were in need of men to look after them.While some travellers are missing the transport of travel in the present pandemic, and modes of transit are certain to be an important aspect to 80 Days, as they were in Jules Verne’s novel, for me it is the place and people that I am missing. The Goal of Attempting to Get Around the World in 80 Days – as I am a slow traveller, who likes to take the time to explore the places I visit, that is what I thought I would wish to do in each city visited in the game.

80 days games