80 Days thread

I didn’t see a thread for 80 Days and thought I would start one. Is anyone else playing?

I’m enjoying this take on the Jules Verne classic though it can be a bit grindy at times. My best circuit time is 52 days, and I haven’t managed to kill Fogg yet. I have also managed to make the circuit without entering a bank.

I’m intrigued by the GC leaders list to see circuit times of under 30 days. I must have missed a lot along the way. I’ve been replaying to try different approaches seem to find something new every time. I’m convinced there must be a way to go west rather than east, but haven’t found it yet.

Played once through and loved it (although I failed to make it by 80 days!). The writing is just so wonderful. I don’t know why it feels like a lot of work to try playing through it all again, but whether I do or not, it was worth it. Definitely a stand-out mobile game for the year.

I’d definitely give it another try. There are many story lines and surprising developments. I’m curious to see if the various threads actually cohere at some point.

Is it iOS only? I saw it written up in quite a few GOTY lists, and it sounded so awesome, but then I saw it listed as an iOS game. Unfortunately, I don’t own any iOS devices. :(

Looked from the update the other day that there’s a new story now, too – to reach the North Pole. Has anybody checked that out yet?

I love this game. It’s excellently executed. My fastest time is 63 days or so.

I don’t know why I haven’t tried this yet - everywhere I look, it’s being praised and lauded! And I was even in an airplane for 4 hours last night - arhghghgh. NY resolution to try this out over the weekend!

It’s really fantastic. And the sort of thing I’d much rather see being explored on iOS than almost anything elsethat actually comes out for it, boardgame implementations aside.

It’s on GooglePlay.

It’s my impression that after you’ve won once, more story lines open up. I’ve done the North Pole route. Also been teleported, and spent time with Captain Nemo on the Nautilus.

Oh cool. Thanks rob!

I’ve only done three play-throughs, but this thread has convinced me to take it up for a few more go-arounds. I do wish it did a better job of tracking your play-throughs with some sort of scoring list. :(

-Tom

Had no idea! OK, gonna go play this some more today.

Yes, I’m guessing the players who’ve achieved 30-day circuits have taken pretty good notes of the outcomes at each branch to get there. The key has to be hidden shirt-cuts; the most efficient obvious routes - the Orient Express, the Great Siberian Railroad - will work but don’t seem to get you under 60 days.

I managed a 43-day circuit. Also discovered that the results are randomized for some choices - that the same choice sometimes produces one result, and sometimes produces the other result.

Later: or the outcome of the choices is influenced by the route you took to get to the present location…

Here’s where I heard about 80 days, listed as Number 2 in Austin Walker’s Top 10 Games of the Year:

  1. 80 Days

Meg Jayanth and the folks at Inkle rehabilitated a genre that I’d previously had no interest in seeing fixed.

A couple of years ago I basically decided I was done with steampunk. Time and again I found steampunk media to be this weirdly sanitized version of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It so often felt like it wanted the aesthetic of those periods without any the troublesome (but interesting!) baggage. So I decided I was done.

And then: 80 Days did steampunk justice.

Inkle’s 80 Days is a major re-imagining of Jules Verne’s Around the World In Eighty Days. Verne’s story focuses on Fogg, a rich Englishman, utilizing the (then recent) imperial spread of European culture and technology to win a dare. But in 80 Days, Jayanth shifts the perspective to Fogg’s servant, Passepartout–whose lower social standing immediately shifts the character and tone of this branching story about world travel. You manage your master’s condition, plot travel routes, trade goods, and engage in intrigues personal, public, political, and romantic. To be perfectly honest, this part of the game could’ve won me over by itself: it’s a game that depicts the wonderful mundanity of travel: did you bring your hairbrush? Are you dressed like you belong in this crowd? What souvenir do you bring home? I’m a sucker for things like this.

But 80 Days goes further: In place of Verne’s then-contemporary setting, Jayanth leverages the vast array of differences in cultures and histories to create a unique steampunk setting. Secret automatons. International politics. Walking cities. Working class revolts. Air Pirates. Sexual experimentation. Mysticism, but mysticism that doesn’t fall into Orientalism. And best of all, the beautiful, dangerous powder-keg tension of a world growing smaller as new technologies bring us closer together.

It was easy for me to decide I was “done” with steampunk. Easy and useless. 80 Days has scolded me for this.

It is rarely enough to say “No, I don’t like that.” Good critique (whether it comes in the form of an essay, a tweet, or a new game) addresses the subject’s internal contradictions and uses those to undermine it, before creating something new and valuable in its own right. I’ll do better next time, Inkle.

Just learned about the game from this thread. Finished my first circumnavigation in 70 days, with a profit of over 6,000 pounds. Very neat game. Definitely something to come back to.

Me, I’m haunted by that GC top score of 20 days. I thought the North Pole was the answer, but I don’t see how you can do much better than 40+ days by that route…

I like it a lot too. My first game I got stalled when I ran out of money in a South American town with no bank and only expensive routes out - probably my own fault, because I arrived on a slave ship and hence was hated by potential allies.

My second game, I incited a mutiny on a submarine when the Captain wouldn’t go fast enough, and finished in London after exactly 80 days. Coincidence, of course, but having it take exactly that long made it feel like every decision I’d make along the way mattered.

Question - various things that seem like stat elements pop up (“your character is now suave. Your relationship with Fogg deteriorated slightly”. Is there (a) any way to see your current suaveness, and (b) do these have any effect?) And like others, I’d like to see a record of your previous trips available. The feature that is there (seeing other random players traveling) are actively irritating.

I read a review which says your relations with Fogg impact how much your attentions to him improve his health. I don’t know how other attributes effect the game. And I don’t see any meter for your current level of suaveness, etc.

Whoops, didn’t see that this thread existed and created my own. Anyway, c/p time:

First off, 80 Days is on sale for $0.99 right now on the Amazon app store, and given how much I enjoyed the two Sorcery! titles, the critical acclaim it’s garnered and that I still had Amazon spacebucks to spend, it was a no brainer.

However, the 15 minutes I spent with it so far has been pretty fustrating. The globe UI is atrocious, I can’t see the names of the cities unless I zoom right in, I can’t easily switch to the map when I’m doing something else (for example, asking people about routes.) There’s no automatic note taking that I can tell, the text scrolls at a glacial pace, time passes quickly while I’m wrestling with the map UI. Am I missing something?