That is not to say you can’t come back again, though, as 80 Days easily withstands multiple play-throughs, not just over each route but in terms of how you play the characters. The world of 80 Days is one that I would love to explore in greater detail without that ticking clock looming large, but there is always another boat to catch, always that next connection to make. If it merely consisted of reading the adventures of Fogg and Passpartout as they embarked on their different journeys, subject to the whims of the reader, it might in some ways be a better experience.

In some ways the fact that 80 Days is a game and, as such, has challenge and goals to it, is almost a shame. The characters are so lively that it feels sort of out of place to find them meekly waiting for days as money is wired to them. Also the system for obtaining money from banks can be frustrating, with the knowledge that if you do find yourself out of money at any point there’s a good chance you won’t make it home on time. Indeed, the game encourages you to see just what Passepartout can get away with.Ĩ0 Days only suffers when it tries to be more conventionally gamey – for example, the inventory and market system feels like an unnatural fit, as though it had been grafted on from a different game with a different purpose. Mistakes can prove costly to the journey, but Passepartout has a range of talents, and fortune often favours the bold. Unlike the old Choose Your Own Adventure books – which were perfectly happy to kill your character off for making a wrong turn, or even making what looked like a right turn – 80 Days lets you have fun with its narrative. The game draws you into its world, delivering surprises all the time. Locations, characters and modes of transport are sketched out well enough to create impressions of depth and to fire the imagination, without the sort of detail that might cause them to lose their mystique. This is a strange but enjoyable experience, and the prose through which the story is delivered is sparse yet intriguing. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.

HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.Is it a text adventure? Is it a puzzle game? Is it some sort of visual novel? Does it have poisonous spurs on its hind feet? It contains elements that I’ve run into before, but the whole is something new. Sometimes a game won’t fit into any particular category at all – instead it sits there, like a cross between a duckbilled platypus and a Rubik’s cube, giving you that look babies get when they can’t decide if they want to laugh or fart.Ĩ0 Days, thankfully, is the smiling sort of Dubik’s Platycube, insomuch as it is an incredibly fun and engrossing game. Such ease of categorisation means you can focus on the details, like how a scientist encountering a new type of beetle can centre not on the fundamental questions of what a beetle is or what’s it for, but instead on the minutiae of why it is different to the other beetles. Some games, however, don’t lend themselves readily to categorisation.

You can play them, learn their patterns and systems, master them and move on. Some games lend themselves to easy categorisation.

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