Give or take a month

I typically stay away from "rogue-likes" -- debates about misapplication of the term aside, it does tend to describe the kind of game where you are expected to fail after a significant time investment, and try again from scratch. I am an impatient man, and dislike losing my progress -- and especially dislike re-treading old ground.

That said, 80 Days managed to impress me, largely in the quality of its writing. In a vein similar to (but lighter than) Sunless Sea, the game looks at an alternate history where weird, magic-sounding technology mingles with Victorian romanticism. Reading about the protagonists' encounters with magic streetlamps, desert hover-cars, and teleportation devices lent a strong and fascinating sense of mystery to the whole thing.

And the charming music and sound effects didn't hurt, either. For a game with no animated cutscenes or 3D landscapes, it does a great job of immersing you in its environs.

Those bits aside, though, 80 Days still feels pretty thoroughly like a game that wants me to lose. When I went to careful effort to build up my travel coffers, the travel time ticked up, and up, and up; then while I paid close attention to Fogg's stamina meter, my money seemed to rapidly vanish. Sometimes I would spot a beneficial route, then find at the destination that I had been effectively stranded -- a trap, in other words. Occasionally a travel hop would be diverted at the last moment, ruining the rest of my itinerary.

I can certainly guess that particular, "correct" routes would have made the trip easily within eighty days. But I had no way of knowing these routes beforehand, and my guesses were statistically unlikely to find them.

I will also freely admit that my efficacy at traveling the world suffered due to my terrible sense of world geography. When an event informed me that I might find fortune in Khartoum, or a swift route through Freetown, I just ... smiled and nodded. Yes, those certainly are places!, I resolved.

I would also argue that 80 Days is lacking some design polish; parts of the game seem conflicted with one another. City markets allow you to purchase goods that may be resold elsewhere for a tidy profit, but the game frequently (or perhaps always?) forbids you from traveling backwards, so properly executing complex trade routes is impossible. Attending to Fogg's health while traveling is usually mandatory, but meanwhile precludes opportunities for finding new routes.

Most of the game's critical decisions, like reacting to opportunities on the road, or engaging with local townsfolk to find new routes, stop the clock; you can take as much time as you want to choose a dialog path. But some choices, like buying and selling goods, or interrogating a travel companion about possible routes, leave the clock running; not only limiting how much you can do, but effectively penalizing you for not acting quickly enough. The vacillation between "turn-based" and "real-time" decision-making seems haphazard to me.

80 Days entertained me with its writing, and there are enough cities in it that I might even enjoy a second run. But I still can't relish the idea of starting another expedition -- especially when I think about encountering a side-story for the second time, or re-experiencing the exact same travel perils.

I would continue playing this kind of game to more fully explore its world, but not to read the same prose over and over again.

Progress: Around the world in 112 days