#cape guy

It’s easy to focus on some of the delightful, but expected ground (and I’ve not explored most of these yet). The opportunity to wander under the ocean in the Nautilus, to go to the center of the earth, or the moon! 80 Days is full of fantastic elements, automata and mechs, airships and submersibles. These are great fun, well-written, and would liven up any text game.

But it’s the little touches of Passepartout’s personality, the world-weary weathering and the world-enraptured joys, the human bits, the struggled-through disasters, and the possible deepening (or straining) of your relationship with Fogg that make the game’s huge breadth of possibilities and replayabilities very special.

Passepartout’s your shapeable protagonist who nonetheless has a past, and the shapeable bits are nuanced enough to lend complexity. He’s the everyman with regrets, old connections, fascinations. A psychology. 

This isn’t to say that every moment’s pure scintillation or that every story’s equal. The unpredictability of player action and the sheer scope of visitable cities can lead to some repetition in the narrative - I’ve had to escape from sympathetic, but secretive and semi-hostile groups multiple times in the same playthrough, for example. There’s some narrative resonance here, like the fact many of these secretive semi-hostile groups are rightfully wary of imperialism, and you’re given the opportunity to react in different ways. A little repetition in a game of this scope’s inevitable.

And let it not detract from some really fine sequences. Some mild spoilers, but the route to the North Pole is worth taking at least once, for risk and wrench. Observe.

I have a hard time not taking the choice to be full of wonder, even in the direst or most inconvenient situations. The writing encourages it. The writing encourages a wide-eyed appreciation of the new, and a reevaluation of the old born from experience. It encourages the two to intersect and interact. Deepen both novelty and memory. There are other nice touches, the chance for romance, the sleekness of the art, the gamble to make bank off something you found in an alleyway, but the core of the experience is exploration and the pleasure (and melancholy!) of the unknown path.