The only route available out of London available on the first playthrough is the connection to Paris, and 80 Days wastes no time in setting itself apart from its rather more grounded source material by having the initial leg of the trip be made by a carriage pulled by a steam-powered automaton, before switching to an amphibious locomotive for a journey under the English Channel that eschews the use of a tunnel in favour of simply travelling along the seabed before coming ashore in Calais. Fogg has just received his famous wager to travel around the world in eighty days or less, and it is your job to arrange things so that the pair of you make the journey both on time and in one piece. When you throw all of these elements together you get an alternate universe 1872 that makes a hell of a setting for a game, and it’s married up with the same high standard of execution Inkle showed off in Sorcery!Ĩ0 Days kicks off in London, and you play the part of Phileas Fogg’s redoubtable valet Passepartout. Which, I should hasten to add, is the good kind of steampunk full of strange, wondrous contraptions and memorable characters instead of being a thinly-veiled apology for Victorian empire where the only real difference is that all the top hats now have goggles on them. 80 Days therefore ends up being pretty much every single significant Jules Verne novel smooshed together with a huge dollop of steampunk. 80 Days might take its protagonists and their overarching goal from Jules Verne’s classic novel, but since Verne’s works have long since passed out of copyright they can play very fast and loose with the characters, themes and settings involved. Inkle apparently thought so too, since while they’ve continued to work on the Sorcery! series in the background their next title was an almost wholly original one. There was nothing wrong with Sorcery! as a concept, but the reliance on a twenty year-old adventure really let it down. My conclusion was that while their conversion was solid and they’d even tried to innovate by including an actual honest-to-god interactive map to represent your journey across the continent (which any young player of Fighting Fantasy would have killed for back in the day), Fighting Fantasy itself has aged rather badly it was one of the strongest CYOA formats out there and yet today it comes across as both childishly simple and incredibly dated in terms of its structure and design. That’s why I was intrigued to see iOS developer Inkle attempting to resurrect them on the App Store a couple of years back, and even went as far as buying their version of Sorcery! for my ancient iPad Mini 2 to check out what they’d done. The Fighting Fantasy series eventually succumbed to the vagaries of time and the whimsy of a young population that was increasingly drawn to video games, but I still remember them fondly. They’re something that left a fairly deep impression on me – I still have basically the full collection sitting in a box somewhere – as their fusion of entry-level RPG elements (character stats, a player inventory, combat) with the CYOA format provided some badly-needed structure to something that even nine-year-old me felt was rather on the light side. If you grew up in Britain in the late 80s/early 90s there’s a fairly high chance you’ll have encountered the Fighting Fantasy series of Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks 1 at some point.
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