80 Days

You are Passepartout, valet to the unflappable Phileas Fogg, and you have eighty days to circumnavigate the globe. How you do it — and who you become along the way — is entirely up to you.

Inkle’s 80 Days takes Verne’s novel and cracks it open, filling the spaces between chapters with a steampunk world of walking cities, submersible trains, and political revolution. This isn’t adaptation; it’s reinvention. The source material provides a skeleton; the game builds an entire world around it.

The World

The map spans 150 cities across every continent. Each is hand-written, distinct, and connected to its neighbors through routes that range from conventional (steamship, train) to fantastical (mechanical camels, airborne hotels, a tunnel through the Earth’s core). The joy is in the discovery — you’ll finish your first playthrough having seen perhaps thirty cities, knowing there are a hundred more waiting.

Steampunk

A genre blending Victorian aesthetics with advanced steam-powered technology. In 80 Days, this extends to automata, airships, and mechanical megafauna.

Inkle’s steampunk isn’t Victorian cosplay. It’s a political reimagining where colonial powers are destabilizing, where revolution simmers in India and Haiti, where the Ottoman Empire fields mechanical armies. The technology isn’t decorative — it’s transforming societies, and you’ll witness the human cost alongside the wonder.

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What Works

The writing is extraordinary. Meg Jayanth’s prose finds Passepartout’s voice — curious, occasionally naive, ultimately capable of real growth — and sustains it across thousands of possible encounters. Your valet might begin as a dutiful servant and end as a revolutionary sympathizer, a published author, or a man questioning everything he believed about loyalty and empire.

Every city offers choices that feel consequential without paralyzing you:

• Help a fugitive escape Russian authorities in Omsk
• Invest in a struggling inventor’s mechanical limbs in Vienna
• Choose sides in a worker’s revolt in Yokohama
• Barter, beg, or bluff your way onto transport you can’t afford

The resource management adds stakes without overwhelming the narrative. Money matters — you’ll sell your luggage, haggle in markets, and occasionally make morally questionable deals to fund the journey. Time matters — miss a connection and you might wait three days or find a faster route. But these pressures serve the story rather than suffocating it.

Passepartout and Fogg

The relationship between valet and master is the game’s emotional core. Fogg begins as an enigma — silent, demanding, unreadable. But across eighty days and countless conversations, you’ll uncover what drives him. Why this bet? Why this obsession with schedule and control?

Your choices shape both characters. A Passepartout who pushes back on Fogg’s demands will find a different man than one who anticipates every need. By journey’s end, the circumnavigation matters less than what these two people have become to each other.

The game handles service and class with surprising nuance. Passepartout is a servant, and the game doesn’t pretend otherwise — but it also gives him interiority, agency, and moments where he must decide what loyalty actually means.

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Routes and Replayability

The map can feel overwhelming on first playthrough. With 150+ cities and countless routes, analysis paralysis is real. Embrace the chaos — the game is designed for replay, and your first fumbling journey will be memorable precisely because you didn’t optimize it.

Route	Time	Highlights
East via Suez	~65 days	Classic route, colonial tensions in India
North via Russia	~70 days	Trans-Siberian intrigue, political upheaval
West via America	~75 days	Frontier chaos, mechanical wilds
South via Africa	~80+ days	Riskiest, most adventurous

No two playthroughs are identical. The game tracks your choices across runs, and certain content only unlocks after specific experiences. I’ve completed the journey a dozen times and still discover new encounters.

What Doesn’t

The UI takes adjustment. The map is beautiful but occasionally unclear about which routes are available. You’ll sometimes miss connections because you didn’t realize you could tap on a particular city. The mobile origins show in moments where precision clicking matters.

The endgame can feel anticlimactic after the journey. The eighty-day deadline generates tension, but “winning” — arriving in London on time — delivers a brief cutscene that can’t match the accumulated weight of everything before it. The journey really is the destination here.

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Playing Today

80 Days is available on iOS, Android, Steam, and Switch. The mobile version is the original and arguably the purest experience — the tap-and-swipe interface feels natural on touchscreens. The Steam version adds a few quality-of-life features but loses some tactile charm.

Platform	Price	Notes
iOS/Android	$4.99	Touch-optimized, original version
Steam	$9.99	Mouse controls, achievements
Switch	$14.99	Portable and docked modes

All versions include the same content. The game receives no further updates, but the existing scope is vast enough that completionists will spend dozens of hours finding every route.

The Verdict

80 Days proved that choice-based interactive fiction could stand alongside any narrative game in ambition and craft. It’s romantic without being naive, political without being preachy, and genuinely fun even when it’s breaking your heart.

The world awaits. You won’t see all of it in one journey. That’s the point.

Pack light. Travel hopefully. And remember — Phileas Fogg can wait while you chase a revolution across the rooftops of Agra.

80 Days won the TIME Magazine Game of the Year in 2014 and was nominated for four BAFTA awards, helping establish choice-based IF as a commercially viable format.