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At Kent, after travelling through countryside untouched by progress, the train hits the English Channel and plunges into the freezing waters. We are somewhat put out by this, perhaps, but we sense that the master is not. Fogg is truly masterful - in the original, imperious sense of the word. He is also "untouched by place or circumstance", which is handy really, since his wager will take him around the world and in a terrible hurry. We hide our fear as the water races past, and maybe this is why our relationship strengthens slightly as a result. Perhaps it's not this, of course. Perhaps it's something else. Perhaps it's nothing at all.80 Days reimagines Jules Verne's headlong dash across the globe as a steampunk affair - trains become submarines, mechanical horses draw carriages, and one city at least is a giant ambling automaton staggering, one clanking foot at a time, through the endless desert. It also reimagines it as a web, however, of consequence and interconnection, where you may pluck one string and see the spider move somewhere entirely different. This is the game part, and it revels in mystery. It's fitting: what is a trip around the world of the 19th century if not a journey into the unknown? And while the choices you make in most games traditionally require a clear sense of what you're actually picking between, 80 Days often does away with all that to thrilling effect. It's a headlong dash, after all: select the start of the next paragraph and see what happens.
It's interactive fiction at heart, each moment in the journey unfolding as a few lines of text, compact yet elegant, taking you further along your route or burning up precious minutes in a diversion. You talk on the road, and you talk in towns where you hole up between departures, either exploring the streets and getting into mischief, selling or buying items for strategic advantages, or haggling with train companies and boat companies and people who run steam carriages, asking them to move departure dates forward. Always forward! Every stop in a hotel feels like failure, but even this has value in truth, as Fogg's health takes a beating as he travels, and sleep, along with the occasional grooming from his valet, can restore it. You are not Fogg, of course. You are Passepartout, and nobody cares enough to monitor Passepartout's health. Fogg does nothing of use an awful lot of the time, and yet he is at the center of everything all the same, judging your actions, appraising your abilities. The whole thing is a delicate escort mission, a survival horror that frequently hinges on icy social niceties rather than monster closets.
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