![]() But you might not recall where in the world those things happened. It’s likely you return from the game remembering the time you got involved in a murder mystery, or was kidnapped by nuns, or participated in a penny-farthing race. Turns out what I remember most are experiences and stories - getting lost in New York, or riding a bicycle through Amsterdam.Ĩ0 Days captures this aspect of travel perfectly. But looking back, I’ve realised that my memories of travelling aren’t the historical monuments and famous buildings I’ve taken photos in front of or checked off a “been there, done that” bucket list. In the past, I’ve thought of travelling as a series of locations, like a list of achievements. The game makes every path around the world a valid and equally correct way to play the game. These stories aren’t even necessarily specific to the cities I visited - going to Paris doesn’t mean the story is centered around the Eiffel Tower - but they were memorable.Īdditionally, no matter what route you choose, you never feel like you are on the wrong path. While other games focus on the subject of travel, from world trivia to open world exploration, 80 Days focuses on telling compelling stories. That, I think, is where 80 Days really shines, and how it reinvents the way games think about travel as a theme. We Tell Stories of Our Travels Around the World 80 Days is not about winning or losing or achieving things or crushing your enemies. It sets the player in motion and gives them a motivation, but the way the game is laid out, where you can only advance going east, ensures that you’ll end up back in London eventually. ![]() The £20,000 prize it sets forth is not so much of a goal as it is a MacGuffin. It’s an innovative game design angle, one that works for 80 Days due to an expansive branching narrative with many possible scenarios. This was counterintuitive to me as a gamer but I found the runs where I decided what I wanted to do based on what decision intrigued me the most in the story were the most interesting and the most memorable. ![]() If you don’t get back to London in 80 days, you can just keep playing until you return.Īctually, not caring about the goals at all is actually the best way to play this game. Keeping Fogg happy and healthy is fine, but if you don’t (even if you somehow lose him), you can still complete the game. The thing that differentiates 80 Days from other video games is that the goals it sets out for you don’t actually matter. And I don’t think it’s the way the designers intended.Ĩ0 Days Shows that Games don’t Actually Need Goals Playing the game this way wasn’t wrong, per se, it was just less interesting. Sooner or later, my gameplay experience devolved into a bunch of clicking through stories and trying to advance to the next city as quickly and efficiently as possible. You know in World of Warcraft when you pick up a quest and there’s a long paragraph about what the NPC says that you skip through without reading? I was doing that with 80 Days. There was a level of strategy involved.īut later on, I realised that this made the game kind of repetitive and boring. I often made decisions in the game not based on what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go next, but based on which path seemed that it would be better for my score. ![]() I was concerned about Fogg’s well-being, fastest routes, and best places to sell items for the most cash. On initial runs of the game, in true gamer style, I kept trying to optimise for the best score. Learning to Play Differently in Inkle’s 80 Days Game This, along with other measures like Fogg’s happiness and the total number of days the trip took, factors into a final score at the end of the game. At the outset, you are given the goal of the wager from the novel: return to London by the 80 day mark and receive £20,000. In 80 Days, you play as the valet to the character Fogg from Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, the book that serves as inspiration for this branching narrative video game. This is not necessarily a different subset of travellers, but a trait that all three traveller types have in common. I mentioned three types of travellers in my previous post, but I’ve come to discover a fourth traveller archetype: the storyteller. However, one of my recent finds, Inkle’s interactive fiction video game 80 Days, made me rethink how a game truly captures the spirit of travel. In a previous post, I wrote about some of the games that appeal to travellers for different reasons. ![]() When I first started looking for games about travel, I was trying find a way to replicate a feeling that we’ve all been missing out on this past year. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |