Around the World in Eighty Days

This is a text adventure. The game describes where you are; you type what Phileas Fogg does next. If you have never played one before, the whole skill is learning that the game wants short, plain commands — a verb and a noun — and that when it does not understand you, it is almost always because you have offered it a sentence rather than an instruction.

How to begin

1. Launch the game from the Tronsoft Games library. The cover screen appears.
2. Press BEGIN THE JOURNEY. If your browser asks for permission to play audio, you may allow or refuse it; the game plays identically either way.
3. You are in the card room of the Reform Club. Read what is on screen, then type your first command into the box at the bottom and press Enter.

The opening few moves, if you would like a running start:

> READ PAPER
> TALK TO STUART
> TALK TO STUART
> WAGER
> WEST

That reads the article that starts the whole business, lets Stuart talk you into the argument, commits Fogg to the bet, and sends you home to Savile Row to collect your servant and your money. From there the journey runs east.

Controls

Everything can be done from the keyboard. Nothing requires a mouse, and nothing requires a keyboard either — the on-screen palette covers the common commands for touch and pointer play.

The verbs

The standard ones behave as you would expect:

And eight belong to this journey in particular. Each has a palette button:

Turn order

Each command you type is resolved in a fixed order, and always the same order:

1. Your command is parsed. If it cannot be understood, nothing happens at all — no move is spent, no day passes.
2. The action is carried out, and its immediate result is printed.
3. If you moved, the new room is described, and anyone travelling with you arrives with you.
4. Consequences follow: a day advances, a character speaks up, a quest completes, an achievement unlocks. These always print after the description of where you now are, so the account of each turn reads in the order events happened.
5. The panels update — chart, day, meter, purse, score.

The day clock

Days are not spent by wandering about. They are spent by completing a leg of the journey, and the cost of each leg is taken from the memorandum Fogg keeps in the novel: seven days from London to Suez, thirteen to Bombay, three across India, thirteen to Hong Kong, six to Yokohama, twenty-two across the Pacific, seven to New York, nine home. Eighty exactly.

This means you can take your time in a location, examine everything, and talk to everyone without the clock moving against you. The clock is a piece of dramatic architecture, not a punishment for curiosity.

Movement

Move with the compass directions — NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST, and occasionally UP and DOWN. The single letters N, S, E, W, U, D work as well.

You will notice quickly that nearly every onward journey is EAST. This is not laziness in the design. Fogg circles the globe eastward, and the direction matters more than it appears to. Keep it in mind.

An exit does not always open when you want it to. If a leg refuses you, you have not yet done the thing that leg requires — bought the ticket, found the servant, settled with the pilot, dealt with the captain. The room description will say so, and HINT will say so more plainly.

Scoring

There is no combat. Points come from progress and from thoroughness, out of a possible 150.

The optional twenty points are the difference between finishing and finishing properly. They are attached to things a careful traveller would take with him and a hurried one would leave behind. Type SCORE at any time to see what you have and roughly where it came from.

Separately, fourteen achievements record particular ways of playing — crossing India without losing anyone, arriving with the whole party intact, and so on. Achievements are not worth points. They are worth knowing you did it.

Winning

You win by returning to the card room of the Reform Club and presenting yourself before the wager expires.

Be warned that the last stretch of the story does not behave the way the arithmetic suggests it should, and that the ending turns on something Fogg does for reasons that have nothing at all to do with the bet. If you play the final region as a pure race against the clock, you will arrive, and you will arrive too late, and you will not understand why the game seems to think otherwise. Do the human thing at New York and aboard the Henrietta. That is the puzzle.

Losing

There are two ways to lose, and they are quite different in character.

Arriving too late

If the eightieth day passes and Fogg is not in the card room, the wager is lost and the story ends. Following the route as the game presents it will not produce this outcome by accident; it is reached by leaving a leg unfinished.

Getting killed

Three decisions in this game are fatal. All three are signposted before you make them — the text tells you plainly that what you are about to do is dangerous, and the danger is always the obvious one:

• Forcing a door in the pagoda at Pillaji rather than going round.
• Setting the mainsail in a typhoon in the China Sea.
• Going after the Sioux at Fort Kearney alone and unarmed.

Saving and restarting

The save lives in your own browser on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, and the game never touches the network. That does mean that clearing your browser's site data will clear the save with it, and that a save made in one browser will not appear in another.

If one of the three fatal decisions catches you, RESTORE will put you back where you were, or RESTART will begin the journey again. Neither costs you a move or a day. Dying in this game is meant to be a full stop in the story, not a punishment for the player.