Inkle's 80 Days, based loosely upon the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days, is a remarkable piece of interactive fiction. Time named it the 2014 Game of the Year, it was nominated for four BAFTA awards and three IGF awards, and lead writer Meg Jayanth won a UK Writer's Guild award for her work on it. Alas, it was only released for mobile devices, leaving it largely outside our professional purview and something we didn't get to talk about as much as perhaps we'd have liked. That's about to change.
"We're excited to finally announce what we've been up to for the last year, in the background, here at inkle HQ," Inkel revealed today. "In collaboration with Cambridge-based studio Cape Guy, we've rebuilt 80 Days from the ground up in Unity, for PC and Mac."
80 Days puts players in the role of Phileas Fogg's manservant Passepartout, who must manage his master's health, finances, route, and time as they attempt to win a bet by traveling around the world in 80 days. Each of the many cities on the journey has its own unique narrative content, and there's a tremendous amount of it—500,000 words, according to Wikipedia, only a tiny portion of which will actually be seen over the course of a single journey.
But the PC release will be even bigger, as Inkle has added a "massive content update" which will include more than 30 new cities, 150,000 words, and two major new plotlines. It's undergone a dramatic visual improvement as well, courtesy of the Unity 5 engine, with new color and shading effects, and a global day/night cycle.
80 Days will arrive on Steam, GOG, and Humble on September 29, and will set you back $10. Find out more at the Inkle Studios website.
