Update Eighty-Three: 20 November 2017

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Damn it, I did it again - I played myself out of a game.

80 Days made me feel like Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor did - it had so many options and so much grind and so much to juggle and so much repetition that it just hits a panic center in my brain and makes me feel queasy and addicted all at once. I realize I hadn’t looked up from the screen until I have a pounding headache. It just doesn’t work out well for me.

This game, otherwise, is lovely. Its user interface is smooth as silk and all of its ideas are fresh as hell. In a steampunky update from the Jules Verne original (I actually ran into him a few times in the game) you play Passepartout the valet to Phineas Fogg, who made a wager he could make it around the world in 80 days. And then they say the world, they mean THE WORLD - you can go everywhere. This alternate-history 1875 setting is really interesting and fun to see all the differences from our own timeline, and there are a lot of important women you meet who do a bunch of cool stuff. This game is also staunchly anti-colonialist and gives colonized people space to talk about the empires that rule them, and Passepartout has a lot of opportunity to help them along.

I think my favorite thing that happened was how I started a mutiny on a steamship heading to San Francisco from Yokohama. The Christian British captain treated his Japanese Shinto sailors poorly and talked shit about their faith, and also neglected his team of submariners and snubbed their skills. I banded the two groups together, ousted the captain, and was named captain in his place! I eventually transferred captaincy to the head of the submariners - a Japanese woman who had become a dear friend. It was sick!

There’s a lot in this game and I am definitely going to hold onto this to try again, but for now I just have let it be.

Next up: I want to get Tales of Berseria, but I have another game to play first. See you in several weeks!

See you soon!