Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing

This game was part of Ryan Veeder's early explorations with unusual uses of Inform, which later branched out into things like twine/parser hybrids, collections of parser games that communicate with each other, dramatic graphical displays, etc.

The main interesting feature here is that the game saves automatically online and reloads your progress, and that the game differs depending on the day you play it. Two characters come and go based on the day of the week, and several actions require multiple days to complete.

Because of this, I frequently started the game before stopping due to forgetting to play again and intimidation. But I finally finished it!

The main idea of the game is that you're at a large pond, which represents most of the map. The pond itself is around 16 (Inform) rooms of water, and circling around it is a long series of rooms forming a circle. You get a fishing rod and a jacket, and the game lets you customize yourself quite a bit, down to a fear of bugs.

You are not given any defined goal. You are not even really able to fish. But as you explore, you begin to find both badges and a large variety of birds. In going out of your way to find badges or birds, you'll also discover a lot about the lives of the people who lived at and/or visited the pond.

The scope of the game is quite large. Even without the timed aspect, it took me around 10-11 hours to play and comment on the game in a forum thread, and so if only half of that was playing, it'd still be around 5 hours, and if only a third was playing, it'd still be 3-4 hours. This is substantial content.

The storytelling is mostly environmental storytelling. Many events are only alluded to. Careful notekeeping can be very helpful.

Overall, I genuinely enjoyed finishing this game off. It took me 6 years to get around to it (and I've had it open in a browser tab for one of those years), but it was worth it.