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.

This is probably my favorite interactive fiction experience of all time. As a game, it's very abstruse, but the presentation and conceit invites you to come back to it again and again until you peel off the layers.

Cast your rod here and get immersed in a game / story which will have you hooked - just don't forget to wear those waders!

As promised, this game presents us with a well-realized retreat with trails, birds and fishing badges aplenty - but keep wandering and you'll find that there's definitely more than meets the eye after your first day or two...

Playing this game through Ryan's website brings an innovative save process to revisiting Jewel Pond. The game keeps all your progress and even arranges your cabin just how you like it... meanwhile, you're gently encouraged to play over days (and probably weeks) so that some events can unfold in real time - ie. things do seem to happen once you go to sleep out here IRL. As you tick off the birds in your book and snag those fish badges, you'll delve into the backstory of the cast of characters living around the lake... (Spoiler - click to show) and, believe me, the plot thickens!

Jewel Pond remains a well-concealed gem in IF for the moment, but it's well-worth getting off the beaten track for an extended stay here.

This game has a few layers; on the surface it purports to be a fly-fishing simulator, but you can probably infer from the tone of the introduction that it actually focuses on life around the lake rather than the literal fishing itself. I hate fishing but love nature, so this suited me fine; on this layer it's actually a wonderful example of a very diffuse, unguided type of (back)storytelling, with things to learn and connections to make at your own pace, unprompted (largely unacknowledged, even) as you explore the area and learn about its contents. Unfortunately, at the risk of an incredibly mild conceptual spoiler: (Spoiler - click to show)if you keep digging, before long the game reveals itself to actually have a much darker story than the "laid-back" experience the introduction promises (and, maybe just as disappointing, a much more formally-traditional lock-and-key-puzzle driven adventure game beneath the veneer of open-ended meandering). So, minus one star for being disappointed that the premise was misleading, but still a high rating for the quality of the "fake" game that the less-interesting real game is hidden in.

This game is the "Joe Pera Talks With You" of interactive fiction.

Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing makes up for every Inform game that's ever felt like a blank room with puzzle components glued down in front of you. The environment is solid and dynamic, but not overly dense: perfectly balanced. And it's very candid about its limitations. That isn't a downside: by gently explaining the walls of our comfortable game of pretend, we can preserve our own immersion by staying inside those walls and sitting by the lake together and doing as much or as little as we'd like today.

My one complaint is that Ryan Veeder is (Spoiler - click to show)terribly mean about insects' appearances.