The Gostak - Details
The Gostak by Carl Muckenhoupt profile 2001 Wordplay Inform 6 Play Online | External Links
(based on 92 ratings) 10 reviews — 118 members have played this game. It's on 224 wishlists. 12 of 12 people found the following review helpful: One of the finest decoding puzzles I've ever encountered, February 20, 2008 by Michael Martin (Mountain View, California)The goal of this game is straightforward; as the gostak, you distim the doshes. Alas, the lutt to the doshery is crenned with glauds! But surely a snave gostak such as yourself can discren them. And, I note, the entire game is like this, including very and deeply extensive meta information. At no point is the central linguistic conceit dropped. I'm a sucker for this, and indeed this is one of my favorite games as a result, but more importantly, the game is approachable in a way that most IF with a metatextual conceit is not. That said, some basic familiarity with the standard Inform library will greatly enhance one's experience with the game, as many (to me) critical clues for solving the game's language came from default responses.Read MoreWas this review helpful to you? Yes No Remove vote More Options Promote this userDemote this userPlonk this userFlag spoilersFlag as inappropriateDirect linkView my user filtersExplain these options | View comments (1) - Add comment 12 of 13 people found the following review helpful: A story that could not be told any other way., November 7, 2007 by Kake (London, England)Related reviews: Carl Muckenhoupt, *****It's a game; it's a puzzle; it's a very, very good depiction of an alien universe from the perspective of one of its inhabitants. The reference is to the sentence "The gostak distims the doshes", which is used to illustrate how syntax can convey meaning — we don't know what a gostak is, nor what distimming is, nor what doshes are, but we do know that distimming is something a gostak does to doshes, and we know that doshes can be distimmed by a gostak. As you play the game, you uncover meaning-in-this-sense, and you learn how things are related to each other; but there is no perfect one-to-one mapping of the gostak's language to English, and I have a strong feeling that the gostak's universe is very different from ours. I "completed" the game a few days ago, but there's still a lot to discover and speculate on, so I'm still playing it.Read MoreWas this review helpful to you? Yes No Remove vote More Options Promote this userDemote this userPlonk this userFlag spoilersFlag as inappropriateDirect linkView my user filtersExplain these options | Add a comment See All 10 Member Reviews 4 Off-Site ReviewsPlay This Thing! Distim the doshes The Gostak is not the game you want to start with if you're new to interactive fiction, because a lot of the decoding process is aided if you already know what commands are typically used in IF and what kinds of things the model is likely to include. But if you've played a few IF games and are looking to have your mind bent in a new way -- a way that would be impossible to imagine in anything but a textual gaming medium -- then you might want to give it a try. Expect to spend a lot of time on each turn making dictionary notes, even for the simplest of moves... See the full review SPAG [...] there's still a whimsical feel to the responses that makes the game more than the sum of its crytographical parts. It's a tribute to the thoroughness of the implementation that the world you inhabit begins to take on some personality; obstacles and helpers don't just serve their functions, they also have connotations, associations -- this one is faintly ludicrous, that one is vaguely chummy, another one is not very bright but trusting -- that suggest that the world-creation effort did not, by any stretch, stop with the bare minimum. See the full review >INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction I was shocked at how quickly and easily I found myself typing commands like "doatch at droke about calbice". However, the whole experience was completely cerebral, with little of the emotional catharsis I associate with successful storytelling. I felt this effect when I played Dan Schmidt's For a Change, but it's ten times stronger in this game, where words aren't simply rearranged but actually replaced wholesale. Consequently, while playing The Gostak was a strange and memorable experience, one which will surely elevate the game to the rarefied level of For A Change, Bad Machine, and Lighan ses Lion, I found it a somewhat strained sort of fun. Great for a puzzle-solving mood, and certainly worth trying if you're a cryptography buff, but not terribly involving as a story. See the full review 50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron A. Reed In an interactive work, how much of the struggle to operate it comes from meaning, and how much from syntax? With familiar linguistic rules, could you learn to play a text adventure whose nouns, verbs, and adjectives were utterly unfamiliar? [...] The resulting world is one you can glimpse only dimly, with logics and consequences that seem by turns familiar and alien. [...] Parser games already take some effort to play; The Gostak requires more than almost any other, and the barrier to entry, to some, can be deeply off-putting. [...] As of 2021 its scores still had the highest standard deviation (the amount of variance in a set of values) of any game ever entered in IF Comp across a quarter century of events. [...] Today The Gostak can be even trickier to play, with fewer players well-versed in the parser conventions on which its foundations for understanding were built. But for those who love a challenge, it’s absolutely still worth trying. It creates a uniquely literary kind of exploration that could never translate to a visual genre, perfectly suited to its textual medium. Its world is as hard to imagine as it is to forget. See the full review Read MoreTags - View the most common tags (What's a tag?) Read More (Log in to add your own tags) Edit Tags Cancel Search all tags on IFDB | View all tags on IFDB Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it. Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags): Add Save Changes Delete Tags Cancel Save Changes Game Details Language: English, Uncoded languages (en, mis) Current Version: 2 License: Freeware Development System: Inform 6 Forgiveness Rating: Polite IFWiki: The Gostak Baf's Guide ID: 1670 IFIDs: ZCODE-2-020305-0926 ZCODE-1-010926-BE47 TUID: w5s3sv43s3p98v45 The Gostak on IFDBRecommended ListsThe Gostak appears in the following Recommended Lists:2020 Alternative Top 100 by Denk (Created 24-Jul-2020) The purpose of this list is not to compete with the IFDB Top 100 but to provide an alternative view, which makes sense for some games. Philosophy: 1. If a game only has 5-star ratings, it is because the game hasn't... 2023 Alternative Top 100 by Denk (18sep2023) This is an alternative to other rating based lists with pros and cons in that it allows for games with fewer ratings (5 ratings required) to reach the top of the list which obviously makes their place on the list quite... Games what I like (for John) by insufficient data These are some games that I like! They tend to err on the side of puzzle-y vs pure story games, and on the more polite side of the cruelty scale. See all lists mentioning this game PollsThe following polls include votes for The Gostak:Solved without Hints by joncgoodwin I'm very interested in hearing truthful accounts of at least somewhat difficult games (or games that don't solve themselves at least) solved completely without recourse to hints, walkthroughs, etc. Great Openings by Floating Info What games have your favorite openings? By opening I mean everything before the first room description in a parser game or the first screen of a choice game. It could be a sentence, a few sentences, a paragraph, or more. But I'm looking... Games for Beginners by WriterBob I'm looking for games that are suited for adults who are new to IF. My purpose is to share these games with friends and let them get experience IF without being frustrated by mazes or guess-the-verb issues. Please avoid children's games.... See all polls with votes for this game RSS Feeds New member reviews Updates to external links All updates to this page This is version 13 of this page, edited by JTN on 28 November 2023 at 11:54pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page
The goal of this game is straightforward; as the gostak, you distim the doshes. Alas, the lutt to the doshery is crenned with glauds! But surely a snave gostak such as yourself can discren them. And, I note, the entire game is like this, including very and deeply extensive meta information. At no point is the central linguistic conceit dropped. I'm a sucker for this, and indeed this is one of my favorite games as a result, but more importantly, the game is approachable in a way that most IF with a metatextual conceit is not. That said, some basic familiarity with the standard Inform library will greatly enhance one's experience with the game, as many (to me) critical clues for solving the game's language came from default responses.
