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About the Story"Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes uncren them. But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you." [--blurb from Competition Aught-One] Game Details
Language: English (en)
Current Version: 2 License: Freeware Development System: Inform 6 Baf's Guide ID: 1670
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Awards
Nominee, Best Puzzles; Winner, Best Individual Puzzle; Nominee, Best Individual NPC; Winner, Best Use of Medium - 2001 XYZZY Awards
21st Place - 7th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2001)
Editorial Reviews
>VERBOSE -- Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction Page
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.
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Member Reviews
| Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 3 Write a review |
One of the finest decoding puzzles I've ever encountered, February 20, 2008And, 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.
A story that could not be told any other way., November 7, 2007It'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.
My Favorite IF, October 19, 2007If you enjoyed The Gostak...
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Recommended Lists
The Gostak appears in the following Recommended Lists:Pieces of Games by Ron Newcomb
Sometimes the best way to understand a type of puzzle or interaction is a pithy, stand-alone example of it.
Metatextual Conceits by Michael Martin
Most works of IF present themselves as works of IF, to be interacted with by you, the user, much as a reader would read a novel. These games play with or reject this, by presenting themselves as some other kind of artifact, or by...
Innovative Interactive Fiction by Victor Gijsbers
Much Interactive Fiction, and some of the best, quite obviously descends from Zork and other early Infocom text adventures. But some of it departs from that terrain, and attempts to take the medium to new and unexplored areas. I here...
Polls
The following polls include votes for The Gostak: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....
No map necessary by Divide
Pieces which can be fully enjoyed without drawing map, ideally without taking any notes whatsoever. Ones which you could play on a bus, on a break, laying on bed, etc. with nothing but a portable player. Games for which you don't need...
Most unique games by Jeremy Freese
Whatever else might be said about ___________, there's not another game like it.
This is version 4 of this page, edited by Emily Short on 2 May 2008 at 2:15pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item