Home | Profile - Edit | Your Page | Your Inbox Browse | Search Games   |   Log In

Download



gostak.z5
For all systems. To play, you'll need a Z-Machine Interpreter - visit Brass Lantern for download links.
gostak.z5
For all systems. To play, you'll need a Z-Machine Interpreter - visit Brass Lantern for download links.

Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Playlists and Wishlists

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to downloadable files
All updates to this page

The Gostak

by Carl Muckenhoupt

Wordplay
2001

(based on 22 ratings)
3 member reviews

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
IFIDs:  ZCODE-2-020305-0926
ZCODE-1-010926-BE47
TUID: w5s3sv43s3p98v45

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.
See the full review

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)
(Log in to add your own tags)

Member Reviews

5 star:
(10)
4 star:
(8)
3 star:
(0)
2 star:
(4)
1 star:
(0)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 3
Write a review


6 of 6 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.

4 of 5 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.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
My Favorite IF, October 19, 2007
by Personman (Providence, RI & Sebastopol, CA)
I am not your average player of IF, it's true. The fact that this game is my favorite IF ever does not mean that it is exceptional in the ways you would expect an IF to be exceptional. The puzzles are solid, but not amazing, the plot is fun but trivial, the interface is not buggy or anything, but it doesn't do anything exciting. But the concept is so utterly wonderful that (english) words do not describe it. You'll simply have to play it.

If you enjoyed The Gostak...

Related Games

People who like The Gostak also gave high ratings to these games:

Delightful Wallpaper, by Andrew Plotkin ('Edgar O. Weyrd')

Winter Wonderland, by Laura Knauth
"Young Gretchen could have only imagined the fanciful events that were to occur before finding herself lost in a winter wonderland." [--blurb from Competition '99]

Whom The Telling Changed, by Aaron A. Reed
The people had always gathered on moonless nights to hear the stories, since the time of their ancestors' ancestors. The heat of the fire and the glow in the storyteller's eyes made the past present, and the path to the future clear. The...

Suggest a game

Recommended Lists

The Gostak appears in the following Recommended Lists:

Games that are super awesome by Personman
These are the IF games that I happen to think are incredibly amazing, fantastically wonderful, supremely terrific, and really great.

Word-play games by Emily Short
Games where the text of the game is part of the puzzle.

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.

See all lists mentioning this game

Polls

The following polls include votes for The Gostak:

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.

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....




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