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I think I should have made a better glossary…, July 4, 2022…because you ABSOLUTELY MUST make one to play this game. Also, it may help to know what I found out only after the fact: "The gostak distims the doshes" is a linguistic joke, illustrating how humans can derive meaning from syntax even when the words themselves are nonsense. And that, indeed, is a driving feature of this game.
To wit: You are the gostak. (Whatever that is.) You have come to the doshery to distim the doshes. (Whatever that means.) However, the doshery is blocked off by five glauds (whatever those are!). To win the game, you must remove each of the five glauds and successfully distim the doshes. But first you'll have to figure out the made-up vocabulary for virtually every important word in the game, including how to look at things and move around! The help page and error messages, which are also written in Gostakian dialect, are very helpful for deducing that first handful of words. Then you'll spend a lot of time working things out from context. Some words have relatively clear meanings, but others are best defined with other words from the conlang and may not even HAVE English translations. What's a gostak? Well, it's a being that distims doshes. What's distimming? It's what gostaks do to doshes. What are doshes…? Well, you get the idea.
What all this means is that figuring out commands can be fun on an intellectual level, but I had no investment in any of the characters. I didn't like that about the game, but I'm also not sure it was that kind of game! Although I think in a larger version of the Gostak universe, the worldbuilding would have been as rich as it was inscrutable. I did run into some frustration with the final puzzle: even the hints told me to do something I didn't know how to do until I looked at David Welbourn's glossary. In hindsight, I'd missed a couple of key words: (Spoiler - click to show)At one point, you encounter a machine that you can play with and even get an inconsequential item from but that otherwise doesn't help you much. However, the machine uses a few words in its description that are found in only one other place. Had I taken the time to work them out, I would have known how to activate a DIFFERENT item in the endgame. I didn't, so I got stuck.
I personally didn't find working out the vocabulary as fun as I expected to, but others might! The same goes for the game.
I have to say, though, it IS pretty fun to say things like "The gostak distims the doshes."