The Gostak

by Carl Muckenhoupt profile

Wordplay
2001

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Number of Ratings: 86
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- Cosmo42, May 28, 2020

- Dan Fabulich, May 12, 2020

- IanAllenBird, December 11, 2019

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Language, meet Logic, December 2, 2019
by Rovarsson (Belgium)

It is very tempting to try to translate The Gostak. I've found different versions of the, no, more accurately I should say a story on the internet. I too have created a story based on my understanding of what things and what actions the strange words in this game refer to.
But as Chase Entwistle put it so well in his review: "Distimming the doshes could be the most evil thing imaginable."

I really started appreciating this game once I let go of the assumption that the "words" had to have external referents, and instead viewed them as symbols in a logic system that could be manipulated through their interactions with other such symbols.

This brings this game very close to mathematics or symbolic logic. "Distim", "Gostak", and "Dosh", like any other "word" in this game are defined solely by their relations with other "words". Putting "words" next to other "words" makes them act in a certain way, and gives output from which the player can infer what role they have in a logical system.

But yes, of course I have my own version of the story. And my, how my doshes are distimmed by that gostak!

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- ArchDelacy, November 29, 2019

- Denk, November 24, 2019

- draziwfozo, September 2, 2019

- florzinha, July 12, 2019

- kevan, July 11, 2019

- CleverFool, June 11, 2019

- wisprabbit (Sheffield, UK), May 6, 2019

- gildedSnail, March 18, 2019

- davidar, November 10, 2018

- AKheon (Finland), September 22, 2018

- Joey Jones (UK), September 15, 2018

- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), August 1, 2018

- yaronra, July 16, 2018

- mjw1007, January 15, 2018

- Greg Frost (Seattle, Washington), November 8, 2017

- lkdc, February 1, 2017

- Brian Kwak, December 28, 2016

- Oreolek (Kemerovo, Russia), October 20, 2016

- insufficient data, July 10, 2016

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A game (in)famous for its main challenge: understanding a nonsense language, February 3, 2016
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 2 hours

The Gostak is one of those games that everyone hears about eventually. Some play it, some stay far away. I didn't get past the first room when I first played it, felt scared, and put it off for five years.

I finally completed it with the in-game hints and some of David Wellbourns dictionary.

So what is this game? It is based off of an old sentence a professor came up with, showing that you can guess a lot about words and their relationships just by their position in a sentence. That sentence was "The Gostak distims the doshes".

In this game, you are the Gostak, and you do have to distim the doshes. You have to learn how to navigate, to examine, to take and drop, and so forth. The help menu, also written in nonsense, is vital in understanding the language.

The hints were actually very helpful, although it might be possible to beat the game without them. The last hint is purposely vague.

The game has two npcs, one who is quite helpful, and one who is not. There are a variety of other objects, though.

After finally beating it, I love this game, but it sure was hard, even with all hints and a dictionary.

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- Matt W (San Diego, CA), March 20, 2015


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