The Gostak

by Carl Muckenhoupt profile

Wordplay
2001

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Reviews and Ratings

5 star:
(57)
4 star:
(22)
3 star:
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2 star:
(4)
1 star:
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Average Rating:
Number of Ratings: 89
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- Ben, February 9, 2009

- albtraum, February 8, 2009

- Cendare, January 14, 2009

- Audiart (Davis, CA), January 8, 2009

- Genjar (Finland), August 31, 2008

- aaronius, March 12, 2008

- jfpbookworm (Hamburg, New York), February 25, 2008

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.

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- puzzler (Everett, Washington), February 10, 2008

- anj tuesday, November 18, 2007

11 of 12 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.

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- Maureen (California), November 2, 2007

- Stephen Bond (Leuven, Belgium), October 26, 2007

- Emily Short, October 22, 2007

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
My Favorite IF, October 19, 2007
by Personman (Somerville, MA)

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.

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