Ratings and Reviews by Fizzgig
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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."
Janky as heck, but fascinating and fun nonetheless, June 26, 2022This entire game is essentially one big story-puzzle: you, a washed-up, alcoholic detective who's lost a lot of his moral compass, must investigate a murder scene and build a case against one of the suspects in the house. Within the first couple of tries you'll realize that everyone, including the player character, is hiding something, and you'll have to take that into account as you build your picture of what really happened and decide who to build a case against.
There's a lot of trial and error. Your first few playthroughs will likely be spent collecting information. The NPC interactions stand out: I found myself being ridiculously careful about not taking particular actions or having particular items in sight in front of them, because they do notice and remember things, have a great many things they can talk to you about and, on rare occasion, will even talk to each other when you're out of the room (uh oh!). Sometimes you'll have to invent a reason to get someone out of a room briefly, then quickly set up the next stage of your plan in their absence. It took me many tries and several restores for that plan to not only come together but go off without a hitch, but it was immensely satisfying when it finally did.
The interaction mechanics for those awesome NPCs, however? They can be fussy: for best results you must spell out EXACTLY what you want to do EVERY SINGLE TIME. I cannot count the times the game interpreted my "show X" or "ask about Y" as being directed at the table, the bread knife, or a person not even in the room, rather than the one NPC present. Sometimes this happened mid-conversation. Even answering yes/no to a question sometimes requires you to use the NPC's name. It's annoying! I didn't run into much guess-the-verb, but I did come across a couple of bugs where things changed in the game state that shouldn't have, or that I should have been notified about but wasn't, and even one point in the endgame where a misaimed accusation left me in a cutscene that just... stopped, leaving me in a weird state of semi-controllable helplessness.
Anyway, it's fun, it's dark, it requires you to work out what to do in what order but in a more forgiving manner than Varicella (which I also played recently). It's very satisfying to get all your ducks lined up in a row. But it does require many plays to get right, plus learning the quirks of how to spell things out for the parser. (One point at which you should definitely save: (Spoiler - click to show)before calling Anthony to tell him there's been a murder. The timing gets much tighter after that, and if you set up the wrong character you may get stuck in the way I mentioned before.)
Challenging and not for the parser-impatient, but highly recommended nonetheless. :)
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