The Gostak

by Carl Muckenhoupt profile

Wordplay
2001

Go to the game's main page

Member Reviews

Number of Reviews: 10
Write a review


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.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment