Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds. Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes discren them. But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.For those who didn't know what was coming from the title itself--which refers to an old linguistic in-joke--this is more than a little disconcerting, all the more so when familiar commands like LOOK and INVENTORY elicit "That's not a dape I recognise." (The trick is somewhat similar to the language puzzle in Lucian Smith's The Edifice, where you needed to communicate something in an unfamiliar language where even the pronouns were unknown; here, while the communication problem is much broader, the syntax and word order are familiar and pronouns, prepositions (mostly), conjunctions, articles, and such are all English.) The HELP equivalent (JALLON) gives a list of basic commands, though they're unlikely to be particularly helpful to the IFer who isn't familiar with the basic IF help menu--the only commands that are familiar are things like QUIT, SAVE, RESTORE, UNDO, and such, and the unfamiliar commands themselves are explained in the same language. Never fear, though-there are Invisiclue-style hints! (Just follow the menu option for "brolges.") Here's one of the hints on the topic "The tophthed curple": "If only it wasn't tophthed, you could pell in there without being glaked. What can you do about the tophthage?"
The net effect is that The Gostak has some pretty severe barriers to entry, so to speak--the initial 50-100 moves or so are apt to be a painful slog while the player attempts to compile a basic glossary, takes cryptic notes, gets mocked by the parser (>LEIL WARB: "That's unleilable"), and starts to think that Colossal Cave had the right idea. It gets less frustrating, but the learning curve doesn't level off much--unfamiliar words just keep coming, and there isn't really a point when you simply know all you need to know. The game ups the ante by doing its damnedest to keep many of its words from having any English referent at all (this is the linguistic joke, as detailed here), and while you can choose to assign them referents of your own devising, you can't assume that the game will follow along with the implications. (You might decide that a particular noun means, say, "water," and later decide that a certain adjective means "wet," and then belatedly discovered that your water isn't wet--because the game doesn't agree that those words have the relation you've assigned.) Beyond that, the puzzle-solving in the game often turns into a scavenger hunt-you're faced with a creature that has an unfamiliar adjective, say, so you go hunting around aimlessly for something that has a similar adjective. There's a helpful character that might explain what the adjective means, to be sure, but he (it) more often than not explains it using two or three more terms that you don't understand. The effect is occasionally like a game with a million locked doors and a million keys in which the puzzle-solving consists of trying each key in each door; the no-referents trick becomes more of a curse than a blessing. (The problem is exacerbated by a certain object that can produce eight more objects, each with a largely opaque adjective, which heighten the combinatorial problem.)
Is all this a Good Thing? Well, it's a certainly a creative thing, and it's done intelligently. Not only do most words lack obvious referents, but familiar words have unfamiliar syntaxes--or words that you think you've pigeonholed as just like a certain English word turn out to have unexpected connotations or uses. In effect, the game's language works like a real second language, with different assumptions about what concepts go together or how to visualize a certain action, rather than simply tracking English. Quite apart from the technical feat of reworking the Inform parser into an alien tongue, which must have been wearisome, convincing the game to respond sensibly to every verb in every context (which, as far as I can tell, it does) is not a trivial accomplishment.
The problem, though, is that I'm not sure the annual competition was the forum where The Gostak was most likely to be appreciated, mostly because of the two-hour rule. Now, it's true that competition judges don't have to finish a game within the allotted two hours, and it's also true that many well-regarded competition entries have been on the long side, and it's also true that you don't need to reach the end of The Gostak to appreciate it. But the two-hour rule does not breed patience, and The Gostak is unlikely to be appreciated by an impatient player. When a judge spends the bulk of the two hours fumbling around and trying to master basic vocabulary, he or she is unlikely to rate the game highly except for pure strength of concept. As it happens, that was enough for me, but not everyone is endlessly fascinated by linguistic wizardry of this sort. The end result was that the scores for The Gostak were almost evenly distributed across the scale--which surprised me a bit, as I expected a large pileup of scores at the two extremes from some players who were frustrated by the whole thing and others who like this sort of thing. I don't know how much the scores mattered to the author--my guess is not much--but even disregarding the scores, I think this sort of thing is better appreciated without a ticking clock. Part of this is that comp entries have gotten shorter in recent years--in the early days of the comp, it was routine for entries to push the two-hour mark, but lately it's become uncommon--and hence attention spans may have become shorter; it's certainly an adjustment to play through several games that can be adequately appreciated in under half an hour and then hit The Gostak.
All that said, there's something entertainingly goofy about the playing experience that makes up for the frustration. Being told, when you try something useless, that "that wouldn't do anything heamy," or hearing an overprotective character cry "My doshes! All my martle doshes!", or learning that a character who looks you over and is amused "tunks you and smarches"--I dunno. Well-chosen words, I guess. But I found the game a pleasure to read quite apart from the pleasure of deciphering, and I found I enjoyed the thing most when I assigned a word its rough contours (establishing that a given noun was alive and ate things, say, or establishing that a verb was transitive and caused certain nouns to leave the vicinity) but didn't try to pin it down precisely. Of course, getting somewhere in the game required a little more than that, and there's only so much pure exploration to do, but there's still a whimsical feel to the responses that makes the game more than the sum of its crytographical parts. It's a tribute to the thoroughness of the implementation that the world you inhabit begins to take on some personality; obstacles and helpers don't just serve their functions, they also have connotations, associations--this one is faintly ludicrous, that one is vaguely chummy, another one is not very bright but trusting--that suggest that the world-creation effort did not, by any stretch, stop with the bare minimum.
Reactions to most IF differ widely, and more so with The Gostak than with most--but despite the frustration of the puzzle-solving, I was drawn in by the premise and the thoroughness and complexity of the language-building, and I gave it a 7 in this year's competition.