yomikoma

I recently played Carl Muckenhoupt's interactive fiction game The Gostak. It was wonderful.

Like other IF games, you interact with the game via a text prompt, telling it what you would like to do. The game responds with textual descriptions of the world and the effects of your actions.

Unlike other IF games, The Gostak takes place in a completely alien environment with an almost completely alien vocabulary. It's still in English - with familiar tenses, pronouns, articles, prepositions, prefixes, and basic verbs - but most of the words are entirely unfamiliar. Even basic IF staples like "That's not a verb I recognize" and "You can't go that direction" are replaced with "That's not a dape I recognize" and "You can't pell at that lutt". Luckily, there is some jallon provided which gives some basic dapes to start with. It's a joy to deduce from context and the small amount of data you have what to do with the things you find and the problems you encounter. If you get really stuck (like I did) there are brolges provided for particular puzzles. (One puzzle, the Cobbic glaud, completely stumped me - I never did figure out how I was supposed to learn that dape.) But for the most part, just pelling at the various deaves and trying dapes will make more and more sense as you internalize the logic of this new world.

Very strange and very enjoyable - at least if you're me.