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.
And what you have to do over the course of the game is not merely solve the puzzles but work out what all the words mean. (The grammar is just that of English, as are a lot of the little function-words. More than that would have been impossible.)
If you like it, be sure to also check out Andrew Plotkin’s ‘Lighan ses Lion’ [0], an entry in WalkthroughComp run by Emily Short [1]. It’s not a game, just a transcript of a fictitious game, but well worth checking out for a chuckle... or as a brain teaser.
Also, the Beast puzzle in ’The Edifice’ [2] by Lucian Paul Smith comes to mind.
Its opening text reads as follows:
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.
And what you have to do over the course of the game is not merely solve the puzzles but work out what all the words mean. (The grammar is just that of English, as are a lot of the little function-words. More than that would have been impossible.)