One of the nice things about fantasy IF--particularly the sort of fantasy IF that Graham Nelson has called "lazy medieval," which covers anything prior to the invention of gunpowder--is that the ground is so heavily trodden that it's easy'n'fun to stand the player's expectations on their head. Leonard Richardson's Degeneracy does just that, and while the trick itself isn't an unqualified success, it works well enough.

It seems you've been enlisted to kill a certain Baron--not only have you been enlisted, in fact, you've gone and done it just before the game starts, and your mission is now to get out of the Baron's castle. Problem is, the Baron has cursed you, and the curse prevents you from escaping, so you need to delve into some alchemy books to undo the curse. There's also a time limit of sorts, it turns out, though it's generous enough that you don't need to be extremely efficient. The game itself isn't particularly long--it can easily be solved in under 100 moves, and the time limit kicks in at about 200 moves or so.

The puzzles aren't especially exciting--there are only a few of them, and reading the manuals you find is essentially all you need to do--but there's lots of fun to be had in the writing. Much of it is mock-Elizabethan or thereabouts--lots of Surprising Capitalizations, for one thing, often put to amusing purposes. (There's one object containing water that you can pour over your head; suitably instructed, the game tells you that "you fit your Head under the deluge from the [object], and moisten your Hair." Better still are the antics of a pig you encounter, such as: 

The Pig wanders over to the heavy Portcullis & pokes its snout
through on of the gaps in the iron Gate. A wistful look comes across
the Pig's face, as it ponders a more carefree time in its life, a
time redolent with Rolls in cool Mud & games of <>
with its thirty-seven Grand-Children.
The hints, liberally sprinkled with fake hints in the style of Infocom's Invisiclues, add to the humor. (E.g., in response to a question about how to get out of a certain room: "You might follow the carpet." "It leads off 'toward the sunrise'." "From which direction does the sun rise?" "Go east." "This is not technically a puzzle.") It's true that the game doesn't take every opportunity for humor that comes along--at least, so it seemed to me--but there are some surprisingly funny bits. (All the funnier because the game appears to take the dour persona of the PC so seriously.) The author wrote Guess the Verb!, from the 2000 competition, which was similarly full of sly humor.

As mentioned, there's a trick of sorts in the game, on which I won't elaborate here. It's not a total success; some players, I know, thought it was a bug, which it most certainly isn't. There are indications that something's afoot well before the trick happens, though they depend to some extent, I think, on whether the player's moving around--fewer, if any, of the clues would be apparent to a player who's staying in one room working on a puzzle. (Technically, none of the puzzles are so hard that such concentration should be warranted, but you never know.) The nature of the trick is such that, unless duly warned, the player's likely to attribute the effect to a bug--that the author isn't extremely well known works against him in this case. (If it were Zarf trying to do the same thing, in other words, the player might tend to have more faith.) The moral is that an author planning a surprise of this kind should err on the side of overcluing (and taking excessive precautions to ensure that the player will see the clues). That aside--and I did get the clues, so it did work for me--it's a pretty clever idea, and again, the medieval setting helps: the player expects breaches of the fourth wall less, perhaps, than he or she might otherwise.

It's also worth noting that, for a short game that may well exist for purposes of the above trick, Degeneracy's world is quite thoroughly created. There's a religion that, if not exhaustively described, comes across enough to be understood. There's a political system (well, hints about one). There' s a reasonably complex system of alchemy. And aside from all this, there are a couple of magic systems that have a variety of effects and are reasonably consistently applied. The production values are good enough, then, that this isn't simply lazy medieval fantasy.

Degeneracy isn't a masterpiece, but it's not strictly a one-trick pony either--there's plenty to appreciate aside from the central gimmick.