The IF Archive is filled with no end of strange stuff, and Golden Wombat of Destiny is one of the strangest. The author is Welsh, I believe; I don't know the circumstances that led to writing this game, nor precisely what language it's written in. But while it isn't up to the technical standards of IF produced now, it's fun in its own quirky way.

It seems you're looking for a lost city in the middle of a mangrove swamp, drawn on by vague talk of a mighty civilization destroyed by a plague, a nameless horror, wonderful treasures, and a Book of Knowledge. The swamp serves as a maze of sorts, not at all a highlight; as you have no objects to map with, the approach of choice seems to be wandering around randomly. The game does note your footprints in the mud, but that's your only guidance. Eventually, you stumble on the city, the game proper begins, and you save the game and never bother with the mangrove swamp again. A peculiar design choice, admittedly, and a harbinger of some equally peculiar choices. Once inside the city, you stumble across a giant termite, a skull guarded by an ant, a Room of Lesser Hallucination, a Death Ray Room--and it gets odder from there.

The puzzles are difficult, often unfairly so--one requires some Shakespeare knowledge, another requires a realization that two machines on opposite sides of the city are linked somehow, and most require startling leaps of logic. The walkthrough in the solutions directory on GMD is handy. On the other hand, there is a certain elegance to a few of the puzzles--at one point, careful study of the geography of the city is rewarded. And the parser, for the most part, is good enough to recognize a variety of syntaxes, so "guess-the-verb" is never an issue. For a homemade parser, Golden Wombat's is fairly effective--full sentences are handled well (though not pronouns or undo, irritatingly), and there are no disambiguation problems that I encountered. And the writing, while hardly flowery, is competent--important events are thoroughly described, while ordinary rooms are simply treated as ordinary. (At one initially confusing moment, you actually encounter the nameless horror mentioned above-- rendered as " ".) As indicated, "quirky" is the name of the game here. Particularly memorable is a funnel buried in the ground (examining it yields "It is extraordinarily funnel-shaped"); when the proper object is deposited in the funnel, you get this: 

there is a noise of ancient machinery which has become activated somewhere
under the ground beneath you...After a few moments, there is a curious
rustling sound amongst the vegetation nearby and a tiny sign unexpectedly
pops up just behind the funnel. It says:
"Thankyou [sic] for your generosity;
"You have given that a wombat
"May romp again in peace..."
There is the sound of tuneless music somewhat like the British National
Anthem being played on a didgery-do on a warped cassette buried in the
ground. You stand to attention and salute.
The upshot of the scene is that a hamster appears--"looking very bemused and sad - the way that homeless hamsters usually do." A little of this sort of thing alerts the player that this game is not played by your ordinary logical rules. Most of the game is cute, but a good deal of it is just downright peculiar.

The plot, despite the rather cursory background given at the beginning, is reasonably well developed, though some things remain unexplained. Central to the story is an empress imprisoned (after a fashion) in the city, whom you endeavor to free--but the consequences upon freeing her are rather surprising, and the ending is a real shocker: just when the player thinks he understands where the game is going, or has gone, the ending pulls the rug out from under him. (The original Zarfian ending, in a sense.) Though most of the story does ultimately hang together, many of the connections are left to be filled in rather than dutifully supplied. The effect is initially frustrating, but it actually fits the enigmatic feel of the game rather well.

Golden Wombat of Destiny is obviously nothing like any IF produced recently; it's very much a product of the early days of freeware and shareware, when home-brewed parsers were common and cooperation among authors to develop and test games was sporadic (at least, as compared to today). But it's no less creative for all that, and it's offbeat fun, for the most part, with a thoroughly surprising finale. Though best played with a walkthrough at hand, it's certainly one of the more intriguing denizens of the IF archive.