Zugzwang

This was pretty random but awesome. I mean, it really has intriguing writing. It kind of sort of felt like chess, but to me it also kind of felt like those old SwordQuest "Fire World" games for the Atari 2600, where you have all these elemental enemies to deal with. It is rather short, but I think that works for this game quite well. I was satisfied at the end and had not gotten bored with running NSEW all the time. The ending is quite good. There are certainly worse ways to spend 10 or 15 minutes of your time.

**Zugzwang** by Vanessa Jygon, Eleanor Jimmy

This game was compact and fun. It feature a plus-sign shaped map. Movement is N/E/S/W, but instead of having to return to the middle square, the direction you type takes you directly to that quadrant of the map.

This is a chess-based powerup game. You are a pawn, and all your enemies represent chess characters as well. You learn attacks from each enemy, and can try those attacks on other enemies.

The descriptions were well-done and interesting. The combat was fun at first, but I eventually began flinging everything I had at the enemies, as I had difficulty seeing the logic behind which attacks worked and didn't realized at first that order matters.

This games has a secret, it's (Spoiler - click to show)connected to another game in the 2024 Parsercomp. Regarding that:

(Spoiler - click to show)The game is made by the authors of 19 Once. Both games have very similar mechanics and can be solved in a similar way. After beating 19 Once, you can unlock a special command for Zugzwang, and vice versa. The special commentary for Zugzwang makes it much better, giving you that vibe of a friend group that likes each other but has a tenuous hold, with some being grating or weird but you stick with them for now.

Very fun concept.