Things I’ve seen:
- Relative directions: FORWARD/BACK, LEFT/RIGHT. This can be make navigation quite confusing, even in a fairly small map – see the science-facility part of Rogue of the Multiverse for an example.
- Port/starboard, fore/aft and similar shipboard directions. In a ring space station, hubward/rimward and clockwise/anticlockwise (or turnwise/widdershins, if you want to get all Pratchetty). This is really just NESW with a little bit of extra gloss; if you use it, it’s probably kind to retain NESW commands and make north = hubward / fore.
- The aforementioned GO TO, or (better, because terse is good for commands you use a lot) just the room name. This works best in games where navigation is not hugely important, and it’s okay to just teleport to any room you know about.
- Linear FORWARD/BACK, with no spur trails (or, if so, spurs handled with a ROOMNAME system, or something.) Useful for highly linear maps.
As you can see, most of these are only useful in fairly specific circumstances. Jokes about your magical internal compass aside, NESW is a general-purpose system with a lot of advantages, and I think that for most players it’s invisible in terms of flavour and tone.