Zugzwang, by Vanessa Jygon and Eleanor Jimmy
German is one of those languages which, if it didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent: it offers up an essential myriad of agglomerated noun-piles that somehow always communicate images or ideas more neatly than a circumlocutorious English phrase can manage. Thus Zugzwgang, combining words for “move” and “compulsion” to mean a circumstance where you need to do something, but anything you do is wrong (this is almost exclusively used in a chess context, though I find its ambit can be usefully expanded: take figuring out what the Democrats should do about Biden’s age, for example).
What does Zugzwang the game have to do with Zugzwang the concept? Er. Let me get back to you. Maybe it’s that your protagonist – dubbed “the pawn”, one of several elements that gives off a sort of Dark Souls-y vibe – spends most of their time shuttling from the scene of one battle to another, generally unable to make progress? You start at a hub caught between a quartet of vicious foes: an obdurate rock, a twisted ent, a spiteful dragon-rider, with only a limited palette of initial actions available. Visiting each monster quickly sees you learning from their attacks, however – the rock teaches you how to use a fortification move to endure damage, and dodging a burst of dragon-fire unlocks a flame attack. Obviously each baddie is immune to a taste of their own medicine, but mixing and matching your targets Mega Man style allows you to progress.
There’s no danger here – it’s impossible to perish, so far ass I can tell – and there’s no timing element to the combat puzzles, so the gameplay does reduce to just visiting each battlefield in turn and spamming different attacks to gain new abilities and eventually conquer the local baddy, which propels all your abilities up to a new tier of puissance. But the prose manages to bring the requisite drama:
Shards of smoking trees jut up about the Ebony King like the leaning columns of a time-lost temple. Between these verdant ruins, the black liege sends forth a shock of flowers, sprouting, bursting, encroaching.
Just about every moment of each fight could be the world’s coolest black metal album cover, and while that’d be a little one-note in an extended game, the gag doesn’t wear out its welcome over a fleet ten-minute running time. There are also some novel twists on the standard dark fantasy archetypes – the pawn’s ability to learn Blumenkraft is enjoyably over the top. The world and the writing are compelling enough that I kind of wish there was a bit more to it than just endless battling, but it’s still a lot of fun for what it is.
Spoilers now for the endgame:
If you check out the ParserComp 2024 entries page, it doesn’t take much perspicacity to notice that the cover art, itch.io blurb, and author names for two games rhyme in peculiar ways: 19 Once and Zugzwang both have a cruciform grid as the central element of their cover images, the author names are anagrams of each other, and the credits blurb listing how the cover art was made are word for word the same. And despite the variation in their genres – post-high-school nostalgia-fest and dark-fantasy action thriller – the gameplay in both involves navigating to a single-room location and gaining keywords you can use to unlock still others if used at a different point of the compass. It’s not shocking to learn, then, that they were both written by the same duo of authors, and that their plots are more connected than they appear: Zugzwang depicts the climactic sequence of the movie that the friends in 19 Once are all going to see. There’s also a series of nested Easter eggs that unlock a secret coda for the pair of games: the end text of 19 Once has a certain phrase bolded, which if you type it into Zugzwang will unlock a new commentary mode, where you can see the 19 Once crew banter as they follow the pawn’s progress. This in turn leads to one more keyphrase that leads to a secret ending for 19 Once (at which point the trail ends, as far as I can tell).
This is a fun way to braid the two games together; it’s perhaps a bit on the simple side, though it probably needs to be given that many people are likely to play one or the other game outside of ParserComp and might not otherwise easily notice the similarities. And bringing the irreverent voices of the 19 Once folks into Zugzwang’s grim world of perilous adventure makes for an entertaining juxtaposition. With that said, while I laughed at many of the extra jokes, I didn’t feel like I learned too much more about the characters than I’d picked up from playing the initial segment of 19 Once; similarly, while I appreciated the secret ending, it doesn’t feel like it culminates the stories of both games so much as it provides a punchy alternative narrative that loses some power inasmuch as it focuses on Esther, who as I mentioned in my 19 Once review I found the dullest of the buddies. But not everything needs to be a narrative puzzle that clicks into place; I think both games work well on their own terms – it’s just better to think of their intersections as a series of DVD extras rather than the narrative climax.
zugwang mr.txt (36.0 KB)
