The Legend of Zelda XD2: Mercuris' Chess

The Legend of Zelda XD2: Mercuris' Chess is a fan-made action-RPG built on the Solarus engine, developed by the Solarus Team and released as an April Fools' joke on April 1, 2017. It's the second entry in a small parody series that began with the original Zelda XD, and while it assumes nothing about whether you played that first game, its opening leans on one running gag from it: Link spent the months since locking Zelda in his cave after a drinking night. From there, Mercuris' Chess tells its own story.

The plot follows a wealthy newcomer named Mr. Grump, who moves into the kingdom and starts buying it — literally. Streets get renamed, landmarks get sponsorship deals, and the game's humor comes from playing that premise completely straight through a genre built on saving kingdoms, not watching them get commercialized out from under you. It's a lighter target than it sounds, more absurdist comedy than pointed commentary, but the throughline about ownership, price tags, and whose version of events counts as true gives the jokes something to hang on besides random gags.

Mechanically, it's a straightforward top-down Zelda-style adventure: real-time sword combat, item-based puzzle solving, and exploration across an overworld noticeably larger than the original Zelda XD's. Two full dungeons anchor the campaign, padded out with side-quests, hidden secrets, and NPC dialogue written for laughs rather than lore. The Solarus Team built the whole thing in about ten weeks, which shows in places — it's a short, tight adventure rather than a sprawling epic — but the dungeon design and combat feel are the same disciplined systems the engine's stock Zelda clone runs on, not a rushed tech demo wearing a joke's clothing.

The name itself is a small joke worth knowing: an in-development location called "Mercuris Chest" kept getting mispronounced as "Mercuris Chess," and the team liked it enough to keep it as the title. There is no actual chess anywhere in the game.

Development wrapped at version 1.1.2, last updated April 2021, and the source is public on GitLab under a mix of GPL v3 and CC-BY-SA licensing. The Zelda IP itself stays governed by the standard fan-game fair-use understanding — this is not an official Nintendo release, and it uses Nintendo's characters and setting without license. PlayBound built its own standalone Windows package for this listing, bundling the official Solarus engine runtime with the quest file per the engine's own distribution documentation, because the raw download from the Solarus site is a quest file for the separately-installed Solarus Launcher, not a one-click executable.

Games like this are why PlayBound exists as a catalog and not just a links page: a fully finished, free fan project that would otherwise live on a niche engine's own site, findable only by people who already know the Solarus community. It's not trying to be a landmark game — it's a ten-week joke that turned out competent enough to actually finish, dungeons and all, and that's worth surfacing on its own terms.