IGF Spotlight: Feign

Feign places you in the role of a lab rat navigating a maze that conforms to neither physics nor sanity and lacks cheese. There is a lot of trial and error involved in playing Feign. As you hunt for nine hidden portals, rounding a corner may yield an entirely different layout than on your previous visit to the same corner. A structure may appear modest on the outside and yet give way to a vast interior.

The game uses a black, white, and gray palette, often reversing the meaning of positive and negative space. For example, a gray wall within a white world may, once passed through, become a gray world with white walls. Unfortunately, there is no consistent logic that will let you reason out what you have to do next, and at later stages, the game devolves into making a run at every wall in hopes that one of them is actually a passage. Once you have figured out where each portal is located, Feign becomes a game of memory.

In the game's current state, maze navigation can be a bit confounding, and there is a single-track music loop that causes madness after a while. Since there is no change in the ambient audio in each zone, you will often feel like you aren't progressing as much as you actually are, and accidental backtracking can often lead to loss of progress. Currently, Feign is a fascinating M.C. Escher-like concept, but it could greatly benefit from more consistent logic and better cues to guide you on your merry way.

For more games like this, check out the downloads blog on GameSpot.