Sometimes games which don’t have much going for them have one aspect so bright that it totally elevates them. Sometimes they have an idea which isn’t carried through enough to do that, but which still makes an impression through an inkling of unusual potential. Feud is a mostly unexceptional game that has one of each.
Feud is a game about a magic battle between two duelling wizard brothers, Learic and Leanoric. Its manual starts off from the perspective of the townspeople who are just going about their business when they get inconvenienced by this feud. The big people have a fight, disregarding the disruption to the little people. Outside of the manual, Bulldog don’t get Feud to make anything of that dynamic, which leaves it as just a bit of a sour note, but it’s a fascinating one. This interesting aside would go on to essentially provide the basis for a whole set of successful games, including several from a remarkably similarly-named company.
In what actually does happen in-game in Feud, it is a bit of a throwback, a 2D top-down maze game without even the flurry of activity of Sabre Wulf. It has a big and varied map, and a few people that walk around, but they provide no interaction whatsoever, unless you count a touch of the old Spectrum colour clash. For the most part, all there is to do is search out ingredients, which are few and far between, to to match the pairs in your spellbook – foxglove and catsear for a doppelganger, dandelion and burdock for a nice drink, and so on, to activate spells. It is a little dull.
The one exception, and it’s an enormous one, is the bits where you meet the other wizard, who is wandering around the map doing much the same as you. You get a compass which continually points towards them, their presence always there in the background. My first glimpse came at a distance as he took a herb that was out of my reach the other side of a maze wall, but before long you will run into each other head-to-head.
The quaint slowness elsewhere magnifies the transformation in mood when your rival comes into view, and the tension around their appearances. They appear and suddenly everything has changed. You have a limited, frantic chance to blast them, or to run away, depending on who has the upper hand at that moment spells-wise, and it’s exhilarating in its abruptness. It’s a mechanic which would work even better if, say, you played the game against another human using two different screens where you couldn’t see each other, perhaps connected by a series of tubes, but the appeal of it shines through even without all that in place yet.
