wfmag.cc \ 61ReviewRated
ReviewSign of the times
t’s always a delight to find a puzzle game
that has stumbled onto an exciting
new premise. The past few years have
allowed for a surprising amount of
experimentation within the heavily
iterated genre, and now The Pedestrian gets to
join the ranks of other mind-bending oddities like
Superliminal and Manifold Garden.
The Pedestrian’s puzzles centre on who – or
what – you play as: a symbol, hopping between
street signs in various urban vistas. To progress,
you need to connect signage and create entryways
to advance through. As the game strolls along,
it introduces new concepts like picking up keys,
supplying power to gates, and descending through
elevators. The novelty of moving between signs
remains as the puzzles start to become more like
Daedalian jigsaws, asking you to connect disjointed
bits of signage to create a mini-level on the face
of cardboard boxes or a restaurant blackboard,
all leading back to a branching puzzle hub. It’s
here that The Pedestrian could have used some
more iteration, the kind I’d be delighted to see in a
sequel – there were situations where the signage
was just hanging in the air without any bolts
attaching it to the background.
This is at odds with some of the game’s better
puzzles, where you cross streets and movebetween genuine signage that doesn’t suspend
your belief that life is happening around them.
I imagine this is a consequence of the designers
butting heads between the minimalist symbolic
approach and providing a decent amount of
difficulty, so you don’t just race by... I empathise.
Regardless, you’ll never dwell on that too much
because the puzzles are far too compelling.
Because the signs are movable, it often feels
like you’re arranging a collage of the thoughts in
your brain as you play, leading to idiosyncratic
eureka moments. Yet, it’s the tiniest morsels of
detail in The Pedestrian that often prove to be the
most delightful. Whenever you press pause, you’ll
zip to a TV hiding somewhere within that level to
establish a charming continuity between scenes.
The camera moves like a one-take piece of
cinema and the dynamic Pixar-esque soundtrack
swells and recedes with the motion. The game’s
pacing is fantastic, and the plot always picks up to
provide new scenery as you’re figuring your way
out of the few dry puzzles. It’s hands-off for the
most part as the game makes you figure out its
puzzles without any overbearing tutorials, yet some
of the mechanics introduced in the late game –
such as the sign-freezing paint system – could have
certainly used some extra in-situ explanation, or at
least offer a means to review past solutions.
The game is ultimately tied together by one of
the most brain-breaking, mouth agape endings
in recent memory, which evoked genuine
comparisons to Valve’s instant classic Portal, and
demands to be seen. An absolutely essential
pick-up, I sincerely hope The Pedestrian enters the
esteemed annals of puzzle history.The Pedestrian
I
VERDICT
A whip-smart puzzler
with a killer ending,
The Pedestrian is one
of the best one-shot
puzzle games of the
past few years.84 %
GENRE
Puzzle
FORMAT
PC (tested)
DEVELOPER
Skookum Arts
PUBLISHER
Skookum Arts
PRICE
£15.49
RELEASE
Out nowInfo
ReviewRated
REVIEWED BY
Jordan OlomanHIGHLIGHT
There’s always a lot going
on behind the scenes in The
Pedestrian, and you’ll miss a
lot of the details (and a few
cute references) if you don’t
halt the camera between
scenes and train your eyes
to inspect the nooks in the
background as well as the
puzzle-laden foreground. The best puzzles in The Pedestrian take
place on believable structures, using the
environment to draw you into the world. The game’s thoughtful
presentation extends to
its cracking soundtrack.