A triumph of visual delight and puzzle design
The Pedestrian is a triumph of visual delight and cunning puzzle design, seducing the player with gorgeous environmental design but hooking you with incredibly inventive two-dimensional puzzle design.
The Pedestrian is a rare case of entirely two-dimensional gameplay being juxtaposed against gorgeous three-dimensional environments.
You control a stick figure who appears to be stuck inside signage. You can run, jump and climb to get to new areas, but the biggest selling point is the ability to zoom out and rearrange the positions of the signs and flat surfaces, creating doorways and new paths.
Once you regain control of the stick figure, you can then use these new doorways to acess the other signs to complete puzzles and advance the game.
One of the game’s more clever mechanics lies in how The Pedestrian manages the concepts of time and space. Making changes to the arrangment of signs will cause switches to deactivate and key items to be lost, meaning that if you don’t go in with a solid plan, your hard work can most certainly go to waste.
Managing a puzzle board full of different segments filled with switches and keys can become a daunting, if never overly-difficult task.
Though The Pedestrian is all about novel ideas with a healthy serving of innovation, there are moments when the game begins to feel a little too “samey”. While the sense of reward from completing a puzzle through your own volition is definitely palpable, the fact that the game’s only tangible reward is simply more puzzles can lead to a great deal of fatigue.
Though never hand-holdy, The Pedestrian does introduce new elements in a gentle and measured fashion.
Many of these mechanics can feel irritating at first but this feeling is always balanced through a sense of reward once said mechanic is mastered.
The Pedestrian is an absolutely unique take on the tired old puzzle format. The mechanics are solid and delightfully creative, with the story being fresh and subversive in its own right. It should be noted that there is a brilliant Valve-esque twist in The Pedestrian that you will not see coming.
Overall, this is a fabulous puzzle game that, while not especially long, will at least provide you about four hours of top-drawer puzzle entertainment.