The Pedestrian (PC)
During everyday life, it’s easy to spot a simplified silhouette of a human being cropping up all across many different types of signage. Whether it’s helping you know when to cross at a crosswalk, alerting you to the danger of a wet floor ahead, or helping you determine which of the restrooms to enter, these stick figure pictograms have become a common part of urban life ever since they were created. In The Pedestrian, one of these socially understood symbols for the human form springs to life and begins to travel from sign to sign, the concept and detailed urban visuals backing it immediately catching my interest and leading me to add it to my Steam wishlist well before it ever released. When the game did finally release, I found myself with a review code for it, so now, I could see just how the game intended to take this journey of a simple symbol and turn it into a unique puzzle platformer.
After selecting whether you want the symbol to manifest in its masculine or feminine form, the player gets right into experiencing the sign-crossing action The Pedestrian is all about. All around different urban environments like a sewer, factory, and of course the busy streets of a bustling metropolis, the signs serve as little rooms your character can run through. The stick figure can only jump and carry things though, its limited abilities enough for it to navigate the space within a sign but not nearly enough to help it cross the barriers between them. Instead, the player swaps between controlling the little character and an assisting hand that can create connections between signs, connecting doorways and ladders with lines that don’t actually have to line up perfectly to work. A door on the left needs to connect to a sign with a door on the right and a ladder going down must connect to another sign’s ladder that goes up, but diagonal angles and long lines between signs are fair game, the stick figure easily able to traverse the space between signs albeit in a way where it cannot be seen while in transit.
Just as important as helping your pictogram person have links between the signage is moving them into positions where they can better interact. When you move to a new cluster of signs, you will need to stand back and rearrange them so that their connections can be set up properly. Barriers might prevent you from making the perfect arrangement though, and plenty of different gimmicks can influence the way you place these signs near each other. Some signs have one-way holes that the human figure can hop through to get from sign to sign, the player placing the signs on top of each other to pull off this effect. In other areas, the signs might have wiring around their edges, meaning you need to physically connect them to electrical sources on top of building your more freely made sign connections so that you can power switches and gates.
An important consideration to make as you connect signs though is that you are free to rearrange them and your lines as you please until your human figure has walked through a connection. Altering a connection that has been used in solving the puzzle and then severing it will make your puzzle solution unstable, and after a brief moment where you can fix it if you altered it by error, the puzzle will reset the positions of everything within the signs. This means you can’t just go into a sign, grab an important item like a key or battery, and then connect yourself immediately to the way back, puzzles able to become quite complex as you need to figure out the correct steps for acquiring items and activating systems. Luckily, the fact only used connections will cause problems if messed with means you don’t need to solve the puzzle right out of the gate, the player able to adjust on the fly so long as they don’t put themselves in a pickle. An interesting gimmick appears later in the game that plays with this even more, yellow spray paint turning signs into rooms exempt from the level reset so that items or your character can then travel through a new set of connections you make.
Most individual puzzles keep their signs limited to avoid overwhelming the player as well, although there are many areas which serve as hubs where you split off to solve other puzzles that allow you to then solve that hub’s main challenge. Luckily, the hubs don’t indulge in many connection puzzles, instead just being the point where you collect the items gathered from the branching paths to open the way onward. Scale is definitely done well in The Pedestrian, many puzzle rooms only having one or two platforming mechanics at play such as trying to work around lasers or move a box around to reach a higher place. The movement of the stick figure is the mode of completing a puzzle while most of the work will come from arranging signs and making the right connections, and some of the last few in the game get really creative in how the relationship with real space signs connections impact the way the puzzle can be solved. The simplicity of the pictogram person’s role in the puzzle solving does prevent the game from ever getting too in-depth that it becomes daunting, but some of the new sign connection gimmicks aren’t as intuitive as they should be at first. The can lead to the rare roadblock as you have to uncover the functionality of a sudden new mechanic in a game that avoids using words save for the loose narrative shared by achievement pop-ups and some rare bits of text on screens or written down.
The Pedestrian does feel like a rather small package in the end unfortunately, some of its gimmicks not having the elbow room to really reach their potential and the sign rooms with simpler solutions cropping up perhaps a bit more than necessary. There are little secrets to find and sometimes it’s nice to stop and enjoy the scenery behind you, the detail in the city environment often top notch when it’s trying to be pretty despite there sometimes being rather bland deviations into long plain indoor areas. Seeing the city rooftops at night, heading to a university, or crossing the bustling street definitely make up for the dark warehouses and dingy sewers though. While the placement of signs certainly breaks away from the way they’d be laid out in real life so they can be conducive to interesting puzzle designs, there are some nice moments where your person finds itself in a new form of signage or even inside computer consoles so it can do things like activate a train or interact with a hacking device. Creativity is definitely The Pedestrian’s strong point, but it feels like it could have pursued some of its ideas in a deeper manner.
THE VERDICT: The Pedestrian may catch your eye with its sign-crossing concept and detailed urban backdrops, but this puzzle platformer really makes its mark with its creative room connecting puzzles. Arranging the signs so that the areas inside them connect properly can become surprisingly complex thanks to flexible gimmicks that complement simple platforming, the puzzle-solving have a good degree of depth without getting overwhelming. The scope of individual sign puzzles is well suited for challenging and creative designs that won’t aggravate players even when it takes some time to figure them out. The Pedestrian could have benefited from more time to explore its mechanics, but it’s still an imaginative and stylish game despite dawdling during its simpler moments.
And so, I give The Pedestrian for PC…
A GOOD rating. The Pedestrian has plenty of moments where a puzzle clicks and you feel that satisfaction of putting the pieces together in the right orientation, and the sign moving mechanic is definitely a distinct and stylish way of doing so. The worlds within the signs are just as plain looking as the person running through them, but juxtapose them with often lovely looking urban settings and you’ll be just as eager to see new backgrounds as you are to see new puzzle mechanics. A bit of time in uglier locales or messing around with plain platforming don’t really hurt the whole of The Pedestrian, but since the journey is likely to clock in at four hours, it could have used a few more moments where the complexities of the puzzle designs really get to stretch their legs. When you finally finish a puzzle hub or overcome one of the more cerebral challenges in the game it is definitely thrilling, so the question of bettering the game is more about the number of those moments rather than the quality of them. A few of the new mechanics could have probably used simple symbols to introduce the concept to make introducing them more fluid, but the ideas for exploring the sign arrangement puzzles are definitely solid and can go in interesting directions, ensuring something that sounds at first like a platformer dependent on a nifty premise is instead a solid, thought-provoking puzzler.
The Pedestrian took over six years to develop, and while my wait for it wasn’t quite that long, I was very happy with what I saw in the finished product. It’s the kind of puzzler that leaves you hungry for more because you see so much of the potential in its design and know the mechanics and concepts at play could continue to be elaborated upon to excellent effect. The Pedestrian definitely has some fun ideas at play and the city backdrops for these mind-bending puzzles look wonderful, so it’s actually high praise that I want to see its ideas developed in even more creative ways. The long development time for this title makes prospects of a sequel unlikely, but The Pedestrian is still an enjoyable puzzle platformer whose creative ideas are easy to appreciate.