The Pedestrian strolls out
Go for a stroll
The opening of puzzle-platformer The Pedestrian plays like a Disney short. It's got that same sense of polished wonder, in a world like ours but the rules are a bit different. You start as a smudge on a whiteboard, then venture rightwards into a world of rearrangeable street signs. You're the man from the toilet sign. The bloke struggling with the umbrella. You're Helvetica man (or woman), puzzling your way through the big city by connecting doors, collecting keys, and twiddling with power switches.
The Pedestrian popped out last night, and it oozes promise.
It's definitely one of those 'if only I'd thought of that' ideas. Every puzzle starts with you stepping back and figuring out how to stitch the level together, though the transitions between areas are so smooth I'm loath to call them levels. You flit between paper, roadsigns and digital screens, not knowing where you'll pop up next.
The doors into each panel have little semicircular nodes next to them, which can be connected to their corresponding halves. Entering connectey mode punts your character back to the beginning of that section, though, so you need to plot your route in advance. I can't comment on whether the puzzles will hold up later on, but the presentation is so good I reckon they'll be worth meandering through regardless.
It's all so crisp and well thought out. Like how opening the menu pans to a CRT monitor lurking somewhere near the bottom of the screen, or how the world rumbles by, out of focus, in the background. Developers Skookum Arts have made something very far from pedestrian. Hur hur.
You can grab the game with a 10% launch discount on Steam or GOG for £14/$18/€15.