Partly this is due to the lucid visual design: the key props are neatly distinguished, and there are post-it notes stuck to walls so that you know what kind of puzzle you're dealing with.
There are a few puzzles that may require trial and error, but The Pedestrian (which shouldn't last you longer than an evening) is far more intuitive than it is complex. You'll take frequent trips in metro trains, tapping buttons inside dashboard displays to travel to new locations as afternoon wears on into nightfall.
Often, you'll have to wire together electrical sockets within signs, so that a current can flow through to activate something in 3D space, like a hydraulic bolt that's stopping you moving another sign. Most intriguing are the puzzles that blur the gap between the clean, mechanical world of the signs and their surroundings. Sometimes you're able to invade a screen (the game's pause menus are pleasingly tucked into CRTVs that dot pavements and shelves, as though left out for the recyclers). You'll find vials of yellow paint that allow you to lock a sign so that it doesn't reset - useful when you need a switch to stay switched when you re-link signs, for example. Later puzzles meddle with the core principles a bit. There are more damning conclusions to draw, perhaps, about the act of stripping a city of citizens in order to play games with signs, but I didn't find the emptiness eerie: it made me feel like I'd wandered into town during a siesta. It helps that there are so few actual people around - you'll spy vehicles, but I only recall encountering one 3D human being. Some signs are dangerous - there are spinning sawblades, and laser beams you'll need to either block or deactivate - but this is an extremely laidback game, with no lives, timers or combat elements and thus, infinite time to savour the light, shadow and picturesque detritus of the urban backdrop. Puzzles are often grouped around hubs, where you venture into peripheral signs to gather objects you need to progress in the middle. You'll search for door keys, throw switches to raise elevators, and haul checkbox crates around so you can jump to ledges. Within this conceit, there are some elementary but nicely executed platforming gambits to reckon with. You need to join things up in the correct order before making your move. You can enter plan view at any point to fiddle some more, but the catch is that once you've moved between signs, that connection can't be broken without resetting the puzzle. You'll need to link them by hitting a button to enter plan view, moving signs around with the cursor (providing they aren't locked inside a frame) and dragging lines between them, as long as they're not obscured by another sign. Proceeding to the right, you find yourself sliding between surfaces in a cluttered office, the camera tracking you gracefully as though following a butterfly, a blissful jazz score tickling your eardrums.ĭoors and ladders in each sign allow movement to another, but these entrances and exits aren't all connected to begin with. You play a 2D human doodle familiar from a billion toilet doors, drawn to life on a whiteboard. It literalises the idea that signs fabricate their own kinds of space within/atop urban geography by turning those signs into rearrangeable chunks of platform level, completion of which transports you deeper into a sleepy 3D metropolis. Skookum Arts' The Pedestrian leans into this delight. After 10 years of living in London, I still get a quiet thrill from walking between Underground stations, re-ravelling connections I understand only as coloured lines on a map. But they can also be a source of delight, an invitation to read your surroundings as several realities jostling against one another, never quite rubbing along harmoniously.
The tension between these kinds of space can be sinister: maps and signs, after all, exist in part to deny you full access to the city's geography, to enforce laws and property rights. When we move around cities we are navigating several varieties of space simultaneously: on the one hand, the tangible contours of buildings and roads, and on the other, the abstract routes, dynamics and barriers imposed by the city's maps and signs. A serene, quietly uplifting afternoon's entertainment for urban explorers and platform fans alike.