WALK THIS WAY

Stick it to the man in public sign puzzler THE PEDESTRIAN.

- Phil Iwaniuk

In those moments when your mind drifts away from whatever mundane reality you’ve put in front of it, do you ever imagine the stickmen in road signs coming to life, and having adventures? No, me either. But it’s to everyone’s benefit that somebody at Skookum has, because it provides a fine foundation for the studio’s debut.

It might just have easily been adapted into a Pixar short: given sentience and agency over the other objects within the signs it occupies, a stick person breaks free from the confines of their painted prison and hops from sign to sign, from subway to street, from mild peril to slightly more pressing peril.

That might not sound a deep enough well of creativity to birth an entire game, but consider this: firstly, the puzzles build on each other in complexity in remarkably well-judged increments and are interwoven between non-taxing platforming sequences. Secondly: it is quite short.

What’s most striking about The Pedestrian isn’t the craftsmanship of the puzzles themselves, but where they exist within the game world. You’re always looking at a 3D environment, technically, but focusing on 2D elements on a flat surface – a whiteboard, a computer screen, the odd blueprint, or most often some abstraction of a public safety or road sign.