GameLog Page

Please sign in or sign up!

...blogs for gamers

Find a GameLog

... by game	... by platform

[ advanced search ]

HOME	GAMES	LOGS	MEMBERS			ABOUT	HELP

dkirschner's The Pedestrian (PC)

[January 19, 2022 08:46:02 AM]

The Pedestrian has a unique style. You are a stick figure in 2d puzzles, the faces of which are on the surfaces of other objects (road signs, monitors, architectural blueprints, etc.). As you solve puzzles, you sort of move throughout 3d areas (a university campus, subway, apartment building, etc.). There is a huge twist at the end that opens up far more complex puzzles that I am sure will be featured in any potential Pedestrian 2.

The puzzles themselves are very clever and become very challenging. I definitely experienced my share of frustration, but when I finished a puzzle, I usually didn't feel like a genius. They are typically set up like this: Your stick person begins on one piece of a puzzle. That piece has doors on the top, bottom, left, and/or right. There are other pieces too. You have to connect the pieces of the puzzles together by drawing lines between doors, through which you move your stick person. You'll have to find and move boxes (to gain height), keys (to open doors), wires (to power elevators, lasers, and other things), and various batteries. Once you connect puzzle pieces, you can't change the lines between doors or else the whole puzzle resets. And the lines are 1:1. Each door can only be connected to one other door.

So, this means that there is a lot of trial and error, especially later in the game. For at least the first half of the game, the possible combinations of doors are few enough that I could play the whole puzzle out in my head, then do it and exit. Later, it became too complex for that, and I would inch toward a solution, moving my stick figure and making connections a little bit at a time, before either solving it or realizing there was an error and resetting it.

This was fine (it's a puzzle game, after all), but there was one mechanic that I hated so, so, so, so, so much. Occasionally, puzzles will have these pieces with windows. These allow you to layer puzzle pieces and like...toggle the foreground to fall through a window and into a different puzzle piece. This is usually either done to get somewhere with no doors or to avoid a trap. I had such a hard time figuring out how exactly these windows worked. One puzzle in particular had like 5 windows, and I was trying to layer them like 3 windows deep, switching in and out of puzzle mode (where you manipulate the connections and pieces) and platforming mode (where you control the stick person) trying to fall just right to avoid lasers.

That was the first thing I looked up on YouTube. I wound up looking up several solutions on YouTube because I was getting frustrated with the windows, and whenever I started a puzzle that had a lot of pieces (especially if any had windows), I'd tense up, turn off the game, sit there, think, "No, I can do it," load it back, try and fail a lot, get frustrated, turn it off again, turn it back on, stare at the screen, and finally go to YouTube. Props to the people who made videos about this.

And that's my experience with The Pedestrian. Overall novel puzzle platformer with puzzles that increase substantially in difficulty, a cool style, and an interesting narrative premise.