All it really takes to hook me into a game is a beautiful and unique art-style, and The Pedestrian certainly has that in spades. With realistic environments holding a multitude of signs for you to traverse, I can quite honestly say that I’ve never seen anything like it before.

But thankfully, there’s far more to the game than just its pretty looks – and that’s what made it one of the best puzzle platforming games I’ve played in quite some time.

Many thanks to Skookum Arts for the review code.

I AM THE PEDESTRIAN. I RUN AND I RUN.
After choosing your stick figure of choice, which seems oddly reminiscent of the lady and gent you see on bathroom door signs, your journey as the titular pedestrian begins. There’s very little story to guide yourself along: you’re just a stick character running and jumping through street signs up until the neat little resolution at the end, which helps to put a bow on the overall experience. And honestly, the game really doesn’t need much more than that.

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You see, what starts out as being a rather straightforward platformer broken up into small sign-sized chunks, soon turns into something far more than that. Whilst your skinny protagonist doesn’t evolve their move-set at all during the adventure, it’s the world around them that changes – often quite literally.

Even though the signs themselves don’t contain anything you haven’t seen before in a platformer, with their assortment of moveable blocks, trampolines, switches, and keys, the world outside is where you puzzling skills will be tested. With the press of the X button, you’ll zoom out from the action and gain the ability to manipulate the position of the signs – including where each door or ladder leads to. It’s a remarkably simple concept, but one that adds far more depth than you may expect, since severing a link between signs will cause all the objects within them to reset – thus forcing you to think carefully about how you line them up. I personally found that working backwards from the result I wanted to achieve worked the best, but I’m sure veteran puzzle-heads will have a more efficient method.

As the levels progress, the outside world becomes an even stronger influence on how you go about your platforming. Sometimes the signs may be pinned down, or there may be other real-world objects blocking your path. Solving puzzles within the sign may be able to remove such blockades, by activating electrical charges or some such, but on other occasions you may simply have to work around these limitations. It’s really well done and there’s enough variety to keep you engaged, even if it does start to run out of steam a little bit towards the end of the four or five hour runtime.

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But the great thing is that the game knows what it needs to do, and pulls it off well. Like the best puzzle games, it takes a remarkably simple idea and turns it into something far more. It’s a perfect blend of gameplay and visuals that both complement and enhance each other. This is helped by how sharp it looks on the Switch, even in hand-held mode – and given that the game also offers touchscreen support, this means that the latter may also be the ideal way to play.

VERDICT
I had worried that The Pedestrian would be all about the visual style and not have much to offer in terms of gameplay, but I was pleasantly surprised by how the game incorporates the unique aesthetic into its mechanics. This game is an absolute gem and will be sure to delight any fans of the genre.