Reviews from

in the past


All puzzle games exist in the shadow of giants. Games like Portal, the Witness and Myst tower in the memories of gamers. These are experiences that subverted expectations of what a puzzle game could be, what it should be. Portal showed us that a game could deliver an engaging narrative whilst pushing a unique mechanic to its very limits. Myst proved that puzzle games could be pretty and compelling as well as teeth grindingly difficult. And the Witness proved that gamers will pay for any old shit if it's pretentious enough.

So oftentimes, a new puzzle game will try to ape one of these giants. Portal has perhaps the highest number of imitators, with QUBE, Quantum Conunudrum, Turing Test and more, and Myst has had its fair share of successors too. But the Pedestrian has its sights on the Witness, but not just to blandly imitate, rather, it intends to evolve the concept. How can you better blend the 2D and 3D than Jonathan Blow did? Seemingly, the Pedestrian comes to the conclusion it's better not to.

Almost all of the gameplay takes place in the second dimension: a fairly rudimentary puzzle platformer that takes place on street signs, blueprints and all sorts of other flat planes that you would expect to see a stick figure on. The 3D rendering is reduced to background work, enhancing the sense of a journey being undertaken by the player character as you travel from a factory through sewers and backalleys to eventually neon lit rooftops. It's quite pretty and while it doesn't add much to the gameplay, I find it hard to argue its pressence isn't an immense benefit to the game.

Now if you've played a few puzzle games before, you can probably guess the twist already. Why design and create all these 3D assets just to have them serve as digital wallpaper? The twist is so obvious and almost inevitable that I think I'd respect the Pedestrian more if it hadn't gone for it. Rather than be happy with its position as an exceptionally pretty and well crafted evolution of a flash game, instead it reaches for the lofty pedestal of the Witness. In its final moments it delivers its thesis, a proof of concept that goes nowhere and is so poorly explained that it kills all momentum. As well as breaking its own gameplay loop, the final puzzle suddenly crowbars in a trite, wordless narrative that hadn't even been slightly hinted at before then and completely undermines the rest of the game. It's like if the final boss of Dark Souls had been a DDR level and tells you that it's all been a dream.

This is to be expected though. Aspiring to be like the Witness is a fool's errand. I maintain to this day that the Witness is a meta-narrative, about the desire to see hidden meanings in that which is intentionally hollow, about a player's need for something so hard to have "meant something", and how easy it is to fool people with insincere, faux-emotional imagery. Trying to be the Witness is like trying to do an impression of an impressionist, it ultimately takes away more than it could ever have added.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh and what is, at the end of the day, a mostly cute and fun little puzzle game. I think I'm disappointed that the Pedestrian wasn't brave enough to stand by what it is. That it could have delivered a little wordless narrative about a stick figure on a journey and been happy with that narrative, but instead reaches for loftier heights at the cost of its own achievements. It's still worth playing if you love puzzle games, it's not the most inventive or challenging game, but it's generally quite cute and well paced. The Pedestrian could have been more if it had been brave enough to just be less.