This review contains spoilers
The Pedestrian is incredibly cool on paper. Its clever idea of shuffling around street signs to solve puzzles is definitely a unique one, and there are some good uses of it and some genuinely good puzzles, but unfortunately there's one problem with the game that severely damages the experience: its consistent inability to give you any idea as to how you're supposed to make use of its mechanics.
The only thing the game lets you know about at all is the basic controls. Every single mechanic here is thrown at you with nothing to show how you're actually supposed to use it. It just drops something new in your lap and says "alright, good luck!" This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the mechanics were something that you could easily understand just by looking at it, but that is often times not the case. Even right at the beginning, there's nothing that lets you know that ladders and doors are only useable if they are close enough to the other door that you have it connected to. That's something I really would have liked to know from jump, instead of figuring it out by accident. Later on, there's a mechanic where you can paint certain panels green by connecting it to a paint dispenser. How, pray tell, was I supposed to figure out that painted panels don't have their contents reset when something is disconnected from them? That is a wildly specific thing for the game to just expect you to intrinsically know. I don't even want an extensive tutorial, all I need is an illustration or something in the corner of the screen so I have any clue as to what the hell I'm supposed to be doing.
The game also has some cases of needlessly obtuse puzzle design at some points. This really comes to a head at the end of the game, where it suddenly becomes a first-person game in-between the platforming segments. This was actually really cool at first, and a pretty nuts twist on the previous portions of the game. Then you get to the puzzles, and the game just expects you to know that pushing a crate into a corner on one of the panels makes a box materialize in the real-ass world, and that you're supposed to place that box on a random part of the floor in order to continue on the panels. It does not at all indicate that pushing the crate will spawn the box, it gives you no idea where it is at all, and it gives you no idea where you're supposed to place it in order to continue. This is just beyond all normal logic or reason, and expecting players to just know that is not particularly good game design. I genuinely do not know how they expected anyone to figure that out without a guide.
It sucks, because these devs are obviously very talented and passionate about their work, but this game is just not intuitive at all. They just expect you to know every one of its mechanics, and when the mechanics are often times not something you can figure out easily by yourself, it really drags the whole experience down. I did not like this game very much. But thankfully, it manages to wrap itself up before it really overstays its welcome.
The only thing the game lets you know about at all is the basic controls. Every single mechanic here is thrown at you with nothing to show how you're actually supposed to use it. It just drops something new in your lap and says "alright, good luck!" This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the mechanics were something that you could easily understand just by looking at it, but that is often times not the case. Even right at the beginning, there's nothing that lets you know that ladders and doors are only useable if they are close enough to the other door that you have it connected to. That's something I really would have liked to know from jump, instead of figuring it out by accident. Later on, there's a mechanic where you can paint certain panels green by connecting it to a paint dispenser. How, pray tell, was I supposed to figure out that painted panels don't have their contents reset when something is disconnected from them? That is a wildly specific thing for the game to just expect you to intrinsically know. I don't even want an extensive tutorial, all I need is an illustration or something in the corner of the screen so I have any clue as to what the hell I'm supposed to be doing.
The game also has some cases of needlessly obtuse puzzle design at some points. This really comes to a head at the end of the game, where it suddenly becomes a first-person game in-between the platforming segments. This was actually really cool at first, and a pretty nuts twist on the previous portions of the game. Then you get to the puzzles, and the game just expects you to know that pushing a crate into a corner on one of the panels makes a box materialize in the real-ass world, and that you're supposed to place that box on a random part of the floor in order to continue on the panels. It does not at all indicate that pushing the crate will spawn the box, it gives you no idea where it is at all, and it gives you no idea where you're supposed to place it in order to continue. This is just beyond all normal logic or reason, and expecting players to just know that is not particularly good game design. I genuinely do not know how they expected anyone to figure that out without a guide.
It sucks, because these devs are obviously very talented and passionate about their work, but this game is just not intuitive at all. They just expect you to know every one of its mechanics, and when the mechanics are often times not something you can figure out easily by yourself, it really drags the whole experience down. I did not like this game very much. But thankfully, it manages to wrap itself up before it really overstays its welcome.