Available since January 4, 2022 in the Xbox Game Pass catalog, The Pedestrian invites you to ask yourself to think. A little moment of calm before the big outings that are coming.
Players, you have no doubt taken a quick look at the calendar of upcoming releases, not without being afraid of all these dates that you have to check off. A new Pokémon may finally be innovative, Dying Light 2 Stay Human and its 500 hours, Horizon Forbidden West, Elden Ring… From the end of January to March, we will clearly not be bored. If you need a moment of calm before this coming storm, pay attention to The Pedestrian, available since January 4, 2022 in the Xbox Game Pass (it was released a while ago on PC and PS4).
Developed by Skookum Arts, The Pedestrian is part of this caste of video games born on Kickstarter years ago (the project was launched in January 2017). He raised exactly $30,318 (just over €26,000), from just over 14,000 contributors, when he only needed $21,000 (just over €18,000). €). The promise ? Allow us to embody a little guy that we are used to seeing on road signs, and to make him progress in necessarily flat settings. An innovative concept, centered on intelligence.
The Pedestrian is cute and heady
The little character, who can be a woman or a man (we choose at the start of the game), has no superpowers and is quite limited in his movements. For him, crossing panels filled with traps is far from easy. That’s why he needs you, and your ability to think, to continue to chart his course towards an unknown future (within urban environments). For Skookum Arts, the limitations of the hero are transformed into an opportunity to imagine a gameplay articulated around increasingly ingenious puzzles.
In The Pedestrian, the goal is therefore to act on the different panels within which the man can move forward, by finding the single arrangement that constitutes the solution. The first levels are quite simple: there we connect two ladders together, here we connect two doors to each other. Then things get more and more difficult, Skookum Arts teeming with ideas to increase the difficulty and allow the game to renew itself sufficiently until the end credits. For example, some puzzles will ask you to connect electrical terminals to trigger mechanisms. The Pedestrian constantly seeks to test everyone’s intelligence. And some passages may require several long minutes of intense reflection, nourished by more or less fruitful experiments.
The success of The Pedestrian, in addition to its ability to never fall into repetition, also lies in its desire to never frustrate. It respects a certain balance to never offer convoluted puzzles, which always constitutes a real risk for a puzzle game. Skookum Arts manages to imagine quite robust levels to avoid routine and too obvious solutions. And this positive observation is true from beginning to end, even if the last portion is a little too cryptic and expedited.
Aesthetically, The Pedestrian privileges the realistic approach, which gives birth to credible decorations. Placed end to end, they form the base of a realistic city, which brings together a warehouse, a metro, a city center, a university or even skyscrapers. There is a relaxing side that emerges from this atypical production, especially since the discreet soundtrack distills themes jazzy very comforting. Nothing will jostle you in The Pedestrian, which is a small parenthesis likely to do a world of good before embarking on a game like, at random, Elden Ring.