The Pedestrian

I tried the demo first (it's here on GOG for free) and bought the game the next day. The whole concept is visually pleasing, yet deceptively simple. Gets more difficult as you go on but it's somehow never frustrating. I guess the best word to describe it is FUN!

A platformer puzzle that is made of 2D two color levels, with a crosswalk stick figure as the main character. How could one make it beautiful? Here's the recipe. Put the game levels on street signs in a living breathing 3D city carefully designed with lots of details. Let the cars and trains go on the background, let the wind shake the signs gently. Add relaxing jazzy soundtrack. And here it is - a game that is not only puzzling but also aesthetically pleasing. As per the gameplay itself, it is pretty challenging, but it does not reach the point where it becomes annoying. Any level can be solved in a few tries. One amazing trait of this game is that it is almost completely "language neutral". All necessary information is coded in icons and symbols. Also, you won't see any overlay menus. The only menu you will ever see is nicely built into the game world as a picture on the nearest CRT display which the camera shifts into when you press escape. All in all, the game is surely worth every minute spent playing it :) Sadly, there are not much of these minutes - it is not very long.

This game was great! It slowly introduces more and more and more of different mechanics, so there is always something new tricky to master, and (almost) never gets dull. If anything I would say it almost has a bit too many mechanics towards the end, where you might feel that some are better and easier to grasp than others. The 3d-world you experience while moving between signs makes it a fun exploration too - always a joy finishing a puzzle and getting to a new place. Very detailed and nice/relaxing gfx :) I'm often not very good at hard puzzlers, but for this game I really tried all I could, since it was so fun to try and solve it all by yourself, and I only had to look up a solution like 3-4 times for the whole game. So for me it had good difficulty at just the right level. Some levels was a bit to much though, taking looong time and involving several steps, and if you made a mistake in the end you had to restart the puzzle, but it was only at 2-3 of all the many puzzles that I felt that way. Music is a mixed bag - sometimes it's almost annoying, while at other places it's nice/beautiful/relaxing. Game has a cool "twist" towards the end that really changes the gameplay, but maybe it was more cool than actual fun?

This game was incredible, short and sweet! I thought the concept would become stale very fast, but every time things start to get repetitive the game adds a new mechanic (all of them are great and help keeping the gameplay fresh, but that last one is something on another level, I was MINDBLOWN) The only thing that I found strange was that the (pretty great) soundtrack would sometimes disappear, leaving the game almost completely silent. An ambient loop during the puzzles would be nice.

It's really terrific in what it does. The visuals are very nice, the puzzling is clean and generally intuitive, and the puzzles build on each other nicely. Generally it isn't overly difficult, but you may run into a few moments of getting stuck. Once you figure out what was blocking you, you'll probably blame yourself, not the puzzle designer. It's worth buying at full price, but if it's on sale do yourself a favor and pick it up.