In those moments when your mind wanders away from the mundane reality before you, have you ever imagined a stick figure drawn on a road sign coming to life and having an adventure? No, me neither. But what someone at Skookum Arts has imagined is beneficial to everyone. Because it provides a great foundation for the studio's platform-puzzler debut film.

The film could have easily been adapted as a Pixar short. Given sentience and the ability to manipulate other objects in a billboard, a stick figure escapes his painted prison and jumps from billboard to billboard, from subway to street, from mild to slightly imminent danger.

This may not sound like a well of creativity deep enough to generate an entire game, but consider: first, the puzzles are stacked on top of each other in surprisingly well-judged increments of complexity, interwoven between unloaded platforming sequences. Second, they are fairly short.

What is most impressive about The Pedestrian is not the craftsmanship of the puzzles themselves, but where they reside in the game world. Technically, the focus is always on the 3D environment, but on 2D elements drawn on flat surfaces: whiteboards, computer screens, and, in unusual places, blueprints, often abstracts of public safety and road signs, etc.

Skookum is clever in the way he presents this unique puzzle. As one's attention is drawn to one element, clues are flicked to sticky notes elsewhere on the screen. As the task at hand becomes increasingly complex, the intrepid stickperson (you can choose a male or female avatar) affects not only the placement of the signs, but also the 3D world around them.

Example: connecting an electrical node symbol on one sign to another will cause the elevator inside that sign to start moving. As the elevator begins its descent, a miniaturized version within the sign also activates, providing a path out of the current sign and down to the next sign. Oh, and that next sign, in the 3D world, is on the floor below, just beyond the elevator.

If it sounds confusing, that's because the words are hard to understand, and as a matter of fact, I'm still devoting 10% of my brain power to what I missed in Pedestrian: the texture of the 2D planes and the wider world, not just as visual interest, but because if the entire game were a featureless wall If the entire game had existed as a procession of signs along a featureless wall, it would not have been as enjoyable. In a very real sense, these changes in the landscape make me feel like I am on an adventure. I'm not (at all) ashamed to say that I got a bit of a kick out of it when my modest little anthropomorphic symbol moved an entire subway train and I got off at the next stop. Lucky guy.

In terms of narrative, it certainly exists in this game, but in the loosest possible sense. You have to actively look for it, think through the details, and notice the phrasing of the Steam achievements and the copy on the store page. In other words, it's not Monkey Island. The absence of dialogue and characters allows the brain to focus on the task at hand without being distracted by extraneous explanations. That said, I myself wanted a little more revelation. It's becoming a staple of the genre, and the techniques that Valve, Jonathan Blow, and Playdead excel at to draw players out have set the standard for titles that will live or die by the puzzle in 2020.

The wide world of "Pedestrian" gives you a sense of forward momentum and a bit of meaning to your actions, while the complexity of the mechanics deepens and the visual language you need to assimilate expands. It begins by going through doorways and climbing ladders to jump from sign to sign, and by rearranging some signs and connecting doorways and ladders, an important path through all the signs is revealed.

Then, as soon as it is absorbed into the gray matter, it shifts again. Drag the box to create a rat pathway. Use switches and levers to manipulate bounce pads, pistons, elevators, and switchable platforms; in less than an hour, signs that once looked like material for a cute Pixar short now look like circuit board diagrams in a nightmare. I haven't done a single homework assignment in 19 years It's like a nightmare where you haven't done any homework in 19 years and you have a final exam in an hour. Multidisciplinary, multitasking tests make me feel like all the knowledge and attention needed to solve them is about to spill out of my brain.

But it doesn't have to spill over. The elevation from friendly ranks to truly difficult obstacles is handled with the tempo and intuition of a seasoned studio. I have to admit, I'm a pretty dumb guy. But I've never felt so hopelessly stuck as I did with "alt-tab to find YouTube walkthroughs."

This game has a clear idea of what it wants to accomplish, and it does it in an orderly fashion. Perhaps it is unfair to scold it for not doing more than that; perhaps we have just been spoiled by works like "Braid" and "Inside," which leave their true impact through reveals and U-turns. Spoiled or not, I was left cold by the lack of narrative and stylistic flair, but fortunately the gradient of difficulty spikes is so skillfully judged and the direction so inherently endearing that "The Pedestrian" is impossible not to enjoy, even for a short time.