When we move around cities we are navigating several varieties of space simultaneously: on the one hand, the tangible contours of buildings and roads, and on the other, the abstract routes, dynamics and barriers imposed by the city's maps and signs. The tension between these kinds of space can be sinister: maps and signs, after all, exist in part to deny you full access to the city's geography, to enforce laws and property rights. They keep secrets from you. But they can also be a source of delight, an invitation to read your surroundings as several realities jostling against one another, never quite rubbing along harmoniously. After 10 years of living in London, I still get a quiet thrill from walking between Underground stations, re-ravelling connections I understand only as coloured lines on a map.
Skookum Arts' The Pedestrian leans into this delight. It literalises the idea that signs fabricate their own kinds of space within/atop urban geography by turning those signs into rearrangeable chunks of platform level, completion of which transports you deeper into a sleepy 3D metropolis. You play a 2D human doodle familiar from a billion toilet doors, drawn to life on a whiteboard. Proceeding to the right, you find yourself sliding between surfaces in a cluttered office, the camera tracking you gracefully as though following a butterfly, a blissful jazz score tickling your eardrums.
Doors and ladders in each sign allow movement to another, but these entrances and exits aren't all connected to begin with. You'll need to link them by hitting a button to enter plan view, moving signs around with the cursor (providing they aren't locked inside a frame) and dragging lines between them, as long as they're not obscured by another sign. You can enter plan view at any point to fiddle some more, but the catch is that once you've moved between signs, that connection can't be broken without resetting the puzzle. You need to join things up in the correct order before making your move.
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