It is human nature to wonder what seemingly mundane and inanimate things are doing when we are not looking. Such thinking has spawned myths like fairies in people's gardens, debtors, and the Toy Story saga, and now we come to street signs. What do these little human figures do when no one is there? If Yaya is to be believed, the answer is 2D platforming, solving numerous puzzles, and taking control of electrical devices to escape their limits.
When taking control of a human figure (with or without a suit) your adventure in the game is mostly limited to a variety of street signs, blueprints, and other 2D surfaces. Blurred in the dark, the background has beautiful 3D views of the world they are in. You can run, jump and climb with light platform maneuvers to reach new areas, but the basis for The Pedestrian's amazement is zoom out and rearrange the positions of 2D landmarks and flat surfaces, creating gates and new paths. Once you regain control of the person symbol, you can use these new doors to access other signs to complete puzzles and progress. Rearranging the playing field adds a layer of complexity that, for the majority of the experience, will make you think of obstacles in two different ways.
There is a satisfaction in ordering the panels in a level in your own way, allowing you to go back and complete the puzzle. The process is not entirely free, because doors and stairs in one panel are only connected to the other when properly aligned, and there are often barriers that can prevent doing anything specific. However, there is an absolutely divine feel to the control it gives you. Sometimes my solutions felt so chaotic that I wondered if they were the intended direction; sometimes the riddles were designed to lead me to certain conclusions. But overall, there's a nice feeling that you're figuring things out on your own, in your own way.
The added challenge is that you can't make most changes to the layout of your 2D platforming world without resetting other things - activated keys are disabled and key items are lost, so you'll need to get into a plan. Sometimes a reset is necessary, especially if you hit a stalemate, but to prevent them from resetting later, you freeze some markers and keep items active for your next try. The concept gets you thinking about puzzles in an almost time travel-like way. Having to manage a puzzle board full of different sections filled with, among other things, keys, keys, and laser beams, and then having to manage time and space to achieve a goal provides surprisingly challenging and satisfying scenarios.
Yaya presents these scenarios in bite-sized chunks. Even when presented with a larger puzzle, it is still divided into smaller sections, making them easier to grasp. However, because of this structure, Yaya can start to feel a little too samey, especially when the reward for completing a puzzle is almost always more puzzles. It works very well as a game to spend half an hour and return later, rather than emptying the four-hour period in an endless barrage of cues.