SOUNDTRACK · 2026-06-29

Soundtrack: The Pedestrian — a jazzy gait walking a city of signs

Logan Hayes

Reviewed by Doremi · #soundtrack #music #the-pedestrian #jazz #adaptive-music #fmod

Introduction — a light swing step that begins on a chalkboard

A stick-figure pedestrian lives inside the road signs on a street corner. You slide the panels of those signs and draw lines between ladders and doors to build a path. In this game, also covered in our review, the first thing to reach your ear is the sound of a piano setting off at a light swing. The composer is Logan Hayes. The timbre blends jazz and orchestra with a touch of Eastern-European melancholy, at a comfortable brisk tempo of roughly 100-ish — neither heavy nor too light, the very gait of moving through a city one step at a time.

As Hayes and the studio Skookum Arts have described, his groundwork was the idiom of film composers like Danny Elfman and Jerry Goldsmith. So instead of square-wave chiptune, orchestral winds and piano that suggest live instruments take the lead, with jazz harmony and the open space of ambient slipped in between. Take a sip of black coffee while you listen and you hear that this music is not 'background for solving puzzles' but the body heat of the city itself.

A puzzle-native trait — even when the player stops, the music doesn't

The moment a puzzle game's music is most tested is when the player stops moving and sinks into a long deliberation. While you stare at the signs, working out which panel to move where, if the music loops the same four bars in blunt cuts your ear turns against it fast. What The Pedestrian does well is to build this part fully in FMOD — the implementation tool for adaptive music. Per Skookum's dev notes, Logan Hayes stayed at the studio for about a week, working to mesh the music with the game's systems. A particular hurdle was making the music survive across save and load without breaking.

In other words, this music was designed from the start not as a 'finished product to be played back' but as a set of parts whose layers fade in and out by situation. During the time you sit frozen before a puzzle, the piece does not force a swell, yet it does not fully stop either. It keeps shifting its expression a little at a time, waiting beside you until you solve it. It is also characteristic that there are almost no sharp cues to scold a retry or a failure — make a mistake and the music does not blame you. In that single respect of refusing to rush your thinking speed, this is, I believe, sound design unique to puzzle games.

A hidden link to the experience — mixing the city's genres

The stage is a city built of signs, neon and billboards. So the music, too, refuses to stay in one genre. It is telling that Hayes himself describes this soundtrack as 'a weird mix of jazz, ambient and Eastern-European music tied together with a piano and orchestral backbone.' Just as a jumble of signs makes one street, a jumble of genres makes one piece of music — the mechanic (rearranging panels to run them into a single road) and the way the music is made (running different materials into a single flow) are bound by the same verb.

Development ran for years, and Hayes and the developer grew the sound through weekly check-ins. After walking the city and the sound together for so long, the music wears a naturalness, as if it had 'always flowed through that town.' Each time the player moves a sign to open a road, another prepared layer quietly joins. The sense of designing a city and the sense of mixing music overlap before you notice. This is a quiet collaboration happening off-screen.

Analogy with the puzzle — just short of the solution, the chord is left hanging

I always have the habit of measuring music in BPM, but in The Pedestrian what I want to measure is not tempo so much as the 'slowness of resolution.' Jazz deliberately leaves an unstable chord hanging for a long time, and makes pleasure out of the moment it finally descends to a settled one. A puzzle, too, stretches the tension of nearly-but-not-quite reaching the answer, and resolves the instant the last move clicks into place. So this music's suspended chords have exactly the same shape as the player's state of mind when stuck 'one step short.'

The light swing while you walk is the rhythm of moving forward; while you stand still and think it thins out, leaving only sustained tones and drifting harmony. Solve it, the door opens, and the held chord finally lands. Because the music traces the three beats of 'go, stop, solve,' the player can confirm the state of their own thinking by ear as well. The hanging just short of the solution is something the music sounds on your behalf — and that is this work's quietest kindness.

Tracks to listen to

Start with the first step out into the city. Here is 'Lost in the City,' uploaded officially by composer Logan Hayes — a piece whose light swing and piano carry the body heat of the city of signs straight to you.

As a companion for when you stand still and sink into long thought, there is Out To Sea ↗, beautiful with its drifting sustained tones. And for the late-game sense of arrival, sounded together with a jazz resolution, Last Stop ↗. Both are official audio under the name Logan Hayes.

Closing — what I'd steal if I were writing it

If I were writing music, what I'd steal from this work is the design philosophy of 'not stopping even when you stop.' Rather than dropping in one finished loop, write in layers from the start and keep it in a form you can add to and subtract from by situation. Fill the long-deliberation time when the player is frozen not with silence or with noise, but with a thinly swaying, continuous chord — even without a tool like FMOD, you can reproduce half of that philosophy just by preparing a 'sustain layer with the lead removed' as a separate take.

The other is the attitude of not fearing to mix genres. Jazz, ambient and Eastern-European melody can stay a jumble and still become one garment, so long as a single backbone of piano and orchestra runs through them. The next time you rearrange signage panels to open a road, or when the materials in your own project get scattered, remember this city's gait. Decide on one backbone, and the mixture becomes a street. And if you're walking a city of signs anyway, listening alongside the sound of a work like FEZ should make the relationship between city and music look different again.