Mirror's Edge is a story about the power of your body. The game, influenced by the parkour phenomenon so popular back in 2008, places you in the role of Faith, an illicit messenger at the fringes of a dystopian world. Digital communication is monitored, so "runners" deliver sensitive messages, running, jumping, and climbing through the city.
This radical, wonderful game never got the audience it deserved, but remains a cult classic. Even now, playing it is jarring and exhilarating. Every element of the game is designed to make you feel, at a visceral level, the action in a way no other game ever has. You don't play Faith so much as become her. It always makes my heart race and my arms tingle with adrenaline.
On Tuesday, Mirror's Edge gets the sequel fans have long demanded. Mirror's Edge: Catalyst ditches the level-based design of the original and sets Faith's origin story in a vast, open world, the sterile City of Glass. For the sequel to work, though, the developers must find a way of expanding upon the gut-level experience of playing the original while retaining the rich sensory environment that made it so immersive.
Doing that means remembering, and understanding, precisely what made Mirror's Edge so special.
Mirror's Edge looked like a crazy gamble when DICE---known almost exclusively for its Battlefield military shooters---released it in 2008. Everything about it was counterintuitive, starting with the fact it encouraged players to run from a fight whenever possible. What's more, the central character is a woman of color (although DICE doesn't address this directly, Faith appears to be Asian) who is not a sex object, but a defiant, powerful hero.
Riskier still was the precision required to execute almost every move Faith makes. Developers tended to avoid this, arguing that players can't navigate jumps and complex maneuvers without clear visual reference points like your feet or the rungs of a ladder. DICE accomplished this with clever details: a viewpoint that jostles and blurs as you run, seeing your hands and feet pumping away in your peripheral vision, the sound of your feet hitting pavement. Mirror's Edge makes Faith's body your body.
"Before Mirror's Edge, you didn't really feel like your character in first-person games had a body," said Chris Baker, an editor at Gamasutra and former editor at WIRED, where he reviewed Mirror's Edge. "Jumping felt disembodied. Your in-game hands weren't grabbing handholds and steadying you as you did a wall run. You didn't see your legs pumping when you ran."
Adding those details tapped the part of the brain that says, "If it looks like I'm falling, I must be falling." And that is why when Faith jumps across the chasm between two skyscrapers, I find myself holding my breath until I nail the landing.
The idea that a character---a player---would regularly jump from one building to another, climb aboard a moving train, or or crawl through an absurd number of ducts offers yet another example of what made Mirror's Edge so revolutionary. "Most adventure or narrative games, you have to traverse 3-D space," said Ian Bogost, game designer and author at Georgia Tech. "In Mirror's Edge, though, the environment becomes the gameplay. It made the traversal of physical space intrinsic to the gameplay in a way that most games hadn't attempted."
Even now, Mirror's Edge is an outlier. Although many games celebrate the joy of unfettered movement and unusual locomotion, it is too often automated, tidy, and unlikely to frustrate or surprise. Dying Light embraced first-person free running with some success, but uses it in a different way and for a different reason: You run from zombies. Dying Light made running all about survival, Mirror's Edge made it all about style and precision.
"It remains a kind of curiosity," Bogost says. "The physical environment is part of the gameplay, something you have to move through laboriously. You look at other games that have some relationship to the precedent it set, like Uncharted or [2013's] Tomb Raider, and they don't. 'Oh, look at this natural environment, with these conventionally placed handholds!' In Uncharted, you can almost do it blind."
Mirror's Edge frames motion differently. You see it in how the developers used color. The game highlights vital points of interactivity---useful pipes and platforms and ledges---in a blood-red shade of crimson. It's a striking contrast with the rest of the palette, overbearing white and sickly pastels meant to emphasize the artificiality and sterility of the dystopian world.
The game calls these points Runner's Vision, and they offer paths through the city. They're also a metaphor. Faith moves through the city like flowing blood. She becomes a part of the city, and you with her. Lines between player and game blur in a sort of deconstruction; the body becomes a controller becomes a body again.
All of the marketing for Mirror's Edge: Catalyst emphasizes that network of relationships in an encouraging way. It focuses on building up the City of Glass, placing Faith within a more vibrant world. It promises, implicitly, that DICE hasn't changed the things players loved most about the original.
It would be easy to lose the kinetic immediacy, though. Much of that power grew from the developer's willingness to leave rough edges. The illusion of embodiment works so well because it can be disorienting and difficult, to the point of nauseating the player. Athleticism is challenging, and bodies are imperfect. The worst thing DICE could do to Faith is make her movements easier, more precise. The original was difficult, and almost abusively repetitive. And that was good.
"What it did was it forced you to look very closely at the physical environment," Bogost says. "You'd try a response and you'd fail, and then you'd look again. It's almost a game about seeing and re-seeing again this physical world. Which is, y'know, a lot of what freerunning and parkour are about in the real world."
That core---about seeing and deeply connecting with a physical space---is essential.
"It has to be a freerunning game, for real, not the way that Assassin's Creed feels like it sort of is," Bogost said. "It has to be about this performative, experimental exploitation of physical environments, and the sense that you can get better at that and learn to see and work with those environments with greater and greater adeptness."
As for the rest of it, the plot, the characters, the setting and anything that doesn't contribute to that fundamental core physicality, Bogost is clear. "I don't think it matters," he says.
He's right. It doesn't.
