Mirror's Edge (PS3, 2008)
The following will not be coherent. It will not be reasonable, it won't make a lot of sense. There's a chance most of it will be content not related to the game at all, or at least nothing you could take from it if you've played it. I assume most of what I'm going to write will be cathartic. I'm effectively going to try and review the game three times, for reasons which probably won't become apparent.
I remember buying this game. I bought it in 2008 after Christmas and I'm pretty certain it's the first case of me ever being ID'd when buying something. It's a 16+, and really as I think about this it's kind of bizarre that this is the case. You get shot at. There's a bit of swearing. That's it. Years later in the same shop I wasn't ID'd when buying GTA V. Years after that I was ID'd when buying GTA San Andreas. Perhaps I'm getting younger in my old age.
I have no idea what my first impressions of this game were. Playing it again, and playing through it in one go as I did on Sunday I can remember feelings evoked by parts of. By images, by the atmosphere in certain places. I have a tendency to get very angry at games that I find frustrating and this one made me bite a controller once. When you don't
really know how to play a game to its fullest potential there are areas which although simple cause untold problems. I can't climb this fence. She's not jumping high enough and I've now been shot for the twentieth time in a game where the enemies seem vastly unsuited to the gameplay. I'm sure being sixteen had nothing to do with this.
Mirror's Edge, if you're unfamiliar, is a game centred around the concept of free-running, or parkour. In a brilliantly designed city of angular whites and colours a shadowy totalitarian regime of some sort runs everything. You, Faith, are one of a group of Runners, the only means of communication open to people who want to live outside this ordered rule. You carry messages by running across and through buildings, living, as Faith puts it herself, on the
Mirror's Edge. The game itself, the story, is centred around a criminal consipracy to kill a prospective mayoral candidate promising change, dragging Faith and her family (of course, her sister's a cop) deeper and deeper into a web of lies and danger.
Now that the sales pitch is over, here's why I like the story. It's simple. There are ten missions in the game and they all follow somewhat sensibly with one another. On reflection the characterisation is quite thin but for the people who're involved for any extended length of time there's enough. The fact too that the City you are in is both secluded and all-encompassing helps make up for any shortcomings in the characters. It itself is one, its facades and advertising (Your 5 a Day in a Can!) being enough on its own for you to want to challenge, to corrupt, to overcome. It's actually interesting to see how the city is created and made to feel like a city when there's effectively no exploration of it. Some years ago I posted a review of a turn-based game called Frozen Synapse Prime and I remember in between the missions of that it showed you an overview of a city of some sort and the locations you were going to fight in. In the chapter select menu of Mirror's Edge it does a similar thing which shows the size of the place you're in. Every level features some landmark in the distance you have to reach which helps flesh out the setting too. It also helps with regards to gameplay, since you now know there's a way across the rooftops to where you're going.
Playing through it again, now, with my eyes there are some oddities. Some months ago I was walking home from the city centre and taking a new route I saw something I hadn't seen before. Hills. Glasgow is based predominately on hills but I had never been able to properly appreciate the outside of the urban area, so when you're seeing this hilariously steep street fall away for several hundred yards and seeing ground miles away which you know is taller than you are, it's quite sobering. The same too can be found in Mirror's Edge's tutorial level. There's a gap between some of the buildings from where you start the Playground Three time trial. In a game where there's this constant railing against something so controlling yet so seemingly connected and transient as a city, a reminder of the outside world isn't to be cast aside. The same too can be found in the last level and the ending credits when you see an overhead view of the city scape at night, seeing just how far it reaches. It's entrancing. I've always had a fondness for the clean design of things in the City too. It's surprising how few of the buildings have windows. But then the bold colour designs of every area, it's something I've never come across. The colour red is a central motif since it fulfills the role of "runner vision," which on the easier difficulties highlights potential paths for you to take when you're running. But then near enough every building and interior has some striking colour design of its own, so things never feel washed out. Of course, the blinding whites and its coloured accents help create the sense of the City being something monolithic and all-encompassing, while the amount of alleys and back ways you have to go through shows how all of these can be undermined. Very clever.
When I played this game first I really identified with this. The sense of rebellion against a seemingly perfect yet unexplained, unknowable foe. Something which seems inescapable and inevitable. My struggle to find a way through this ending with the theme song crooning
I'm still alive over the end credits in an angelic voice. The music in the game is actually very good too, most of the background music is based off of that song Still Alive and it combines with the colours and the designs to create a really distinctive atmosphere. To interject my own experience for a moment, I always found listening to Get Ready by New Order to be a complimentary experience. Not in the way some clowns will tell you to listen to Pink Floyd while watching The Wizard of Oz, there's just certain songs and certain areas which go together. Songs like Turn My Way, Vicious Streak and Primitive Notion are surely terrible, yet they, the album and this game are forever linked in my mind. I won't embarrass myself any further by quoting any of the lyrics but I had to include it. The fact that the cover is a greyscale image of a woman in tattered clothes holding a camcorder in front of her face doesn't have any influence. Neither does the big red bar across the front of the picture, a recurring image in different colours through the rest of the liner notes. Fortunately in game the music stands up for itself, you know, if you're weird and don't like New Order. In the sections where it's unavoidable to be hectic it's more upbeat, in the calm it takes a back seat. I think the music in a game like this could have gone very badly but it isn't the case. I think in mission 7 or 8 there's a piece in the background which sounds a bit strange but the rest all fits perfectly. It strikes the right balance between being complimentary and standing out, and this along with the art design helps create an unforgettable experience.
I realise I'm starting (or have been the whole time) to sound like a thirteen year old with a dictionary trying to write a sales pitch so we'll go seamlessly from all of the surroundings and their effect on the atmosphere to surely the most important one, the gameplay. Mirror's Edge is in first person. And in some people, playing a first person game where the person is running, where you hear breath and see arms and legs flashing in and out of focus in front of you, this game causes illness. Feelings of nausea. I would dearly love to see someone experience this. I don't get it. I really don't and I'm not trying to sound smug or anything, it's just something I can't imagine. Now, I mentioned earlier about this game causing damage to my controllers. I can't really talk about the gameplay 8 years detached so I'll try and keep it simple. Although this game is centred around parkour, the concept of free-running and joining run to jump to run and so on, and while this is undoubtedly the best way to play and enjoy the game, there's lots of fiddly bits. There's lots of bits where cheating is the best option. Most recently I did have to play it a first time again and I recalled my earlier frustrations. For the most part my ability to play games had improved to the extent where I didn't have too many problems though. I'm trying to think of the best way to describe playing this for the first time. You play it... natrually. As if you yourself are doing the running, where there's an uncertainty which isn't helped by the runner vision making things flash red because you know if you jump off one box at speed you'll inevitably have to try and find the next one right away to keep that speed. You don't, you slow down, it becomes harder to go on.
On the one hand this does wonders for immersion. On the other hand, it's infuriating. And then, once you've played the time trials and watched hours of youtube videos as I have you never play the game the same way. And that's gone. But I'll come to that later. In addition to the free running the game, as I mentioned at the start, has guns. Imagine being 5'7 and weighing 110 pounds. Imagine being that size and running at 16 miles per hour. Now imagine running towards a guy wearing metal plating. Who's about 6'6. Who's firing a light machine gun at you. The bullets are hitting you. Now because you're running at full speed you can jump, kick him in the face and slap him a few more times and knock him out. Hmm. Yeah. For the amount of enemies with guns the game puts in front of you, for the trophy even for completing the game without firing a gun at all, it never quite seems to know what to do with them. Thequickest and safest way through all the levels (because of course, the gun mechanics are largely terrible and you're slowed down when you have a gun putting you at even more risk) is to just run at full speed ignoring everything trying to stop you. I feel as if guns were included to normalise the game in some way, to make it more marketable. Certainly the fact they're so bad discourages their use and encourages a 'purer' play style but they're still there, and the enemies seem incongruous with every other part of the game. Maybe that's the point, and it's you, the runners, who are out of place. Or supposed to be. It just makes you want to fight harder.
An aside here, I just remembered one section of the game where you have to break through some buildings to get to a lift and away from some cops. In a small part of an alleyway there's a tree. I've just realised it's the only time there's anything organic in the whole game. There's even a bird singing, the only non-human living thing. When I took the time to stop and notice this it really compounded how much the City had attempted to crush all forms of independent life. By including it in a spot where you're running at full speed and likely to miss it the moment is enhanced when you do realise it's there.
Now, I mentioned time trials. Coming to this many years after it came out, there's DLC, and I include that here. The time trials are mostly sections of the story levels with a time limit attached. The DLC levels are new and based heavily on the themes of block colours and geometric shapes. They're all quite visually stunning. I'm sure you can find some pictures. The thing with the time trials though is that you have to know how to play the game quickly. You have to be able to side jump boost, which involves you jumping sideways then turning to face forward, making you run at full speed immediately after starting. Other things like wall runs, coil jumps and even just aiming jumps to land on the right platform, these all become much more important. And if I thought I couldn't play the game when I was young, oh. I had no idea. Trying to play the game quickly just makes you worse at it. Yet although the concept of the time trials, and the full chapter speedruns which thankfully have much more forgiving time limits, is based around speed and efficiency of movement playing the game in such a way where this is your main priority doesn't seem right. It makes you feel too detached from the surroundings. And since I rather like the surroundings I suppose I don't enjoy this sensation.
And so, that attitude to playing the game is what eventually led to the change in my understanding of the game itself I've been alluding to. When you know how to play it, you don't play it as you any more. I can't play it as someone exploring, feeling their way across roofs or through vents or up rooms. I instinctively turn and try to go full speed. I was better at side jump boosting when playing the game than I ever was in a timed setting, annoyingly. But that's how I play it now, and how I would play it if I were to go back to it eight years from now. No matter how long, I'd pick it up and it would become instantly famililar. Is this a bad thing? It contradicts a lot of my memories of the game. Important memories. Not to the extent that I can't have those memories any more or that they're replaced. I don't think they ever will be. In my final playthrough I did try to play it the old way. With that same attitude and to an extent, it worked. I'm just thankful that I now know how to approach the bits which enraged me so much in the past. Being able to look where you're going to jump to while wall-running for instance, that's a big help. And I should add that the DLC time trial levels do add a significant challenge to the game, which is nice. For all its faults the actual mechanics of the game are quite solid, and putting them fully to the test is fun. Even if only one attempt in a hundred seems to work.
Posting about Mirror's Edge like this is a strange thing. If you're reading it now, soon after I've posted it then you've ever played the game and can understand at least some of what I'm talking about or you never will. If you never have you'd be horrified by the game. For all I've said about the art and the design, it's ugly. Graphically it's really shown up, and I haven't even got a PS4. I also forgot how annoying it was to see LOADING LEVEL show up on screen while I sit around waiting for the game to allow me to play it. Maybe the sequel fixes what problems I have, I don't know. I'm sure you'll find out soon. Will it evoke the same feelings in me as this one did, as it still does? Well by definition it can't, since the reasons for me identifying with the game and its content so strongly are long gone from my life. But I'm glad I played it when I did. And I'm glad I finally went back to finish it and beat all of it.
