David Perry Challenge #001 - Mirror's Edge

Today I bring you the first of the 100 game challenge, Mirror's Edge from Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment and published by EA in 2009. Video footage comes first and my 1-page writeup follows. This will be the format I follow every week.

Week 1: Mirror's Edge (DICE/EA, 2009)

Mirror's Edge is a first-person free runner designed with the intent to create a high stakes experience in an adrenaline-pumping setting. The use of high-contrast colorization - which itself contrasts many of the releases of the current generation's use of brown, dull materials – creates easily navigable pathways with the use of red-shaded objects to guide the player's eye. Combined with the design choice to have bullets unable to hit you when you are going over a certain speed, Mirror's Edge is tediously calculated simulation of a game. It's smoke and mirrors, a highly glossy prototype, but nothing more.

This is not to say that it's a bad prototype. Quite the contrary, Mirror's Edge successfully posits the thesis that a game which takes place from a First-Person view can be used for more than just shooting guns. The parkour mechanics go beyond the basics of running and jumping to include two different kinds of shimmies, wall-runs, 180 degree kick spins, zip-lining, and vertical climbing. The visuals are incredibly striking, with the outdoor having a strong emphasis on blues and indoors favoring greens. In order to finish the RGB trifecta, Reds are used sparingly in order to guide the player toward what they need to grab onto or run at next. It's a simple technique that eliminates some confusion in an otherwise highly detailed and sometimes confusing world.

However, the game is not without its faults. While the parkour mechanics are solid for the most part, a lot of it feels like a pixel-hunt. It is easy to gloss over your goal half the time or miss a jump because your “Death Dot” cursor happened to be off from where you were supposed to have it. While a “Death Dot” in many games can be a blessing of precision-based shooting, here it only serves to hamper the experience. The purpose of free running is just that - to be free in your running – and yet more than once I found myself unable to get through a section the way I wanted to. Even though it looked like a wall would be ideal for wall-running, or the gap between platforms easily jumped over, the section was specifically designed for you to shimmy across the ledge on the side. It is moments like this that force the realization that the player is being led; that any sense of agency they have in the game world is an illusion, and the whole game has been laid out to be played in a specific manner. Do it any other way and you will not only die but will have to replay the current section countless times before you are allowed to continue.

While Mirror's Edge makes itself out to be an open world, it only leads the player down a linear path. It's possible that this “illusion of freedom” motif mirrors, as it were, the game's totalitarian narrative. Any freedom one is led to believe they have is actually a carefully constructed ride, with ups and downs, glimpses of choice, and much like the game's high contrast aesthetics, shimmers of greatness. The game's challenge come from finding the path through levels laid out by the designers, not by creating your own as the game would have you hope would happen. The skill comes in the form of precisely timing and aiming your jumps (a slow-motion mechanic is included to assist in this endeavor and disarming enemies, though it almost seems as if it too was at one point included in the ride and was changed to a button-press at the last minute). While you can take enemies guns and shoot them, the game in no way encourages this behavior. Gunplay is a sloppy, slow, throwaway mechanic. Being that this is from the studio that brought us Battlefield, we know damn well that they are capable of forging solid first-person shooter mechanics. The gunplay is all part of the simulation. The player is given the illusion they can use guns, but that use comes at the cost of usability. In the end, it is a better choice to just throw the guns away. Even the bullets flying at you are all part of the ride and are themselves an illusory threat. There are a few tense moments to be found here, but once you realize just how shallow the rabbit hole actually is, the tension wears off quick.

There are some good ideas in Mirror's Edge, but they are all at odds with each other. The mechanics are shoehorned into an expressionistic use of narrative-as-gameplay, yet the gameplay itself can do nothing to alleviate the feeling that the roller-coaster is too well constructed. We are still safe.