Introduction

When Mirror’s Edge released in 2008, the term “first person platforming” was met with, to put it mildly, a great deal of skepticism. Many foundational first-person shooters featured bits of platforming, chief among them Quake and Half-Life, but those sections were almost universally reviled by the time of Mirror’s Edge’s release. It made sense at the time as a way of adding a bit of variety to improve the pacing of these largely linear, single-player experiences. But the awkward controls and janky physics of those titles made those sections incredibly tedious to complete, and are to this day brought up as the worst parts of both of those titles. 3D platforming had become almost exclusively the domain of third-person titles, with old series like Mario still reigning supreme. And as far as first-person games went, movement was incredibly standardized, nothing like the bunnyhopping days of Quake. 2007, the year before Mirror’s Edge’s, saw the release of three shooter classics that codified the rules of first-person games: Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, and Bioshock. These three games were each wildly innovative in their own way, helping define what many consider one of the greatest years in gaming history. But despite answering the question of “How do you make a first-person shooter” with their own, unique answers, each answered the question of “How do you move in a first-person game” in a fairly similar way. Halo 3 is perhaps the most unique among them, continuing the series’ emphasis on lower-gravity, longer jumps, and at least some strategic value to bunnyhopping. But, largely, each of the games asked the player to move around a 3D space slowly, with a sprint button to speed up the process, and maybe a “vault over object” button if you were lucky. Cut to a decade later Halo 5 has jetpacks, Call of Duty has wall running, and Titanfall 2 has jetpacks AND wall running. Even Destiny, perhaps the biggest FPS in the current market, has movement that encourages jumping and ups the speed and importance of movement as a defensive option. I wouldn’t call any of these games platformers, but they all answer that question of “how do you move in a first-person game” with much more variety and much more complexity. So, what changed in the decade since? Well, I would argue, Mirror’s Edge came out, and developers finally started learning from it.

Mirror’s Edge released in 2008 to relatively little fanfare. It sold poorly, reviewed just above alright, and didn’t get a sequel until eight years later. Mirror’s Edge, commercially, failed, but it is still talked about today despite this. I believe that this is largely because, to the best of my knowledge, it is the only dedicated first-person platformer ever released by a AAA studio. Since its release, a handful of indie games have tried similar experiments (Clustertruck, Deadcore, Refunct, Valley, A Story About My Uncle), and a smaller handful of AAA titles have been inspired by its movement system (Titanfall, Dying Light, Brink), but there has never been an attempt at first-person platforming as purely focused on the technical challenge of the platforming itself as Mirror’s Edge and its sequel. This makes it an incredibly useful reference point for developers experimenting with movement mechanics in first-person games. But, in all the borrowing, remixing and reinterpreting of Mirror’s Edge over the almost decade since its release, I believe that many developers have missed something core to the formula that made the game work, either intentionally to better fit its ideas to the game they were designing, or unintentionally as they simply failed to understand the game itself. And with Mirror’s Edge Catalyst both failing to recapture the strengths of the original and also doing poorly commercially, I doubt we’ll see another focused attempt at a first-person platformer for some time. With that in mind, I think it’s valuable to examine exactly what Mirror’s Edge did, why it worked, where it didn’t, and how other games have interpreted its bold and focused answer to a question that other developers are now answering with more regularity: “How do you move in a first-person game?”

Mirror’s Edge

One of the most commendable, and probably most damning, elements of Mirror’s Edge is its purity of design. In 2017, AAA games with purity of anything are nearly impossible to come by, so this alone makes it unique. Mirror’s Edge is a series of 10 chapters, each a continuous series of obstacle courses. It lasts about six hours on your first playthrough, though I recently completed it in three and I’m not even very good at the game. Its extra modes are a time trial mode that cuts up the 10 chapters into quick levels that can be replayed in 1-3 minutes, and a speedrun version of those 10 same chapters. It had one DLC pack that added a series of extra levels with a new visual aesthetic, and that’s about it. Mirror’s Edge does not have a sprawling open world filled with collectables, it has thirty runner bags hidden throughout the entire game. It doesn’t have a giant features list of multiplayer, single-player, and co-op, it has a linear, single-player campaign. It isn’t packed with new modes and options and torrents of DLC, expansions, and seasons passes, it just has one experimental pack. This dedication to its one, core idea is beyond refreshing in a year when even something as pure as demon killing in Doom comes with a multiplayer modes, a snapmap map creation feature, hundreds of collectables, optional challenges, and the list goes on and on and on. This isn’t to say that variety is bad, or that games shouldn’t try to experiment with their mechanics, but gaming in 2017 has gone far past that point. In contrast, Mirror’s Edge’s ability to know what the engaging core of its game is, and then focus on it, makes it so much easier to play and to think about. However, like I mentioned earlier, it means that you can beat the entire game in three hours. And must of the gaming community is not exactly receptive to a “quality over quantity” argument. Games with that short a runtime get crucified on forums and subreddits. So while I love that Mirror’s Edge is exactly as long as it needs to be and not a single hour longer, it contributed to why it didn’t sell well. And, it also lead to the inclusion of the game’s single worst feature: combat. Everything I’m about to gush about that makes the game flow and feel tight is completely broken during these stilted, awkward combat sections where the player spams an attack button to try to punch armed guards to unconsciousness. No one liked it, the developers didn’t even like it, they just included it because the game was too short without it, and it is the game’s greatest flaw. But, if you load up Mirror’s Edge today, set it to easy mode to make the combat as brief as you can, you’re in for an experience unlike any other. You’re going to experience Mirror’s Edge as a first-person platformer, and little else.

Mirror’s Edge is striking from the first moment you turn it on, welcoming the player with a bold visual aesthetic. Nothing before or since has really captured those same ideas, with its vision of a clean future symbolizing the control of an authoritarian government, contrasted against its grounded setting. Because the game uses almost entirely precomputed lighting and unmoving objects, it still looks gorgeous to this day. Couple that fidelity with a strong visual aesthetic and accompanying political message and Mirror’s Edge feels fiercely contemporary. I’ll talk more about why Catalyst’s sci-fi aesthetic does not fit the design of the first game, but Mirror’s Edge did not feel like a fantasy, nor a stock reimagining of Orwell’s 1984, it feels like something that could happen today. It takes the idea of an authoritarian post-9/11 surveillance state and makes it real and uncomfortably plausible. Keeping the game locked to the first-person perspective made the player feel present in this world, and its commitment to keeping this perspective further enhanced its grounded feel, only cutting to third person in the beginning as the player assumes control of Faith, and the end as the player relinquishes it. The design of the parkour movement added even more to the feel that this was a game that interpreted realism as an actual imperative to design their game around, not a visual aesthetic that necessitated more grime, blood, and forced moral ambiguity. In Mirror’s Edge, huge falls will kill you. If you think you couldn’t make a jump in real life, you probably couldn’t make it in game. Faith isn’t a superhero, she’s just really good at parkour. The animations reinforce this, placing a great deal of emphasis on Faith’s limbs and body positioning as she moves through an environment. This realism lead to a level of mechanical transference that the other games I’m going to discuss simply didn’t. Playing Mirror’s Edge made me see real-world environments as spaces that I could parkour through, if only I had the skill. It encouraged me, in the real world, to try to climb or jump off of things, because Mirror’s Edge had conditioned me to look at spaces like that. Catalyst, Dying Light, Titanfall and Refunct, did not encourage that, because they weren’t as focused on realism as Mirror’s Edge. And it was through understanding this commitment to reality that I found what I believe to be the goal of Mirror’s Edge: to create a grounded, first-person platformer with tight levels that want you to traverse an environment quickly and stylishly, but also allowing you to slow down and think about environments as puzzle spaces. And from this foundational philosophy came the complexity of the game’s mechanics.

I know Dark Souls comparisons have long since passed the threshold of overuse, but while replaying Mirror’s Edge, I constantly found myself making comparisons. Mirror’s Edge requires a commitment to animations that no other game in this piece does. Jumps, rolls, landings and climbing cannot easily be canceled, and are required to play out animations before they allow the player to start their next move. This adds a strategic importance to every decision the player makes, discouraging sloppy play, but also adding a weight and heft to the animations. In general, movement in games isn’t supposed to be a challenge, it’s supposed to feel smooth and effortless. But in Mirror’s Edge, movement isn’t a way for the player to get from point A to point B, it is the core objective of the game itself. This means that conventional approaches to movement won’t often mix well with a game that emphasizes it in this way. For most games, the designer wants the player to feel like they’ve mastered movement as soon as possible, but for Mirror’s Edge to match the arc of a traditional video game, it has to have a gradual sense of mastery, not an instant one. It does this, in part, through its animations. By preventing the player from easily canceling their moves, it requires the player to think more carefully about each move they make, making them engage with systems they might have otherwise ignored. And this is exactly how Dark Souls works, requiring commitment to every input, and punishing sloppy play (though Dark Souls is significantly more punishing than Mirror’s Edge). The result of applying this philosophy to movement, instead of combat, is that it turns movement into a technical challenge, not an easy means of traversal.

However, high-level play in Mirror’s Edge could hardly be described as cautious and stilted, if anything, it looks effortless and flowing. Flow is a concept and a term with a strong relationship to Mirror’s Edge; it’s even name-dropped in the opening cinematic. And I think it’s the only game I’ve looked at that fully commits to getting the player to the flow state. But it’s important to distinguish between flow, the mental state, and flow, the aesthetic. Flow the aesthetic, at least as far as movement is concerned, is a general, uninterrupted traversal. Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is probably the best example on this list of that purely as an aesthetic, but the original commits to it as a mental state. That state is one when the challenge is high, but the player’s skill is just as high, and they match every challenge as they are presented with it, not effortlessly, but with focus. Mirror’s Edge commits to this by creating a robust set of mechanics that are constantly testing the player’s timing and coordination. Precise button inputs at the correct time are highly valued, and different moves are strung together to create a sequence of balanced challenges. This is where the level designers had to work carefully to chain different paths together, and balance the difficulty of each obstacle to avoid spikes. This must have taken a great deal of effort, but the result is a game that begs for speedrunning, because once it gets going, it makes the player not way to stop.

However, sometimes it does stop. Be it for narrative pacing, trying to squeeze more hours of their limited amount of levels, or because the designers genuinely find it interesting, the game does have many sections where the player is asked to stop moving quickly. Combat is obviously one of those, but the more successful lulls in the pacing comes from the more puzzle-focused sections. Now, arguably the entire game is a puzzle of exactly which obstacles to travers and in what order, but some sections in the game feel much closer to a traditional puzzle game. In these, the player is asked to give up some of their momentum and really engage with the mechanics at a low level. This puts the player into a planning phase where they figure out a sequence of moves that might work, then try to execute them perfectly. The game wants the player to look for unique solutions, to think of how the mechanics might be used differently, or to see the space they are presented not as a real-world place, but as a series of game pieces. This seems completely out of sync with a game about flow the aesthetic and flow the mental state, but somehow, it works incredibly well. It does help even out the pacing, as previously mentioned, but it also expands the possibility space of the mechanics. If the player is always moving at top speed, they don’t have time to slow down and think about the implications of the mechanics. Giving them these slower sections helps them master more complicated ideas in the faster sections. That is part of the brilliance of these puzzles: once the player knows the solution, they can fly through them just as fast as any other section of the game. They’re almost like invisible tutorial sections, letting the player figure out a specific move or series of moves so that they can recognize sections later in the game that use the same idea. These sections, however, only work in a game that treats movement as something interesting in and of itself, not as a means to an end. And its sequel, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, largely does recreate these sections, but does so with much more compromises.

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst

Catalyst is a sequel (prequel, reboot, whatever) that I never thought I’d get. Released eight years after the original, it makes me genuinely wonder how this game even got made. Sequels to poorly-selling eight-year-old IPs just do not happen in this industry. So, no matter how much I’m going to tear into Catalyst in the paragraphs to follow, I am still incredibly glad that it exists, and the majority of my complaints about it come from it being a sequel to Mirror’s Edge. Because, unfortunately, Catalyst fell victim to the same style of Ubisoft open world that claimed a sizable chunk of AAA titles in the past few years. In contrast to the original Mirror’s Edge,’s grounded, mechanically-focused approach with careful level design, Catalyst is a sci-fi open world game that treats its platforming more as a cool navigational gimmick to move quickly than a mechanic set in and of itself. And while there is a lot to unpack in the subtle differences between Catalyst and its predecessor, I think the genre change is a good representation of the misunderstandings Catalyst has about what Mirror’s Edge is. Because Mirror’s Edge is not sci-fi. It isn’t set in the future, it’s set in the near-future, and that may seem like a semantic distinction, but I think it’s core to what made Mirror’s Edge work. Catalyst is filled with gadgets, sleek, future buildings, and cyberpunk corporations conspiring to spy on every citizen. The original was thoroughly grounded in the realities of a post-9/11 surveillance state. It felt uncomfortably plausible, like you could see it happening in a city you knew. The city it was set in wasn’t even named, it was just referred to as “the city”, allowing the player to project any city the might be familiar with onto its clean-but-not-too-clean surface. Catalyst, however, is wildly creative with its setting, using vibrant sci-fi architecture where the strong blacks and whites of the original are filled with bold, primary colors. Mirror’s Edge had a very limited color palette, even famously so. But Catalyst is a bustling sci-fi metropolis, filled with strange and varied buildings. Part of it feels like the art team spent so long working on the Battlefield games that they used Catalyst to run wild. And, while I disagree with this particular choice for the Mirror’s Edge series, I want to stress that this is a gorgeous artistic decision. It makes navigating through the game exciting just to see what you can discover next. The overworld feels, in a word, slick. Everything is polished to a mirror (heh) sheen, guiding lines are smooth and flowing, and Faith’s feet make little squeaking noises as she sprints across various surfaces. And, in a similar way, the movement feels great to control. Animations that had long delays in the original now finish instantly, jumps feel tighter and are accompanied by beautifully polished animations and sound design. Out of all the games I’m going to talk about, Mirror’s Edge included, movement feels the best to control in Catalyst. But, to create a game that is outwardly more welcoming to the player, a great deal had to be sacrificed. And here is where Catalyst’s problems begin to emerge.

Perhaps the best example of what separates the tone, mechanics and setting of Mirror’s Edge and Catalyst are two moments I happened to play back-to-back while recently replaying them. The first happens in the original Mirror’s Edge, which begins in a sequence where Faith is being chased by a pack of cops, and is running out of escape routes. However, glancing up, the player sees two cranes, painted in a shade of red the

The crane in Mirror’s Edge

game uses to highlight objects the player can run off of. Then it hits them. The game wants them to jump between those two cranes. That’s insane! The player has pulled off some crazy jumps before, but nothing like that! As the player climbs to the top of the first crane, dodging gunfire along the way, Merc, the player’s “man in the chair” over an earpiece, warns Faith not to do what he thinks she’s going to. But the player reaches the top of the first crane, holds their breath, then makes the leap. The barely make it, skidding down the side, as Merc shouts in disbelief over the earpiece. The player’s heart is thumping, and the charge towards the nearest rooftop, leaving the cops behind them in disbelief. I finished this sequence, switched over to Catalyst for a bit, and chained a leap over a giant chasm between buildings with a grappling hook ride up dozens of feet in the air, landing with an easy roll to continue moving. I can’t remember much more than that. If the crane jump happened in Catalyst, they wouldn’t even draw attention to it, since actions like it happen so often that it wouldn’t be memorable. Catalyst does draw attention to how crazy of a jump the player is making at one point, where they are walking a tightrope between two huge skyscrapers, gazing down at the vast expanse beneath them. It’s like something out of an action movie. The player could never imagine doing that in the real world.

So Catalyst has a problem with not being grounded. In the same way its sci-fi aesthetics extend wildly beyond the original’s near-future setting, its scope and scale is much more grand. Mirror’s Edge had, to put it charitably, a forgettable story, but it mostly took a backseat to the platforming challenges anyways. Catalyst has cutscenes. Well-animated, voiced and scored cutscenes. Yet the story is a totally forgettable hero’s journey where Faith needs to learn to accept that she’s really a superhero who needs to fight the evil corporations. The original wasn’t entirely realistic, it ends with Faith

Walking between buildings in Catalyst

kicking the big bad out of a helicopter on top of a skyscraper, but the story doesn’t end with her taking down the entire government, it ends with her saving her sister. And, well, Catalyst technically ends the same way, but it makes a much bigger deal out of its revolutionary aspirations. Now, this shift in genre and scope could still be true to the original and be a great game in its own right, but this lack of grounding unfortunately applies to two more areas: the level design, and, most disappointingly, the mechanics.

I mentioned earlier that Catalyst has the best feeling mechanics out of any of these games, and that definitely is valuable in its own right, but it sacrifices a lot to get that better feeling. I’ll be going into more detail about the level design shortly, but I think it might be where a lot of these changes stemmed from. Open worlds, specifically Ubisoft-style open worlds, aren’t a great fit for complex movement mechanics, because the player spends so much time just getting from objective to objective that additional complexity added to the movement system adds work and tedium. If new movement mechanics are included, they need to justify their existence by making traversal easier, not harder. The original Mirror’s Edge has traversal that is, by nature, more difficult than the majority of games, but that’s where it draws its depth from. Catalyst still does this to some extent, but that extent is much lesser than its predecessor. Perhaps the most noticeable change to the movement is that the windows for specific inputs to be entered is much more generous. Where the original might have given the player a one-second window to hit the roll button before hitting the ground, Catalyst would give the player two or three. This, on the surface, seems like it would make traversal easier all around, but I think it might end up making it more difficult. Because the window for input is more generous, the player doesn’t learn the exact timing through muscle memory, which often leads to them playing sloppily, because the game never trained them not to. This can result in the player missing a lot of jumps, rolls and wall runs, because they haven’t been trailed properly to use them. But in addition to occasionally making its systems more unreliable, this change also removes some of the depth and satisfaction from them. Some of the improvements are objectively better than the previous game, with more polish and responsiveness, and I don’t want to undersell that, but the added control sacrificed some of the depth. Now, it would be easy to equate inconvenience with challenge and call it a day, but I think the satisfaction that came uniquely from Mirror’s Edge was a sense of technical challenge that kept you grounded in the movements of Faith as a physical human being, not a video game avatar. When some of that difficulty is removed, the satisfaction inherent to the game’s mechanics is lessened. And, to enhance the problem, the game has an upgrade system that gives the player stat bonuses to running, and unlocks some of the most valuable skills. I’ll touch on this more in the Dying Light section, but, in an open world, if you give the player the option of upgrading to a better mechanic, then you have to design most of your world around the player decided not to unlock it. This means that, because, for example, the quickturn is not given to the player by default, that areas can’t be designed with it specifically in mind, and thus using it makes the environments feel too easy. The result is a mechanics set not suited for anywhere near the amount of depth of the original, and while it does feel better in parts, it overall feels less robust, less satisfying, and less carefully designed. Unfortunately, these mechanical failings are enhanced by the open world the game is set in, and for all the benefits of having an open world game where moving is satisfying on its own, the style and design of the open world does not quite live up to this promise.

The most noticeable impact of the open world in Mirror’s Edge’s design is the longer load times. This is a simple technical reality that will be completely obsolete when Catalyst is as old as its predecessor, but is incredibly frustrating now. Time trials, speed runs, and other trial-and-error sections of the original would often lead to the player falling to their death, causing the game to reload the level, but because the game was just reloading a single level, it didn’t take that long. On modern hardware, the delay is almost unnoticeable. But Catalyst has to reload a chunk of an open world every time the player dies and, even on an SSD with, still takes a decent amount of time to load. This makes every death and mistake even more frustrating, and drives the player away from retrying old levels. Ten years from now, advanced hardware will almost certainly remove this problem, and I really wonder what Catalyst will play like with the removal of those load times, but for now, it stands as a major reason I so often return to the original over Catalyst. And this feeling of compromise and frustration carries into other aspects of the design, namely, the tightness of the design. Mirror’s Edge was a very pure game about very specific challenges. It had exactly one thing it wanted the player to do (I suppose two, if you count the optional runner bag collectables), and that was it. Catalyst gives the player a world filled of instanced challenges, collectables, and story missions, and designs the world so you can more easily get between those objectives. Each of those individual activities is fun in its own right, but it feels hampered by the open world. Obstacle courses aren’t as tightly designed because they have to serve as both that instanced obstacle course, and an easily traversable section of an open world. This would be okay if the game encouraged you to find interesting routes between points, letting the player gain a slow sense of mastery over the world and use those paths more efficiently, but the the racing start and stop points all seem arbitrary, so that mastery never forms.

Additionally, two mechanics designed for ease of use in a traditional open world game kill any familiarity the player might gain with the world: objective pathing and fast travel. Much has been written about how fast travel can prevent the player from engaging with the world in open world games, and it’s doubly true for Catalyst. Fast travel skips the traversal so the player can go to other areas and solve traversal challenges. It’s skipping the core gameplay. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding about why people play a Mirror’s Edge game in the first place. If they want to skip moving from place to place, then they aren’t engaged enough with the mechanics as is. But it also creates a loop of play where the player is fast-traveling between different instanced objectives, so they never get a chance to just be in the world and explore it organically. With this approach, creating a pack of levels instead of an open world would have been much more valuable. And secondly, the game implements an objective pathing system similar to the Clairvoyance spell in Skyrim or the breadcrumbs in Dead Space, having a wispy red line show the player the exact path to take to their next objective. It prevents the player from figuring out where to go or how to navigate the environment. Sure, the player can figure out more interesting ways, but it is usually best to just follow the line. This can be disabled entirely, but without it, the environments are difficult to read and it is incredibly easy to get very, very lost (Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit did a video on this subject in more detail, and I’d highly recommend it if you’re interested in open world design). The world Catalyst creates is simply not designed for you to engage with it as a platforming game. Yes, the original let you press a button and be instantly pointed towards your next objective, but it only showed the player the direction, not how to get there. Finally, the last example of how Catalyst flirts with solid design but isn’t able to commit is how it handles collectables. These have, sadly, become a staple of open-world design, and Catalyst mostly implements them poorly. The most common collectable is an item that requires you to walk up to it, stop moving, press an interact key, watch a couple of seconds of an animation, then return to whatever you were doing. It is totally antithetical to the momentum of a Mirror’s Edge game, killing any sense of flow that the game usually works so hard to preserve. Most of their collectables are like this, but one of them, the gridleaks, actually work very well. Gridleaks are glowing orbs that appear in the world for some sci-fi reason, but are scattered so broadly that they end up serving as little challenges in their own right. Some of them, the player can just run right through on their path to the next objective, but others are tucked away on a seemingly unreachable surface, goading the player into figuring out how to get there. They don’t break the flow, they fit in with the running, and they encourage clever thinking about the mechanics. And it’s the fact that the game still manages to capture some of the puzzle solving of the original that keeps my opinion of it positive, despite all the criticism I’ve been levying against it. It has these wonderful gridNode challenges to unlock new fast travel points, which are basically puzzle sections from the original, but as soon as you finish them, there don’t seem to be any puzzles left except for a few collectables. Some of the designers at DICE clearly know how to make a good Mirror’s Edge level, and some of them clearly know how to create good Mirror’s Edge mechanics and animations, but the greatness in those aspects is so often trumped by an open world design that commits to convenience over challenge.

Dying Light

But what would happen if a team approach those mechanics solely as auxiliary to the main game, and designed its platforming with that in mind? Well, Dying Light is a great example, an open world game with so many features thrown in that “kitchen sink” barely covers it. It treats its platforming not as a challenge in its own right, but as a cool navigational gimmick for avoiding zombies. Loosening rules and easier movement felt like a compromise in Catalyst, but in Dying Light, they feel appropriate, because the player isn’t just focused on the movement. The movement in Dying Light just feels good to control, and a lot of that comes from the easier traversal. By the end of the game, the player can climb unrealistically high walls, jump from insane heights, and vault over a horde of zombies. I wouldn’t want to play the game just as a parkour game, but it works well as a fun way to get from place to place, so much so that I miss it in other open world games. When using the Ubisoft open world design philosophy, even a little bit of depth to the movement makes the hours of traversal so much more fun. It even turns the obligatory tower climbing sections in every one of those games fun! It doesn’t integrate perfectly into combat, which usually ends up with the player just spamming the attack button, but it doesn’t really have to. It does allow for some great moments of jump-kicking zombies in the face, but it doesn’t really deliver on the idea of the combat that Mirror’s Edge and Catalyst hinted at. Those games attempted to make a melee combat system about chaining combat moves into parkour moves, but never really delivered on it. The easiest strategy was to just run up and spam attack. Dying Light’s dropkick move at least tries to do this, but doesn’t get very close. The movement works as a way to manage the horde, not to be explored deeply. So, here is a game that is clearly inspired by Mirror’s Edge and benefited from including some if its ideas. The developers asked themselves how first-person platforming and parkour could improve their game, and they found out that including it as a side option worked fairly well. But what are the limits of taking the ideas from Mirror’s Edge and applying them to a game where platforming isn’t the focus?

At the start of the game, there aren’t many problems. The controls feel tight and grounded, the player character struggles and is overwhelmed by intimidating challenges, they even have a scene where he jumps off a crane and freaks out about it. But, while Mirror’s Edge takes about 6 hours to complete, and Catalyst takes 8-13, Dying Light can last anywhere from 16-40. And twenty hours of running around an open world with platforming not being the focus can start to get tedious. After a certain point, I just want to get to my next objective. So, the game offers stat upgrades, some of them interesting, some of them just pure numerical increases. On the interesting side, the game gives you a roll move to let you jump from higher buildings, it even gives quickturns, a move that added a great deal of depth to Mirror’s Edge. This has a similar problem to Catalyst where, in an open world where you can unlock different abilities, the designers have to assume you haven’t unlocked them. However, they work well as ways to increase the skill ceiling on movement, while not breaking the system. But some of the upgrades are just raw stat boosts. Run faster, jump higher, survive higher falls. The problem with this is that it takes the system from a grounded and tight one and turns it into an unrealistic and floaty one. If I was designing Dying Light and absolutely had to include linear stat upgrades, I would start the player out with mechanics that were a significant amount clunkier than the starting state it shipped with, then have them reach that point at about the mid game, getting only a bit better by the end game. But the actual game starts out at about a Mirror’s Edge 1 level of control then jacks it up to a Catalyst level, then keeps going. By the end of the game you’re zipping across rooftops with a goddamn grappling hook, surviving every fall, flying over every obstacle. It feels great, but it also feels mind-numbingly easy. To their credit, the developers put a lot of work into making this system feel good, with extra bits of polish to animations and sounds, but at the end of the day the core mechanics themselves feel broken by this stat upgrade. At this point, the player feels less like a physical human being with limbs that have weight and and organic positioning, and feels more like a box that zips from place. It does create flow in the aesthetic sense, but never approaches flow, the mental state. It is firmly camped in the “control” mental state, with the player rarely being challenged. The game wants you to relax while moving, to feel good, but not really engaged. And that’s okay, as a design decision from their own open world game, but it does make me wish for a game that really did commit to skill-based movement, that took its AAA budget and applied it to a system as tightly- designed as the original Mirror’s Edge, and did tried to integrate combat well. Well, fortunately, that game exists.

Titanfall

Titanfall and its sequel feels like the games Mirror’s Edge was destine to inspire. First-person shooters are no strangers to skill-based movement, with early examples going as far back as Quake. So, when a developer comes up with a new design for first-person movement, it’s only natural that a that an FPS would try to adapt it (I’m not talking about Brink). Titanfall does this wonderfully, succeeding in its attempts to create a first-person shooter that wants to emulate the crazy-fast movement of old FPS titles, with parkour and jetpacks to improve map versatility and for defensive movement. From the get-go, it is easily the fastest-moving game I’ve talked about so far, letting the player get up to a frankly ridiculous speeds if they chain enough wall runs together. Titanfall emphasises momentum in a way even Catalyst really doesn’t, with the player’s starting speed being the equivalent of a sprint in a normal FPS, and their top speed being the equivalent of maybe the original Doom? However, the player is hard pressed to stay at this top speed for long, so they’re encouraged to plot routes through the map to give them this high speed when they need it. However, because of this speed, mixed with affordances for aiming with a gamepad, aiming in Titanfall is incredibly difficult, and usually requires slowing down and aiming down sights to hit and target farther than a few feet away. This means that there is a constant back and forth between moving fast defensively, and slowing down to line up a few shots. A fast moving player may be able to avoid death for a decent chunk of time, but they won’t be racking up any kills while they’re doing it. However, this movement system isn’t perfect, and often times a player who is just better at aiming can take you down no matter how fast you’re going. Also, while gaining a lot of momentum is incredibly satisfying and strategically valuable, when the levels don’t give the player a clear path to their objective, they can spend the time awkwardly hopping around. Titanfall 2, fortunately, addresses this problem, with the addition of grappling hooks and slide jumps. The grappling hook is an optional ability for some reason, and with how much it adds to the game I am genuinely amazed it wasn’t made standard for all loadouts. It has a strategic depth that the grappling hook in Dying Light simply did not. While that game’s grappling hook mostly existed to skip over parkour segments, Titanfall 2’s exists to speed movement up even more. When used correctly, it becomes another way for the player to create paths through the level, letting them make up some lost momentum or quickly navigate open spaces. Slide jumping also greatly improves this, though is a bit more difficult to master. It requires the player to jump, press the crouch button right before they hit the ground, then jump again before their slide animation completes. I think. I haven’t quite gotten it down yet. Regardless, the process makes the player harder to hit and move faster while crossing open environments, raises the skill ceiling, and allows players good enough to reach it a constant boost to speed.

Unlike Dying Light, Titanfall feels a bit closer to the purity of the original Mirror’s Edge. The combat and the movement are designed around each other, and that really shows in the way it handles upgrade. While Dying Light and Catalyst had stat upgrades to their movement systems, Titanfall’s stays mostly the same, the only exception being an ability

that lets the player shoot while sprinting. The designers at Respawn created a tight, skill-based and expansive movement system, then kept it the way it was, allowing for a purity of design that is admittedly rare in AAA circles. Of course, it has a cacophony of guns, gun upgrades, combat upgrades, titan upgrades, and cosmetics, but movement wise, it is fairly pure. It isn’t the core of the game, combat is still the most important part, but unlike Dying Light, it doesn’t feel tacked on. Titanfall could not exist without its parkour mechanics and still be identifiably Titanfall. Dying Light probably could.

Unfortunately, Titanfall got a great deal of bad press for being part of the 2014 anti-hype cycle, and its sequel sold poorly for a number of reasons, including being sandwiched right in between the launch of the annual Battlefields and Call of Duties. But its influence is still strongly felt. Halo, Destiny, and Call of Duty all have implemented some form of movement that borders on parkour, with Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 even featuring a parkour obstacle course mode. This mode could not have existed in earlier Call of Duty games, and the fact that it does speaks volumes about how much movement in FPS games has changed since 2008. Titanfall is probably still the most visible inheritor of Mirror’s Edge’s ideas about first-person movement mechanics, but that influence has seeped into other games, and is now firmly established. Despite selling poorly, the game’s design philosophy has a foothold in AAA design. But what about the indie scene?

Refunct

Refunct is a game that clearly would not exist without Mirror’s Edge, but also has a wildly different goal. Rather than being a skill-based parkour game, it’s a relaxing platformer about moving at a brisk pace from platform to platform. Its goal to be a relaxing game is apparent from the moment you open it, with chill electronica playing in the background and a hazy, abstract visual aesthetic. If anything, it feels like the developer is putting their own spin on the Pure Time Trials DLC maps that released for the original Mirror’s Edge. I’ve gone on and on about how Mirror’s Edge being grounded was so important to its design working, but the Pure Time Trials DLC shows that the formula is able to be bent a bit before it completely loses its punch. Refunct is an exploration of an abstract take on grounded mechanics, like the DLC, and uses its laser-focus to rebuild those mechanics around its goal to be relaxing. It does this by altering Mirror’s Edge’s low-level puzzle solving loop, one borrowed from more conventional platformers. Where that mode wanted you to carefully consider each moment, Refunct wants to to keep moving at a brisk but not blinding pace. This means that the fast parkour sections and the puzzle solving sections don’t feel like two separate modes like they did in Mirror’s Edge, it’s a single state of gameplay. The puzzles in Refunct are never complicated enough to have the player seriously considering the implications of the mechanics, they more exist to let the player have a quick moment to say, “Oh, that was interesting.” It lacks some of the more complex mechanics of Mirror’s Edge like the wall run or quickturn, which would have added more complexity than Refunct really needed. It does have a wall jump, but it’s used in situations that don’t require perfect timing. Where Mirror’s Edge wants the player to consider the exact timing of each move, Refunct simply wants the player to know what the correct move to enter is. And while this removes some of feelings of viscerality that Mirror’s Edge was so successful in implimenting, it, again, works with the goal of being calm. The player isn’t getting stuck, or trying the same jump over and over, they just keep moving from objective to objective. That’s not to say there are no pauses to the game, sometimes it’s not great at telegraphing its next objective and I’m left missing Mirror’s Edge “Press Alt to Look at Next Objective” button. However, it mostly keeps the pace at a comfortable level. Refunct’s only failing, if you can call it that, comes from its budget. It’s a $3 game made by a solo developer that can be easily beaten in twenty minutes your first time (the speedrunning achievements have you pushing four minutes). This means that it lacks the polish of the AAA games I’ve been discussing so far. While all other games on this list have emphasized the physical body of the player character, Refunct does not have one, removing a great deal of the physicality associated with this genre. Some mechanics feel very artificial, like you have entered a trigger box, the game stops your momentum, moves you up a few units, and deposits you at the precise location it was programmed to. Of course, all games work like this, but without the sound and animation polish that comes with being a AAA title, Refunct is unable to replicate this. Still, as a game to relax to with an interesting spin on movement, Refunct is an interesting and valuable experiment, and one that would not have existed without Mirror’s Edge.

Conclusion

Despite its own series struggling to find a foothold in the industry, it’s clear that Mirror’s Edge has influenced designers from all different genres. From AAA FPS games to open worlds to indie passion projects, its emphasis on skill-based movement, physicality and flow have lead to what I believe is a much healthier market of first-person games. First-person games just have more complex movement than they did in 2008, be that a result of callbacks to the movement of early FPSes or a reinterpretation of Mirror’s Edge’s ideas. Movement is a part of every first-person game, and when designers are encouraged to experiment with the assumptions that define it, we get games with different focuses, different goals, and different possibility spaces than we would have when these actions were standardized. Mirror’s Edge, unfortunately, never got a true sequel or spiritual successor that carried the torch on its ideas of a more realistic approach to that movement. However, while I wish such a game had been made, I would much rather see a healthier market of games inspired by Mirror’s Edge, but not constrained to it, than a market flooded with Mirror’s Edge clones. I’m glad that developers can apply these ideas to entirely different genres and be confident enough to stray from the genre-defining work. 2007, the year before Mirror’s Edge’s release, saw the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a brilliant game in its own right that inspired an incredible amount of stagnation in FPS market, crippling innovation because of how wildly innovative it was. Designers emulating Modern Warfare rarely deviated substantially from its formula. It took a much longer time for Mirror’s Edge’s influence to be felt, but now that it has, it exists as a jumping off point, not a template to be copied. And, as a fan of first-person game across genres, this makes me hopeful for the future.