First replay since release! Quite glad I could shake the bugs out of my distant memories of this game being somewhere near perfect. The ways in which it's weird and frictional definitely give it some character, though. Mirror's Edge's campaign kicks off with relatively simple flow-state platforming that eases you into the control scheme with clearly signposted goals that offer a degree of player freedom which made the journey from A-to-B feel like my own. 'Runner Vision' is still a neat little gimmick as an outright replacement for waypoints and such, acting as both a diegetic and stylised way to subtly suggest to the player little tricks that they could be doing to nudge them in the right direction. Surprised to learn that the game really shines whenever a train is nearby; intense little segments that feel so fast n lethal they shredded years off my life.

It doesn't take particularly long for the game's priorities to shift to something more akin to the jumping puzzles in like, Half Life 1 or something? Often throwing you into very dense obstacle courses or industrial interiors that demand a surprisingly great deal of spatial reasoning. With Runner Vision dialling down the closer to the finale the game gets, I found myself having to stop and survey the area for anything resembling surfaces I've come to know are scalable. On one hand, it's alarmingly rare for a Triple-A title to demand such a thing from a player - but It becomes fairly clear at some point that the game has more or less forgotten the thrill of scaling rooftops and communal areas in an unbroken sprint. A handful of areas feel downright lazy however, I don't demand that a game's world caters itself to the player's moveset, but it becomes fairly apparent that Faith loses her place at points - namely the ship and carpark shootouts which are neither visually interesting or engaging to navigate. Oftentimes you're thrown into a dense warehouse area filled with props and mezzanines that it becomes a game of finding the red door of progression.

All well and good, I don't really mind all of those temporary roadblocks much. I've even had quite a bit of fun looking up speedrun tech and going back through chapters just to absolutely crush them. The kickglitch makes you feel like you're in the fuckin Matrix or something. One of my biggest gripes is honestly that the game is absolutely gorgeo, but it really doesn't want you to appreciate it. Stand still and admire the view, the incredible lighting and texture work that wouldn't look out of place in the current-gen game roster, and a squad of armed feds will eventually come and pepper you down. You can't just put Nvidia PhysX Technology into your game and not let me fuck around with the curtains.