When I think of the beginning of my teenage years and the games that occupied that space as I grew older I tend to think of a few different ones.
Assassin's Creed, Oblivion at my, at the time, best friend's house (R.I.P. Max), Heavenly Sword, Blazblue Calamity Trigger and most importantly of all I think about Mirror's Edge.
Mirror's Edge upon its first announcement blew me completely away. It came at that time of my early budding explorative amazement with art and different mediums where I would look at an E3 show or trailers online or discussion of different things and I, all wide eyed and still not that aware of what the medium can fully do yet, go like "holy shit VIDEO GAMES huh? What can this medium do? What CAN'T it do? Holy shit! That Killzone 2 trailer is TOTALLY real!"
In the case of Mirror's Edge I'd never seen first person platforming and parkour quite like this. I'd never seen a game try to be this and try to do anything like this. I hyper fixated on it, I thought about its wonderful usage of color in the trailers and gameplay I'd see of it, I remember wanting to know more about the dystopian 1984 ass world it takes place in, I wanted to run, I wanted to jump, I wanted to wahoo even all while radly jump kicking a cop off of a rooftop. I was spellbound by this game made by those wildin Battlefield devs that I didn't know much about at the time and what they were going for. It just hit something for me in a really special kinda way.
Eventually I was able to get it and to say my expectations were met and exceeded would honestly be a complete and total understatement. I played this game to fucking death, I wanted to get levels down, do no gun runs, get the best routes and lines down that I could. It excited me and while I didn't have a lot of people to share that passion with as a kid, I at least had my older sibling who shared that passion with me. I think I even remember kinda wanting to do parkour too but being too afraid of pain to ever bother trying lol.
So for me picking this game up is picking up a lot of memories I guess. Like a sort of time capsule, I remember the couch I played it on, I remember playing it with my sibling and trying to beat each other at the races, I remember playing it late into the night on weekends and my blink and ya miss em summers. I would take it to my Dad's place when we had to go, I would watch videos and runs of the trials other people online were uploading at the time.
I would play some other things too but this game just didn't leave my mind a lot for a good few years. It in a way was a comfort game for me. It made the bad and hard things that I had trouble dealing with and had difficulty fully grasping in my life not seem so bad to me and it gave me the genuine escape I tended to look for in those days. I would always return to it and give it a few more playthroughs. I just absolutely fuckin loved it.
Eventually though I put it down and didn't return to it for a long time. I would get it through a Humble Bundle years ago at this point again on PC but wouldn't really get too deep into it again. I picked up Catalyst too (though I forget if through a sale or bundle years ago too?) and have still only barely played the beginning of it. I think a part of me especially at that later time (about 2015-2018) was trying to get away from these feelings that I associated with bad things from my life that I was only then fully coming to terms with and trying to figure out how to really deal with.
Embarrassing experiences and personal things that with hindsight hits in a way that I don't wanna describe. It hurt to remember these things around that time, dealing with anything quite head on felt fairly impossible to me and this game was tied to a youth that I felt and honestly still feel was somewhat false in ways. Looking at this game I felt a sort of void and I didn't want to feel that anymore. Honestly I just didn’t wanna think about anything, I think in a way I became the void I wanted to escape without realizing it. So I just let it sit there in the pit of my memory, faint nostalgia and personal pains for a long while.
So I couldn't really tell you why I decided to just replay this today. After making videos I tend to like to chill with things I play for myself and review here or on letterboxd or whatever, detached from videos, and just write even more for myself and for all of the wonderful people who follow me and read all of this shit I write. But honestly I don't think that's fully why. I think maybe that wide eyed middle school MCR listening wannabe goth 7th grade self that's in there somewhere carrying all of the good and bad memories alike wanted to play it again and get me to see what I loved so much about it.
Playing this again I see it. The wonderfully smooth parkour that feels like a dream once you get the flow down. The levels that feel so great to learn and replay over and over again, the sense of height and verticality as you look down at the world below you from the high rooftops above. The wonderful art direction, the melancholy yet intense score just all of this comes together that makes something very special to me.
Even its imperfections just make me feel so happy for some reason. The clearly crowbarred in sloppy ass gun combat that doesn't fit what the game is really going for, some of the level design being a bit messy and somewhat flow breaking with the parkour (looking at you sewers) the first real go around, ledge grabs where sometimes I feel like I should've had that jump right and instead I completely plummeted to my death, the kinda empty and messy story. It all just makes up what Mirror's Edge is to me. An innovative testing ground of ideas and ambitions from a team clearly wanting to try something different than what they felt the norm of FPS games were and to me that just makes it special. Like Gravity Rush, even its imperfections add to the overall charm and humanity of the project itself. It just connects with me in a very particular kind of way.
Even though I just knocked the story, I also gotta admit that Faith and her want to get Kate out of the situation she has been tricked into resonates with me in ways that I don't wanna go into. Just know I relate to Faith in a lot of ways and although not the most fleshed out it just hits me in a very particular way.
This whole replay of the game just reminded me of a lot of things too. A lot of people that I miss. The places I haven't been to since the last time I left California. How much time has passed since then. How much time continues to pass as I and the people I know get older. All that I still wanna do with my life and the dreams and goals I have for myself and my future.
I miss those days and late nights on the couch with my sibling doing runs of this game. I miss that couch where I kept doing my best to get the pacifist achievement runs. I miss the couch where I completely beefed the speedruns cause I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be at them. I miss those days and some of those good feelings that come with them but I carry the memories with me forward as I continue to live on, both the good and the bad ones. I live to keep those memories alive, to find joy in the things that younger me never got to experience or always wanted to see or play or go through or listen to.
I guess in a huge roundabout sorta way I’m saying that Mirror’s Edge is why I love video games and art in general. Or it’s at least one of the many reasons. I love connecting to works on such a deep level like this. I love feeling like a piece of art is speaking to me in a way that it may or may not for someone else. I feel like I’m giving back to myself because I’ve needed to in ways and I feel like playing this again has just helped me even see that I needed to reconnect with that in a way. I needed to know that it’s okay to feel all of this right now. All these feelings of doubt within life choices, within where I am and why I’m still here and what matters the most to me, of what I’ve learned and how I’ve grown and changed and continue to grow and change. The fear I have of the future and things that could happen to me or the people around me but my desire to still take it on regardless and try to keep pushing forward regardless.
It’s easy for me to just feel kinda stuck sometimes and even just running through the same thought processes on loop while I’m trying to understand why exactly I’m feeling that way. I didn’t expect this at all or even realize this would happen on this replay after all of these years but I’m really happy that it did what it did for me. Honestly writing this and just sitting with these thoughts did too. Maybe a bit indulgent on my part but fuck it this is Backloggd! We all indulge a little!
At the end of the day I’m honestly just glad to Still be Alive ya know? (Corny I know but I wanted to end on a nice note and I wanted an excuse to link the song! It’s really good! I used to listen to it on my Sansa MP3 Player on my way to school!)
Assassin's Creed, Oblivion at my, at the time, best friend's house (R.I.P. Max), Heavenly Sword, Blazblue Calamity Trigger and most importantly of all I think about Mirror's Edge.
Mirror's Edge upon its first announcement blew me completely away. It came at that time of my early budding explorative amazement with art and different mediums where I would look at an E3 show or trailers online or discussion of different things and I, all wide eyed and still not that aware of what the medium can fully do yet, go like "holy shit VIDEO GAMES huh? What can this medium do? What CAN'T it do? Holy shit! That Killzone 2 trailer is TOTALLY real!"
In the case of Mirror's Edge I'd never seen first person platforming and parkour quite like this. I'd never seen a game try to be this and try to do anything like this. I hyper fixated on it, I thought about its wonderful usage of color in the trailers and gameplay I'd see of it, I remember wanting to know more about the dystopian 1984 ass world it takes place in, I wanted to run, I wanted to jump, I wanted to wahoo even all while radly jump kicking a cop off of a rooftop. I was spellbound by this game made by those wildin Battlefield devs that I didn't know much about at the time and what they were going for. It just hit something for me in a really special kinda way.
Eventually I was able to get it and to say my expectations were met and exceeded would honestly be a complete and total understatement. I played this game to fucking death, I wanted to get levels down, do no gun runs, get the best routes and lines down that I could. It excited me and while I didn't have a lot of people to share that passion with as a kid, I at least had my older sibling who shared that passion with me. I think I even remember kinda wanting to do parkour too but being too afraid of pain to ever bother trying lol.
So for me picking this game up is picking up a lot of memories I guess. Like a sort of time capsule, I remember the couch I played it on, I remember playing it with my sibling and trying to beat each other at the races, I remember playing it late into the night on weekends and my blink and ya miss em summers. I would take it to my Dad's place when we had to go, I would watch videos and runs of the trials other people online were uploading at the time.
I would play some other things too but this game just didn't leave my mind a lot for a good few years. It in a way was a comfort game for me. It made the bad and hard things that I had trouble dealing with and had difficulty fully grasping in my life not seem so bad to me and it gave me the genuine escape I tended to look for in those days. I would always return to it and give it a few more playthroughs. I just absolutely fuckin loved it.
Eventually though I put it down and didn't return to it for a long time. I would get it through a Humble Bundle years ago at this point again on PC but wouldn't really get too deep into it again. I picked up Catalyst too (though I forget if through a sale or bundle years ago too?) and have still only barely played the beginning of it. I think a part of me especially at that later time (about 2015-2018) was trying to get away from these feelings that I associated with bad things from my life that I was only then fully coming to terms with and trying to figure out how to really deal with.
Embarrassing experiences and personal things that with hindsight hits in a way that I don't wanna describe. It hurt to remember these things around that time, dealing with anything quite head on felt fairly impossible to me and this game was tied to a youth that I felt and honestly still feel was somewhat false in ways. Looking at this game I felt a sort of void and I didn't want to feel that anymore. Honestly I just didn’t wanna think about anything, I think in a way I became the void I wanted to escape without realizing it. So I just let it sit there in the pit of my memory, faint nostalgia and personal pains for a long while.
So I couldn't really tell you why I decided to just replay this today. After making videos I tend to like to chill with things I play for myself and review here or on letterboxd or whatever, detached from videos, and just write even more for myself and for all of the wonderful people who follow me and read all of this shit I write. But honestly I don't think that's fully why. I think maybe that wide eyed middle school MCR listening wannabe goth 7th grade self that's in there somewhere carrying all of the good and bad memories alike wanted to play it again and get me to see what I loved so much about it.
Playing this again I see it. The wonderfully smooth parkour that feels like a dream once you get the flow down. The levels that feel so great to learn and replay over and over again, the sense of height and verticality as you look down at the world below you from the high rooftops above. The wonderful art direction, the melancholy yet intense score just all of this comes together that makes something very special to me.
Even its imperfections just make me feel so happy for some reason. The clearly crowbarred in sloppy ass gun combat that doesn't fit what the game is really going for, some of the level design being a bit messy and somewhat flow breaking with the parkour (looking at you sewers) the first real go around, ledge grabs where sometimes I feel like I should've had that jump right and instead I completely plummeted to my death, the kinda empty and messy story. It all just makes up what Mirror's Edge is to me. An innovative testing ground of ideas and ambitions from a team clearly wanting to try something different than what they felt the norm of FPS games were and to me that just makes it special. Like Gravity Rush, even its imperfections add to the overall charm and humanity of the project itself. It just connects with me in a very particular kind of way.
Even though I just knocked the story, I also gotta admit that Faith and her want to get Kate out of the situation she has been tricked into resonates with me in ways that I don't wanna go into. Just know I relate to Faith in a lot of ways and although not the most fleshed out it just hits me in a very particular way.
This whole replay of the game just reminded me of a lot of things too. A lot of people that I miss. The places I haven't been to since the last time I left California. How much time has passed since then. How much time continues to pass as I and the people I know get older. All that I still wanna do with my life and the dreams and goals I have for myself and my future.
I miss those days and late nights on the couch with my sibling doing runs of this game. I miss that couch where I kept doing my best to get the pacifist achievement runs. I miss the couch where I completely beefed the speedruns cause I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be at them. I miss those days and some of those good feelings that come with them but I carry the memories with me forward as I continue to live on, both the good and the bad ones. I live to keep those memories alive, to find joy in the things that younger me never got to experience or always wanted to see or play or go through or listen to.
I guess in a huge roundabout sorta way I’m saying that Mirror’s Edge is why I love video games and art in general. Or it’s at least one of the many reasons. I love connecting to works on such a deep level like this. I love feeling like a piece of art is speaking to me in a way that it may or may not for someone else. I feel like I’m giving back to myself because I’ve needed to in ways and I feel like playing this again has just helped me even see that I needed to reconnect with that in a way. I needed to know that it’s okay to feel all of this right now. All these feelings of doubt within life choices, within where I am and why I’m still here and what matters the most to me, of what I’ve learned and how I’ve grown and changed and continue to grow and change. The fear I have of the future and things that could happen to me or the people around me but my desire to still take it on regardless and try to keep pushing forward regardless.
It’s easy for me to just feel kinda stuck sometimes and even just running through the same thought processes on loop while I’m trying to understand why exactly I’m feeling that way. I didn’t expect this at all or even realize this would happen on this replay after all of these years but I’m really happy that it did what it did for me. Honestly writing this and just sitting with these thoughts did too. Maybe a bit indulgent on my part but fuck it this is Backloggd! We all indulge a little!
At the end of the day I’m honestly just glad to Still be Alive ya know? (Corny I know but I wanted to end on a nice note and I wanted an excuse to link the song! It’s really good! I used to listen to it on my Sansa MP3 Player on my way to school!)
Reviewed on Feb 06, 2023
11 Comments
I smiled a lot reading through this.
@Weatherby I wasn't at all even expecting to write something like this about it or for the game to leave me with the feelings that it did honestly. I just started writing and the words for it just kinda spilled out and here we are lmao. That's rad! I hope ya dig it whenever ya end up getting around to it. I feel like this is the type of game where people either really fuck with it or don't but I could have the read on the reception way wrong due to my own biases and shit.
@Vee I'm glad! Honestly by the end I did too. Like parts of this was thinking about some shit but a lot of it, especially when writing about the game itself, was just nice to write out so I'm glad it made someone else smile too!
@Vee I'm glad! Honestly by the end I did too. Like parts of this was thinking about some shit but a lot of it, especially when writing about the game itself, was just nice to write out so I'm glad it made someone else smile too!
I owned this on the 360 a few years ago, but then bought them again once they were transferred over to Steam back in 2019. I liked what I played thus far, but for some reason have yet to finish it. Should get back to it one day.....
It's definitely a pretty easy playthrough at like 4 hours which is nice. I'm debating on if I wanna dive into Catalyst finally after doing this just to finally do it but we'll seeeeee.
The music and bright sharp colour aesthetic of the first trailer I saw hit me like a crossbo bolt the first time I saw it. In a generation of brown games this just stood out as something so fresh.
I also spent time learning and perfecting the speed running, no guns just efficient paths and movement. And yes Still Alive is a gorgeous track!
Great review, thanks for sharing.
I also spent time learning and perfecting the speed running, no guns just efficient paths and movement. And yes Still Alive is a gorgeous track!
Great review, thanks for sharing.
@Fallen Grace Yeah for me it's like especially with where that gen was going with the oversaturation of brown bloom and gloom shooters it was always nice to return to Mirror's Edge and just dive into how colorful even its most purposefully sterile looking environments were. It's just so refreshing every single time I've gone back to it. Thank you!
@MPK92 Thank you! Yeah I'm playing Catalyst right now finally actually and I wish we got more from what they were trying to do here. It's solid and honestly I think a good base for a sequel to improve upon but there's no way in hell they're gonna let DICE do shit with this ever again. It's such a bummer.
@MPK92 Thank you! Yeah I'm playing Catalyst right now finally actually and I wish we got more from what they were trying to do here. It's solid and honestly I think a good base for a sequel to improve upon but there's no way in hell they're gonna let DICE do shit with this ever again. It's such a bummer.
This truly feels like the frutiger aero of games, weird sense of techy nostalgia from the 7th generation
Oh yeah it absolutely gives me the vibes of like a 2000's Windows XP Background/Website Aesthetic of that era. Just something strangely and radly mid 2000's Razer flip phone poppy about its sterility.
This is a great piece! I added it to my list of favorite reviews. Thanks for sharing!
@cowboyjosh Thank you so much! I'm really honored to be on a list like that! Glad ya enjoyed it :)
Weatherby
1 year ago
I just remember this getting announced and the general feeling being "oh they're finally doing a proper-ass parkour" game. I recently bought a copy for the 360 (I sold my PS3 copy years and years and years ago) so eventually I'm going to get back to this one.