When it works, it's in part because of the closing of the doors. Even the disasters come on like sensory victories, each plummet to the streets after a missed ledge building a wonderfully exhilarating kind of terror within you before the unseen impact. It was wish fulfilment, really, like all the best magic: here's what life on the rooftops looks like, here's what the life of a champion gymnast feels like. The game was trying to take a viewpoint most commonly employed to put you looking down the sites of a gun, and expand its potential in every direction, creating a platforming gauntlet in which you could jump, roll, and generally fling yourself across the landscape without ever leaving the confines of your character's own skull. Mirror's Edge goes to such lengths to convince you of your presence in this world because, at the time, it was trying to do something that hadn't really been attempted before.
#MIRRORS EDGE WINDOWS#
You're really here, you're really doing this, the game seems to be whispering, and then at the end, a leap onto the skids of a chopper offers a glimpse of yourself in the mirrored windows of a superscraper. Its first level is a case in point: a first-person race along rooftops and through office backways, where each time your eyes drift down you see your feet working away beneath you, and every grab at a ledge is framed by your grasping hands. But Mirror's Edge makes the connection between magic and game design unmissable. I've been amazed, over the years, by the sheer number of designers and developers I've encountered who have Thurston prints tacked on the cubicle walls, or who insist on keeping a pack of Bicycle Black Ghost playing cards in a jacket pocket. Yes: Mirror's Edge knows a thing or two about closing doors.Īll games are illusions to some extent. Closing doors is about creating a path for the audience, about leading the audience right past all the things that will make them gasp with delight, while making sure they have the best views of the action. Closing the doors is about shutting down an audience's errant curiosity, answering their questions before they've realised they want to ask them, and directing them away from the things that will ruin the trick. Magicians like to talk about closing the doors: it's a part of the secret repertoire that builds successful illusions, every bit as crucial as fake shuffles, palms, and forces.
#MIRRORS EDGE FULL#
Doors you aim for at full pelt, doors you pound through, punch through, the clatter of collision accompanying the blinding whiteness that greets you on the other side, before your eyes have time to adjust and before the game pulls you onwards.Īnd it's perverse, really, that Mirror's Edge does such lasting service to the humble act of opening a door when the game itself is all about closing them. It's the doors: the red doors, each one opened not with a polite survival-horror twist of a creaky handle, but with a squeeze of the right trigger and an almighty slam. The best thing about Mirror's Edge isn't the parkour, the sense of movement and momentum, or even the sharp, bleached-out world that you're moving through beneath a vast sky of Sega blue.
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