The most recent person to come up with that joke, all things considered

If you know, then you know that that mirror does nothing for Alice Thymefield. She’s still asymmetrical (T^T)

You might be familiar with parkour-based media in TV and video games if you grew up with the likes of Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, God of War, Prototype, or the subject of this post: Mirror’s Edge.

And its sequelboot: Catalyst.

I had played the original and seen gameplay of it about a decade ago as Catalyst had recently released at the time and my read was that it was something akin to Assassin’s Creed and Dying Light, though it’s among several influences for Dying Light, at least the original. Catalyst is the cousin. The premise is that in a time where the state turns into authoritarian Singapore and the media is so controlled the Fun Police need to write your news articles for you, what gets them up and do the physical part of their jobs is a loose confederation of runners who use the ancient art of parkour to weaponize the blind spots of this security apparatus.

For the plot, the protagonist Faith Connors has a sister who’s unjustly framed for the death of an opposition politician. Chasing the shadows of all these leads brings her to the major players in a crackpot conspiracy theory that would’ve died on 4chan in 2006, and been vindicated in absentia in 2019. And the one drum I’ve beaten before is that the criminal knows the victim approximately 90% of the time. In layman’s terms: the average crime is an inside job. Including this one:

Massive spoiler for the game? Well, it’s old enough to graduate high school and then start looking into higher education, and multiple people have recorded it online years ago so this one ain’t a spoiler very much. In fact, the plot itself is… not very interesting. I’m pretty sure I can craft a better one with some more intrigue, but not to be too harsh it is an interesting fit for the setting and the setting being what it is sadly locks the game into the type of anti-authoritarian framing it mostly only uses. The benevolent dictatorship hides its dictatorship behind benevolence; yeah, countless regimes have done that already, going as far back as Rome. And Pearl Jam captured it best in 1998.

Channel: PearljamVEVO, Song: Do the Evolution (1998)

Looking back, it seems like the latter half of the ’90s was asking questions we didn’t know we’d need an answer to buy now.

From a gameplay perspective, Mirror’s Edge’s controls demand a certain style of precision. It’s not as terrible as Red Ninja, and it may just be me playing a 2008 game on a PC I built in November 2024, but a lot of the parkour suffers from a lack of polish. On PC at least, I don’t have any strong memories of playing the console version (I don’t think I ever did), but these days, the game can’t even run on modern hardware. I was able to run it on the better of my laptops, the one where the letter E decided to choose when to work before moving it to the giant rig on my desk, and the frame rate this time around seems to be tumbling into the depths of hell. It drops to 1 and I’m not doing a f[game menu SFX]king thing.

I’m not even at a part of the game that would put the graphics card and CPU into maximum overdrive like that, but the internet and Steam reviews are telling me to blame this on EA again, and I don’t think I can trust that because the internet is also telling me that Attack On Titan, My Dress Up Darling, and Chainsaw Man all rub elbows with the likes of William Butler Yeats, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.

No matter what, the fact remains that by technology or by game design, Mirror’s Edge utterly defeated me. It f[bowling]ked me up and spat me out. Maybe it’s a minor setback though and I can play it periodically like the rest of my Steam library.

And since I brought up Catalyst, a quick look on that game’s review section on Steam, it seems EA shut the servers off some time ago and stopped supporting the game… allegedly! Allegedly… they’d been skirting around the Worst Company in America label by the time Catalyst came out, but some developers had proven themselves much worse than EA following the “surprise mechanics” debacle.

All things considered, the reasons to hate EA lie with the games that came after this for a brief period of time. For what the games look like today, the only tragedy is that they don’t run as well as they used to and that bugbear I’ve been bringing up is making the rounds again, and it’s games that lose support and die in hospice care. Now me owning it for myself may mean that it’s somewhat safe from digital deletion, but that’s largely only for me. Once I better improve my programming abilities, I’m leaving copies of the PC version up for permanent download for everyone. Or I’ll just do what I normally do and direct you lot to the friendly neighborhood pirate site. Also for free.

Honestly, I thought I’d put a lot more into this but the technical difficulties left me to call it quits. And I hate that feeling so much! But I don’t want to feel like this game sent me packing, I know there’s a way to get past all the technical difficulties; I just haven’t found it yet. Soon…

So what is this then? A recommendation? A dissuasion? Well, I’ve played better parkour platformers and I’ve played worse. God of War, Dying Light, and early Assassin’s Creed are three proud stallions, but Red Ninja and some of the Avatar: The Last Airbender games can net you a discount on the way to the glue factory once the horses take the double-barrel to the back of the head. Be that as it may, this is still worth preserving for the archives.