12/24/2022 0 Comments Games like mirrors edgeIn Mirror’s Edge, the colour red stands out from the rest of the world. Not only is red more extremely noticeable, it also has another strength. It’s why so many businesses have red signs as opposed to blue ones - they grab attention. If you want to draw someone’s attention, a portrait painter once taught me, use red. It’s a lesson I learned quite some time ago from an art teacher. Red, of course, is the most attractive colour to the human brain. At one point in the game, one of the news feeds in an elevator mentions that one of the ways to spot a runner is to note their fondness for the colour red. In this case, we can climb those pipes, so we see them as red. One of the cooler mechanics in Mirror’s Edge is something called “runner vision,” where objects that help you progress are highlighted in red. Because you can see through chain link fences but not climb them, the world feels a lot larger and more open while providing a realistic reason for not being able to go places you might otherwise be able to go.įortunately, to get past this fence, there’s usually a pipe you can climb. Do something that lets you have flow.”ĭICE could have lined their playing fields with regular walls, but doing so would have made the game’s maps feel more claustrophobic. For a game that’s all about flow, chain link fences wouldn’t be that fun to climb, so Mirror’s Edge cuts you off by sticking barbed wire at the top of a lot of them. If you’ve ever climbed a chain-link fence, you know how clumsy and awkward you can feel while doing it. There’s barbed wire everywhere, discouraging you from climbing the chain-link fences that define your boundaries. In a game about free running, a dystopia that targets free runners makes a lot of mechanical sense. Speakers in the city streets blare warnings that attempt to frame you for someone’s murder. This is not a pleasant place, especially for a runner like Faith, the game’s player-character. The city in Mirror’s Edge is too clean to feel human and too caged by barbed wire - even on the rooftops you often run across - to feel welcoming. In Mirror’s Edge’s second chapter, a former runner, Jacknife, has information that’s crucial to you. Like The Silent Cartographer in Halo, it’s representative of the rest of game: from its successes in both flow and breathtaking leaps to its failures, namely its gunfights. Out of all the levels in Mirror’s Edge, Jacknife is my favourite. What matters in Mirror’s Edge comes up during all the running you do - the choices about how to handle individual motions, a stride, a vault and a lunging grasp at a time. Even the objectives - the things you’d use your gaming skills to run to - amounted to simple barely-interactive cutscenes. The story, one about a dystopian future and couriers being its last hope for survival, was paper-thin. With Mirror’s Edge, the destination was the journey itself. How you got to where you were going could be interesting, but your decisions rarely boiled down to more than “I want to go in that basic direction” or “I want to get to that particular spot.” Much of the meaning in these games could be found in the stories that emerged along the way, but even then, the gameplay loop was: approach, assess, engage. Players make their way to an encounter, decide how to deal with it, and then engage. In 2008, shooters largely focused on a kind of ‘start and stop’ gameplay.
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