The Everycity: Mirror’s Edge
Everything that we experience, we experience through our eyes.
We have whole bodies, but we practically exist just in the front of our heads. We see ourselves in parts – our hands, our feet, only the front of our body, never our backs. And despite our supposed familiarity with our bodies, we don’t even know how we look like or how we move, apart from external implements, like mirrors. So we live and move and have our being.
It’s therefore surprising why no one has ever done something like Mirror’s Edge before. The first-person genre of games has been established for more than a good decade, but never have our virtual hands ever been used other than for holding weapons. This time – after all this time – we can palpably run, breathe, hear the wind in our ears. We hold our breath with every leap.
Looking across the starkly sunlit skyline, we almost remember a world we’ve all known at one time or other, before we decided to grow up and stick to the familiar and the streets. That world where walls do not necessarily surround us, but sometimes stands under us. A world where we move at dizzying heights, without actually taking on wings. It’s a freedom that’s ironically possible only in the most crowded and built-up of cities.
Even the game’s sparse population – the occasional policeman – are reminiscent of that experience of violation when we suddenly realise we’re not alone in our sanctuary. The fellow rooftop sojourner. A voyeur, through a distant window. Or that security guard we thought evaded when we sneaked across the lobby, left far behind on the ground floor.
Mirror’s Edge is almost a condemnation of the pedestrian – people who are familiar with the streets and shopfronts, yet alienated from those things that should be known to natives of the land – the alleys, the secret route, the rooftops – the stuff of urban life and its legends.
Mirror’s Edge not only does it make pick up the controller “just one more time”, it also makes me want to put it down, and change, and go for a run.
