The bloat is evident on the game’s minimalistic map, which slowly fills with an impregnable swarm of icons that might make you forget this isn’t an Ubisoft game. Climbing puzzles to unlock fast travel, floating collectables in out-of-reach places, allies under attack by guards, safe houses, control towers, delivery missions. Though this new open, explorable city invigorates the game (for reasons I will come to later) the long trail of standardized game design that comes with it almost drowns the cities unique characteristics. This is due, in part, to the transformation of the linear level-based structure of the original game, to the open-world layout of Catalyst.
With the inelegance of a cyberpunk-themed Tumblr, it all feels clumsy, especially when the big bad software program you are trying to stop is called “Reflection” in a city called “Glass” in a game called “Mirror’s Edge.”Īlongside the game’s contrived fictions, the structures of Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst have been aligned with the most standardized features of the its videogame peers. This city is populated with seemingly endless terminology “Grid,” “Beat,” “Omnistat,” “Employ,” “Scrip,” which is further muddied by being fed into awkward camel-case terms like “offGrids,” “outCaste,” “gridLink.” And finally a thin sheen of cyberpunk plot is laid over the whole thing, built around a skeleton of subterranean rebels and an ignorant, hooked-up populace pulled from the body of The Matrix (1999) and clad in ideas so broad that they fail to register as anything other than well-worn tropes. Most of this is done inelegantly: The nameless city is relabeled as “Glass” (as in “city of Glass,” sadly not a Paul Auster reference). It has been suggested that Catalyst is a remake of Mirror’s Edge, or a reboot, but it is in reality a re-alignment of the first game with the recognizable features of a mainstream videogame, a reparation between the most original of its ideas and the most generic features of its medium. Developer DICE’s response to their apparent failure is to flood Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst with unavoidable narrative, with “lore” and exposition. Speak to a Mirror’s Edge fan and they’ll barely remember the ins-and-outs of the plot, the clean lines and smooth movements wiping them from their memory. A nameless city, simple characters, an obvious conspiracy, it allowed the art direction and movement systems of the game to step into the frame. The original Mirror’s Edge (2008) had a kind of purity to its narrative. Yet I can’t help but feel the two cities are somehow connected, as if one was the dream of the other. It has no citizens, and no life, apart from the idling shapes of ever distant figures and the constant drone of unmanned vehicles. It has no history-it could have been built in a day. It is almost nonsensical, built from collections of interiors and exteriors that don’t seem to point towards any kind of civic function. As it stretches towards the horizon it reaches towards simplicity, devolving into white cubes as if reaching back into its own history of white-boxed levels and untextured 3D spaces. This virtual city lacks the complexity of the glacially growing oil slick that is London. There is no dirt, no decay, only pristine progress occasionally sullied by the scuff marks of black-soled running shoes. Instead of crumbling brick and rain-stained concrete there are only glistening volumes and flaring screens. The city of Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst is nothing like London. There is no dirt, no decay, only pristine progress I began to see the city differently, not as a territory of demarcations, but as a single branching corridor of various volumes, a set of rooms that might be traveled in a single path, one to the other, never stopping, like the current in the wire-the signal in the system. I followed them down flights of stairs, into low corridors, slanted and uneven, where rows of doors were marked with pristine private signs, leading to unknown destinations at unknown angles along unknown vectors. Among the fake leather seating and off-white walls, the large canvas prints of Parisian street scenes and the art-deco light fixtures they stood out as uniquely functional objects, unornamented, hidden in plain sight. In my fifth year in London, buried in basements fashioned to appear as French cafés or Italian bistros, I obsessively traced the shapes of silver ducts and pipes, interwoven along the ceilings as if they were circuit boards. The system and interface of their streets. I’ve always been fascinated by the coherence and incoherence of cities.