Picking Every Fight In Mirror's Edge Part II

Who’s disarming who in DICE’s reluctant shooter?

- Jeremy Peel

There’s a decommissioned nuclear bunker just outside York where the walls are painted in calming tones—designed to help its occupants keep their heads as they carried out essential logistics in the days and weeks after a hypothetical strike.

It seems like wishful thinking to hope that a nice shade of paint might make the difference against the weight of the world’s end. Then again, color associations are strong and laden with meaning. When I think of Mirror’s Edge, I tend to remember the gleaming whites and deep blues—the aspects of its palette I associate with serenity and freedom under an open sky. Now that I’m playing through it again as a killer, I’m noticing a whole other part of the color wheel—the angry oranges and block reds that kick in with greater frequency as I punch my way through to the middle of the campaign.

As Faith, I’m a runner who lives in the gaps left by The City’s surveillance society, making highways of its roof spaces and maintenance shafts. But the cop gauntlet of our last instalment made it clear that something has changed— power in The City is shifting, and Faith’s outsider status is in flux.

In fact, right now I’m about as inside as it’s possible to be, in the offices of Robert Pope & Associates. Pope is a mayoral candidate running on an anti-surveillance platform, which might be why his building is full of frosted glass windows, as opposed to the transparent panes found everywhere else. I’m on the 26th floor, Marketing. The carpets are thin and the walls are adorned with TVs, in places nobody would stop to watch them.

FIGHTING WITH MY FAMILY