Mirror's Edge

I bought Mirror's Edge (ME) during the 2012 Steam Holiday Sale the 21st of December for only 2,49 €. Thinking about this before even playing it I knew I'd get true value for money with this purchase. I knew this mainly because, before having bought it myself, I heard about it through my personal friend SimoensS who owns it on his Xbox 360. Having engaged in this game before with friends, I never played it from the very beginning nor did I pay attention to the story or the graphics. The few times I played it, the controller got handed to me after a friend died during a run that lasted maybe five or ten seconds. Not doing much better myself, the controller got grabbed from my hands just to see the next guy fail just as hard as me or the one before me.

I installed the game on my pc when I ran into some technical difficulties while starting the game concerning black screens. After twenty minutes of googling I finally found a solution to this infuriating problem. Having fixed it, I was psyched to finally play the shit out of it! I wanted to be prepared for the next time the controller landed into my palms, little did I know there is no mastering the edge. Even during the tutorial I had a feeling I might not complete this game without putting an enormous amount of time in it, but with a totaling time of just a little over five hours I'm quite satisfied.

The difficulty slope of the game goes up rather fast, but I quickly figured out ME needs this to keep the constant pressure it exhorts on its player to keep him/her motivated to keep going. This constant drive made the game both majorly enjoyable and at times enormously infuriating. Pushing you into unwanted corners, forcing you to make mistakes over and over again. I couldn't endure more than two chapters of this rush at a time, just because I would start shaking like I was hopped up on caffeine, wanting to get out, get away from or get into some building. After day one of playing ME my brain started noticing everything flashy red. After day three, during a car drive to the local hardware store, taking a route I've passed over a hundred times, I saw a red pipe on a building and nearly missed a turn just staring at it thinking "I can get up there". Not a single game adapted my way of thinking in such a profound way over such a short period of in-game time. This whole brain altering experience tells me something about how strongly we are influenced by fight-or-flight reactions in our daily life without even noticing it. A strange conclusion after playing any game and a very strong accomplishment for this very game!

During my time playing ME I never felt like the surroundings were insufficiently rendered nor did I ever get sidetracked looking at some glitch which, for me, means the graphics are a success. The cutscene art is drawn in what I personally think is an awesome art style making the story extremely watchable, only adding to the game in total. It's a pity the endscene leaves the main protagonist on a roof admiring the city around her when that same roof was crawling with bad guys armed to the teeth only seconds before that. A small error that should not have such a big impact, but for some reason, I just can't overcome. It leaves me with this misplaced feeling of incompleteness that the game doesn't deserve.