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Docs/References

Mirror's Edge and Mirror's Edge Catalyst

What it is: Mirror's Edge (DICE / EA, 2008, Unreal Engine 3) is a first-person parkour game. You play Faith, a runner carrying messages across the rooftops of a clean, controlled city. Mirror's Edge Catalyst (2016, Frostbite) moved it to an open city.

Movement#

  • Momentum-based running: speed builds up over a few steps and is lost when you hit things badly.
  • Wall-runs, wall-climbs, wall-turns (jump off a wall backwards), slides, vaults, ledge grabs, coil jumps (lift your legs over obstacles), and rolls on landing to keep speed after a drop.
  • One button for "up" and one for "down" do most of it: context-sensitive actions, easy to start with.
  • Combat exists, but the best runs avoid it.

Look and feel#

  • Runner vision: objects you can use (pipes, ramps, doors) turn red, so the line is readable at speed. You can turn it off.
  • A white, clean, architectural world with strong primary colours, high-contrast sunlight and soft bounced light. It still looks great today because of art direction, not polygon counts.
  • A body in first person: you see your arms and legs. Camera bob, the arms swinging faster with speed, wind noise and the edges of the screen blurring sell the speed.

Timing and community#

  • Time trials with star ratings and online leaderboards. Speedrun ghosts of other players to race against.
  • Catalyst added user-created time trials (place a start and finish in the city and share them).
  • A long-running speedrun community, despite the game's slower, more scripted design.

What we take#

  • The look: clean architecture, strong light, calm colour. Readability over noise.
  • Runner vision as an option for the lines, next to path lines and drop-in ratings.
  • The body: first-person arms and legs, a landing roll and speed effects. Purely visual: they must never change the physics.
  • Player-made time trials: a start and a finish anywhere, which our timer gates and the in-game builder give us.

What Airtime does differently#

  • No context-sensitive one-button moves. The physics stays manual, and the skill is in the input.
  • Fighting isn't the main path: Faith can disarm and fight. In Airtime, some story sections give you a gun, but gunplay stays secondary to movement.

Also worth taking#

  • Being chased by armed police while you mostly run: Mirror's Edge's best moments. That's the model for our story chase chapters (world/story.md).