It was as if DICE felt it had the Portal vote all tied up, and needed to broaden its appeal to sway some undecideds. (Sample lyrics: "Ooh, I'm still alive/I'm still alive.")Īfter the initial trailer, curiously, every Mirror's Edge press release reflected design decisions shockingly unlike Portal's. Until, of course, they set lyrics to the official Mirror's Edge theme song and called it "Still Alive". It was all supposition DICE itself never drew the comparison directly. Early previews suggested that radio communication was an important element, implying, agreeably, that the story would be delivered primarily through voice-over. It seemed like a reasonable assumption, then to expect that this minimalism would result in a gameplay-endemic storytelling model much like Portal.
Where Portal was the definitive first-person action puzzle comedy, Mirror's Edge would likewise be the first-person free-running platformer, capturing the adrenaline-rush primacy of movement and physicality like few games had before it.īoth are minimalist in their design, featuring sparse, bright environments and no HUD. Otherwise, they were both first-person games with no emphasis on combat, instead preferring environmental puzzles. Obviously, they shared a female player character and a vivid color palette - and it's unfortunate that those are so rare as to immediately link the games together. It invited favorable comparisons to Portal (perhaps unintentionally), as both games appeared to have a visual and a gameplay aesthetic in common. Clearly it was something different: artistically striking, and an original first-person take on a familiar third-person genre. The debut trailer in May quickly endeared itself to the constituents of Internet City. These things have a very fragile lifespan. This is one of our last opportunities to talk about that process while it's still current and hopefully still interesting - although Mirror's Edge itself will be last-gen and boring as early as next January, so pretty soon nobody will be talking about the actual game, either. Mirror's Edge has been released, and from my perspective, it ran a very strange campaign.
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