Portal's Edge

You know the game I’m talking about, right? First-person action/physics puzzler that people first got a look at in 2007, starring a young lady of East Asian descent with specialized footwear? Where the levels are mostly figuring out ways to make it from start to finish intact, and a story that closes with your character, having removed the powerful immediate threat, but facing a totally unknown (and unseen) future, escaping while the song “Still Alive” plays over the credits? No… I mean the other one.

I admit that, in my recent playthrough of 2008’s Mirror’s Edge, I didn't start thinking about the similarities to Portal (2007) until I caught the name of the closing song and it all just... came together. While Portal received something of a stealth launch as part of Valve’s Orange Box compilation a few months before ElectronicArts’ first announcement of Mirror’s Edge, I think it’s safe to say the two games were developed largely independently of each other. Which raises the question… why then? What was going on in electronic gaming that resulted in a niche for games like these… and why was one (the smaller of the two, no less, not that either is particularly long) widely celebrated and is beloved to this day, while the other remains, at best, an “cult classic?”

Coming to Mirror's Edge in 2023 after hearing about (and, admittedly, owning) the game for a number of years was something of an odd experience. Not different enough from the modern idiom to feel truly "retro," but still the product of another time. This actually worked to the game's advantage, selling the idea of a "near future" through this sense of cognitive dissonance. (Alan Moore once said that he went for a similar effect in V For Vendetta - comics, as I am so fond of pointing out, also requiring audience investment to fill out setting and actions out of view.) It also helps that the designers eschewed obvious indicators of a futuristic setting and presented us with a stylized city not too different from the present (2023 or 2008), partly by keeping it largely devoid of vehicles and people. Since the game's signature setting is rooftops and big, empty buildings, there shouldn't be a lot of people, but it works to Mirror's Edge's advantage, conveying a sense of otherness, a separation from a population unwilling (or afraid) to venture outdoors. With the stark white aesthetics, it's easy to fit into in an image of a climate-adapted future where, as has been suggested, light colors are used to mitigate heating from direct sunlight. Naturally, it's not likely that this was intended (climate adaptation wasn't really on sci-fi creators' imaginative radars in the mid 2000s), they were probably just trying to go for a distinctive look and the "iStore Aesthetic" was becoming the rage. Not entirely, though, a lot of games of this era were leaning hard into the "grim'n'grimy" aesthetic, particularly on the console side of things. Portal, interestingly, succeeds in having it both ways, with the clean plastic face Aperture Science presents, but also a (literally) darker, dirtier, more industrial space behind the walls.

The thing that stood out to me about Mirror's Edge, though, that had no equivalent in Portal, was its treatment of police, which felt very modern in a way that, ironically, we're unlikely to see in a major studio game today. Aside from the protagonist's sister (who, while a cop, is framed for murder by... other cops? Mirror's Edge's plot is murky and missing huge amounts of expository information) and her superior (who's... trying to fight the system while pretending to be corrupt? See above) the police, or "Blues," are portrayed strictly antagonistically and, most importantly, lethally violent. A number of levels are you running from police shooting at you, even though they're aware that you're not armed in any way. The game predates police violence entering the larger public consciousness through phone recordings made by witnesses, so it was likely considered dystopian at the time - even though we know the increased scrutiny only highlighted a problem that already existed. Nonetheless, it's almost refreshing to see cops portrayed so unambiguously (one plot point seems to be about replacing the city police force with a private security firm a la Robocop... but in the game, there's no difference between them other than uniform). But thanks to the "thin blue line" reactionary response to calls for addressing police violence, we're unlikely to see any major media risk portraying cops in a broadly negative light nowadays - I can see Electronic Arts quashing the idea immediately.

But it still feels like a number of things got quashed in production, or at least glossed over, in an effort to get a cool-looking game out as quickly as possible. The mid-story plot twist (that Project Icarus involved the Runners... somehow?) is never developed or even brought up again. No reason is given for the bad guys keeping Faith's sister alive, she's simply there for you to go rescue. Thankfully, one area where the Mirror's Edge creators showed particular foresight was the focus on electronic surveillance... even if it was dropped towards the beginning of the game and only reappearing at the very end. It was still a number of years before Edward Snowden's whistleblowing on PRISM and other surveillance, although the most modern context is our growing awareness that, with most of our communications methods under the control of massive corporations, we are all entirely under their discretion and subject to their total willingness to cooperate with law enforcement. Mirror's Edge's central conceit, that every form of electronic communication is compromised  and that physical couriers are the only way to avoid surveillance, feels ever more relevant in our authoritarian, neoliberal era.

Aside from the ethics of experimentation with human test subjects and a general mistrust of corporate power (and the doublespeak employed to hide it), the original Portal doesn't really delve into heavy issues. If Mirror's Edge bit off more than it could thematically chew, Portal kept a clear enough focus to have its cake and eat it, too. It's length is an obvious factor - the game simply isn't trying to tell an overly complex story or build an overly detailed setting. By design, it's quite minimalistic from a storytelling perspective, with the player only learning some broadly sketched details over the course of the game. This left a lot open for the sequel, 2011's Portal 2, to fill out, with the history of Aperture Science, GlaDOS, and the testing facility. But, to be fair, Portal isn't starting out from scratch, either, ostensibly taking place in the Half-Life universe and, more importantly, being included with the first installment of a Half-Life 2 follow-up in the Orange Box. This meant that audiences came to the game with more than a few expecations, namely dark comedy involving mad science and an express goal of messing with players' expectations of how they interact with an electronic game world. The Portal Gun, after all, follows in the physics-bending footsteps of Half-Life 2's Gravity Gun, and the game is expressly about the opportunities it offers in shifting the imagined game world away from the limitations of our own. On its own, this gimmick would have been enough to make Portal a memorable curio, but what made the game hit is that it's uproariously funny, in a way that's never been replicated... possibly even by the game's own sequel. GlaDOS is a perfectly realized AI villain for a game of this length, echoing predecessors like System Shock's SHODAN as a malicious, omnipresent entity, smug in its superiority over humans (specifically the protagonist and, by extension, the players themselves), but GlaDOS added sarcasm mixed with a corporate mindset that brings to mind, for me at least, Mother of the original Alien. Had the character been less well-written or well-acted (it's impossible to overstate the importance of Ellen McLain's portrayal to Portal's success), the effect would have been annoying... instead we got one of the most beloved villains in the history of electronic games.

Mirror's Edge, unfortunately, has no equivalent. The abbreviated cutscenes (done in a completely different style, distancing them from the gameplay sequences) fail to develop most of the characters at all, friend, foe, or in between. The final bad guy's motivations for what he does are unclear. In defter hands, this could have been played to an advantage, with the system itself as the real villain and antagonists simply having become part of it rather than fighting. (They may have been going for that, come to think of it, since the most effective enemies were the nameless Blues enforcing the status quo.) This feels like a particularly missed opportunity in that, again, these games already stand out for how different they were from the first-person pack both in the years leading up to and following their release, and their differences in presentation and gameplay also allowed for differences in storytelling and characterization. After all, we were already engaging with game worlds in a manner other than the standard omnipresent weapon first-person shooters asked us to consider our stand-ins. Both games, I think, are something of a response to staleness in the formula, as well as a sense of playfulness in the presentation of a game world. But the industry was ever-growing, and the annual release strategy of sports titles was becoming more and more the standard. With product moving that fast, and with ever-more money at stake, playfulness and risky experiments were both things to avoid in favor of a straightforward product that delivers exactly what the audience expected. Look what happened, after all, to the other city-traversing game that premiered in 2007 and was often compared to Mirror's Edge. Thankfully, the indie scene was growing - in no small part due to Steam, the distribution network pioneered by Portal creators Valve, but also starting to make inroads to consoles via the PlayStation and Xbox online stores, and these were the kinds of games that picked up the mantle of experimentation and risk. And, showing that the replication approach wasn't limited solely to bigger publishers, these indie studios were where a rash of of knock-off "first-person puzzlers" appeared shortly after the release of Portal 2. (Which, some might argue, is the definitive, if best, Portal knock-off.)

So, in an unexpected way, my experience with Mirror's Edge came with a sense of loss, of imagining what high concept games could have been like with major studio money backing it. The abruptness of the game and the cut corners made it feel like it was itself just on the precipice, like its protagonist Faith on a ledge, trying to leap forward into new ideas and innovation, but instead, as was often the case in my own playthrough, plummeting into the chasm below, rushing ever-faster to the flat, impossibly hard surface of predictability and mediocrity.

- B

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