Making Faith and her friends feel like a bunch of idealistic but slightly petulant kids is the right move for this game, where the solution to every problem is either petty vandalism (you can rip apart municipal electronics for a boy who spends his time painting "YOU ARE SLAVES" on city walls in ‘90s bubble letters) or breaking and entering. You could replace many of the mission goals with 'Stick it to the Man' Despite their disagreements, they’re all allied against the "families," a handful of dynastic corporations who rule the city’s easily pacified masses. Faith Connors is an orphan recently out of a juvenile detention facility, attempting to reclaim her place in a gang of couriers known as "the Cabal." Her compatriots, who wouldn’t look out of place in a suburban skate park, have names like "Icarus" and "Plastic." She’s mentored by aging countercultural agitators who run groups like "Black November," an underground militia that missed its true calling as an opening act for My Chemical Romance. Catalyst presents a more detailed and coherent world, but it’s still one where you could replace many of the actual mission goals with "stick it to the man" and lose little in the process. The first Mirror’s Edge subscribed to a kind of mall-punk politics that treated making a city too clean as self-evidently evil, barely bothering to explain its characters’ motivations. It’s a world designed purely for ease of running, not any kind of realistic human occupation - the ultimate evolution of global "supermodern" architecture, in which buildings become ahistorical spaces not to live in, but to move through. Where most video game cyberpunk revels in grime and neon, the City is dystopia by way of Ikea: a sprawling landscape of tasteful porcelain blocks, their interiors all decorated in the same flat colors and hyper-minimalist quasi-furniture, like low-budget coworking facilities or trendy hostel lobbies. Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is set an unknown number of years into the future, in a glistening metropolis dubbed the City of Glass. Instead, it’s marked by a combination of high energy, moral simplicity, and earnest anti-consumerist cynicism - a desire to ditch the dull business of a respectable life not to imagine something greater, but simply to revel in freedom of movement at its margins. But it’s not the bloodthirsty, sociopathic fantasy that we tend to mean when we deride certain games as power trips for teenage boys. And while I will never make the perilous real-world leap from my world to theirs, I feel like I’ve done something similar when I trip along the edges of skyscrapers in Mirror’s Edge Catalyst.Īt its core, Catalyst, a very loose prequel to the cult free-running video game Mirror’s Edge, is joyously adolescent.
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The rooftop seems like a natural environment for them, a place that exists outside the normal architecture of the city. When the temperature rises in New York, I start to look for teens on the roof across from my apartment - sitting on the crumbling cement, smoking joints, talking late into the night.