I played some Mirror's Edge and it made me feel melancholy about the passage of time

Yesterday afternoon I decided to play a little bit of Mirror's Edge. I was aware of the game when it came out and saw some videos and coverage, but I never got around to playing it because it looked like the kind of game I might enjoy but wouldn't really love. At some point I picked up a cheap digital copy on Xbox and last year I booted it up on a whim and played a couple levels, thinking it was interesting but that a lot of its ideas had been incorporated into later games. I ended up putting it down to play other things.

A couple days ago I picked it back up and decided I might as well finish it, since it's short and I hadn't had a bad time with it previously. I've been picking away at it, a level at a time, and while my opinion on it hasn't changed, my emotional reaction has.

Mirror's Edge doesn't really hold up, and it makes me sad.

At first glance Mirror's Edge seems to hold up pretty well. The bright, clean, stylized visuals are still striking, since they rely on color contrast and draw distances rather than highly detailed models or textures. The Xbox Series X version cleans up the resolution and frame rate enough that it doesn't have that "barely holding together" feel that a lot of 7th gen games did. The free running system is well designed, and while I would call the controls a bit clunky by today's standards they still work okay. It's fun to find a line and follow it, and to chain moves together to get past obstacles. Scanning the environment to figure out the movement lines makes for a fun sort of puzzle gameplay. The story is boring but who really cares about that in a platformer? All of the pieces are good enough to be enjoyable.

The problem is with the level of polish and the small inconveniences. There's not a lot of combat in Mirror's Edge, but what there is feels pretty bad. This is intentional in the sense that the game wants to incentivize movement, not fighting, but at times you're expected to fight and it never feels good. Punching feels bad, disarms are canned animations that take forever, and the shooting is clunky and unsatisfying.

Movement is better, but as you are expected to complete more and more difficult challenges you start to feel the lack of polish, which is really just an artifact of the time the game was made. Wall running can be touchy to trigger. When you try and grab a swing bar from above it is too easy to land on it with your feet and not actually latch on. The camera is placed so that you tend to want to jump earlier than you should to get maximum distance off an edge. On their own these are all minor inconveniences but put together they make the game feel rough around the edges.

Then there's the level design. It's just not up to modern standards. There are too many hand railings that are a pain to deal with if you want to get a good wall run going. There are a lot of dead ends that may add to immersion but take away from flow. Marking of where to go next is inconsistent, sometimes clear and sometimes very much not. Again, none of it is terrible, but especially combined with the small inconveniences of the movement it makes the game a bit of a chore to play. It's not that it's too difficult, because it's certainly not, it's that it's too hard to keep up momentum and too easy to get annoyed and frustrated.

Part of this is the design of the game (it's meant to reward smooth running and multiple playthroughs once you know the lines) but part of it's just age. There are things that designers know now about how to design environments and how to make controls "feel" good that they didn't back then. 2008 was only a bit more than a decade after the launch of the PlayStation, closer to that than it is to today. They'd figured out a lot about 3D movement, but not everything yet.

And as I played the game I thought back to the time in my life when it came out and I was reading and hearing about it. The apartment I lived in. The hopes and feelings I had back then. The state of the world and the relationships I had. And my inability to connect with the game made me feel a small connection to that time and those memories start to dissolve. I often use games as a way to connect to the past. They trigger memories and feelings of where I was in my life when I played them or read about them or whatever. It's similar to how a lot of people feel about music (and game music certainly has that effect as well.)

But time has marched on and early 7th gen games feel outdated now. They're not all bad or unplayable, but they're old. And I'm old too. It's that feeling of realizing that you put something off so long that it's not really an option anymore. I can play Mirror's Edge and appreciate aspects of it, but it will never be like if I played it in 2008. I don't regret not playing it then, I played other games with that time, most of which I enjoyed more than I would have Mirror's Edge, but I made those choices and now I live with this, very small, consequence.

Obviously these feelings are about a lot more than "old game has aged, film at 11" but the strength of my reaction surprised me. I played through the level, cursed at a couple frustrating parts, enjoyed the parts where I was able to flow better, and moved on with my day, but the feeling lingered. The passage of time is inexorable. Games, especially single player games, seem like they can help buck that trend by crystalizing worlds and times forever in digital amber. But even they degrade over time. For better or worse we cannot go back to 2008. That's the nature of life. Mirror's Edge just held a mirror up to that for me, and it was one I didn't enjoy looking into.