In the real world, the difference between ‘free running’ and ‘parkour’ is one of style and adventure versus efficiency and rehearsal. In Mirror’s Edge, it’s the difference between appearance and reality.

DICE’s largely gun-less firstperson action game is deceptive, and divisive. It features a world just begging for open, meditative traversal, but one where the price of exploration is certain death. For longer than most people care to play it, its hyper-athletic heroine spends much of her time bouncing off dead ends and ledges into bullets and fatal plummets. Its immersive POV provides extreme physicality at the cost of physical and spatial awareness. It goes simple on story and character yet lacks the levity or zest of a Jet Set Radio. How much of all this is intentional is unclear.

I’ve had numerous arguments about it, all ending in stalemate. People, myself included, feel that their reactions to this game say so much about them – that they’re hip enough to ‘get it’, sharp enough to question it, principled enough to value it, or hardcore enough to master it – that there’s simply no give and take. True to its name, Mirror’s Edge shows us ourselves.

For my part, I wish it had been more like Core Design’s Free Running, which despite a malfunctioning camera feels like a truer expression of what DICE’s game could have been about: finding your own path. The story and cutscenes in Mirror’s Edge are pretty shit, but what’s worse is that they confuse the spirit of street athletics with the science, the tyrannies, of linear game design. Magnified tenfold by marketing, they create a crisis of expectation.

None of which undermines the game’s beauty, which endures despite a relatively old Unreal codebase. I saw those first screenshots and asked my colleagues, ‘They’re bullshots, right?’ But of course they weren’t. DICE, however much it’s grown since becoming EA’s flagship studio, is still that Nordic demoscene veteran, product of a computer art movement famous for pushing hardware to its limits. You’ve seen Battlefield 3, right?

It follows that Mirror’s Edge art director Johannes Soderqvist is a self-professed Atari ST demoscene alumnus. You should definitely check out Psygnosis PS1 game Kula World to see his dreamlike debut, which you can download for PS3 from the PlayStation Store. Soderqvist’s art team, furthermore, was the X factor in making Criterion’s Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit “something beautiful”. I will interview this obviously brilliant man at the earliest opportunity.

What we know from previous interviews is that with Mirror’s Edge, Soderqvist and his team wanted to capture the feeling of travelling through a world. The striking contrasts of dark and light, interior and exterior, made hyper-real by a stunning use of colour. He said this to IGN:

“When it comes to specific colours we have a limited palette: red, orange, yellow, blue and green. Red is used for the runner vision. Orange and yellow is often used to subconsciously lead the player or simply because it looks great in direct sunlight. Blue is used when colour is wanted but without leading the player. Blue also looks good in shadows. Green is practically banned from exteriors and is only used in interiors.”

The other major ‘trick’, he explains, the thing that separates Mirror’s Edge from almost all other Unreal games, is that is eschews the “high frequency information” of normal and specular maps. In a gameworld almost bleached by sunlight, the result is a game of crisp, flowing textures and purposely stylised materials. Soderqvist is a “big fan of Wipeout“. Go figure.

One of my biggest frustrations with the game is that it seldom provides free movement between the city’s highest and lowest points. From the rooftops, the white-box vehicles scurrying about at ground level are just as inaccessible as the Runners’ own remote kingdom. It makes characters like Faith feel imprisoned. The game’s choice of locations cares little, however, plucking two unlikely landmarks from the real world, one the epitome of sky-piercing optimism, the other a marvel of secret subterranean industry.

The first is the Shard, a striking skyscraper which shares name and likeness with an actual development in London’s Bridge Quarter, due for completion in 2012. Designed by international architect Renzo Piano, this remarkable structure’s entirely glazed exterior reflects the colour and patterns of the world around it, harmonising the city’s skyline. Mirror’s Edge doesn’t just steal this idea years before anyone could actually build it, it gets it.

The second is G-Cans, the equally incredible city of pipes and waterways underneath Japan’s Saitama Prefecture, affectionately dubbed ‘the world’s largest drain’. Built to protect Tokyo from flooding during the monsoon seasons, its tunnels run for over 100km, feature several 213-foot-tall silos, and culminate in the 580-foot-long tank known as the ‘Underground Temple’. It’s a lot less gloomy in Mirror’s Edge, doubtless by necessity. Its awesome scale is preserved, though, highlighting the urban infiltration aspects that owe themselves to the game’s art.

A few things to note about these images themselves. Many were taken while I was mucking about with running games in a Cinemascope aspect ratio (or thereabouts), which is quite tough to achieve in Mirror’s Edge as the game is anamorphic, enforcing a 16:9 frame. So I had to use an FOV hack by the illustrious Racer_S. It’s something I should more often as it’s simple enough to crop the images for desktop use, and the results in games like this one speak for themselves. I’ve uploaded them as-is for now, but if the demand is there I can always do a 16:9-only version.

Then there’s the menu map, that gorgeous relief model of the city that floats behind the game’s title screen. Being all-wrapped-up in Unreal Kismet script, it’s normally inaccessible. Just as well, then, that DICE left the game’s map editor in there so I could hack it all out and explore.

The last thing is DLC map pack ‘Pure’, an abstract world extrapolated from the game’s actual design, not the loftier aspirations of its story or city. Despite being cobbled together from ransacked map parts and textures, it is every bit as artful as the game proper, giving Soderqvist’s (by no means exclusive) love of Syd Mead, in particular, a playground of its own.