Interesting Mechanics

Mirrors Edge developed by EA DICE and published by Electronic Arts

A little while back I picked up a copy of Mirror's Edge on Steam. I was interested in having a look at the setting, the story line, and one specific aspect of the game play - parkour. Mirror's Edge is all about running around a near future city that has a definite dystopian touch (just read the "news reports" that appear on screens around the place), but this running isn't down down on street level. Oh no, you run and jump and climb around the rooftops - leaping from building to building, grabbing pipes to shimmy up or down, balancing on beams that span yawning chasms between buildings, sliding under low hanging air conditioning ducts or using the cranes constructing new buildings as your personal freeway.

All of this is done in first person view, but with a twist. Unlike most first person views, in all of this running, jumping and sliding, your hands and feet come into view. And making a jump from the side of a building to a narrow ledge above you can really get the heart racing. Miss and you plummet numerous floors to your rather crunching demise. It's not a pleasant way to go.

I also came across another title - Remember Me - that also uses elements of parkour in it's play. Like Mirror's Edge, Remember Me is also set in a dystopian universe, and like all good cyberpunk stories it is you against the faceless corporations. What made me want to check this title out though was something else. In Remember Me you have the ability to reorganise people's memories, allowing you to change what they remember as true and thus manipulate them in order to achieve your goals. A really interesting concept, like the use of parkour, and one that works quite well within the game world.

What this shows is that there are plenty of underutilized ideas out there ripe for the picking, it just takes someone willing to take a punt on it.

Remember Me developed by Dontnod Entertainment and published by Capcom.