You’ll finish a route with a one or two star (of three) rating and notice an outlier score that’s somehow 10 or 20 seconds faster than yours, then realize there’s a completely different way to come at the course. This is where slowing down becomes paramount, however counterintuitive. Here you can explore and maneuver as you like, running routes to challenge a leaderboard of players’ best times, or devising grueling runs of your own that show up on other players’ maps. Veer off toward the broader city’s jutting structures and labyrinthine byways, and Catalyst becomes something else entirely-a glittering playground of kinetic possibility. The villains are boring, hand-to-hand combat feels clumsy and pointless (at least the gunplay’s gone), the story’s typical pablum that telegraphs its twists too soon, and these things ultimately stand between you and Catalyst‘s far better free-range gameplay. But mostly you’re tailing “runner’s vision,” the game’s candy-apple-red GPS that guides you through Glass’s urban jungle to tag an endpoint, punch a button and watch a cutscene. And in a few instances there’s a ruthless timetable to beat. Corporate underlings pop up along the way-more irritant than threat since you can generally run right past them.

So yes, there’s a plot here you can chase that reduces the game’s open-world to 15 linear sprints from this point to that one. It’s one of my favorite sequences in a video game, a kind of “Zen of investigatory acrobatics” set against an exquisite Mondrian canvas. But my first try took over an hour sorting runnable routes from red herrings. Watching vets play this sequence now, amounts to a few minutes of surefooted clambering. You had to probe for connection points, then tilt the view just so to attempt gasping wall-runs, scrambling climbs and heart-stopping leaps. That’s for you to puzzle out, and the moment for me the game finally came together. Looking at a five-story high maze of concrete, rebar and piping, you wonder “How in the world am I going to scale this?” Ambient electronica pings and blips soothingly. Dazzling sunlight makes the room’s lemon and white checkerboard walls glow. You’re in an empty atrium and asked to find your way up along a succession of platforms obscured by a lattice of scaffolding. Towards the end of the original Mirror’s Edge, there’s an area that exemplifies most of what studio EA DICE’s 2008 first-person parkour game got right.

Mirrors edge games