High above the Orwellian vigilance of the streets, the sun-scarred rooftops reverberate with the rhythmic beating of soft-soled feet. In a city where every phone call is monitored and every email filtered by a privatized government under the guise of the common good, Faith and her fellow Runners are the only safe line of communication for those with the courage to fight. They are rebels, messengers, traversing the most precarious reaches of the metropolis to reclaim a future of freedoms long forgotten.

In a landscape of muscle-bound bravado, gray skies, and arterial geysers gushing from severed limbs, Mirror’s Edge, like Faith, represents the dream of an escape from the dire gloom FPSs have bathed themselves in. The ethereal soundtrack, the blinding glare of the sunshine, and the vibrant colors are beautiful in every sense of the word, but it is the motion of Mirror’s Edge that makes it so mesmerizing. Foregoing the explosive firefights and tactical progressions that have become the norm, Faith relies upon the speed and agility of a body honed for movement. Mirror’s Edge is First-Person Parkour.

Parkour is both a philosophy and an activity that emphasizes the freedom and efficiency of movement. Its practitioners – traceurs – dedicate themselves to achieving a level of fitness, kinetic ability, and agility that allows them to diverge from the constraints of modern architecture. Translated for gaming, the borders of civilization melt beneath your shoes. Billboards become vertical sidewalks, buildings wrapped in scaffolding transform into high-rise playgrounds, and leaping from rooftop to rooftop happens to be the fastest way home.

Runner’s Vision is there to help you develop the traceur’s eye and see the structures of urban terrain as possibilities for movement instead of obstacles to be avoided. Pipes to climb and boxes to vault from literally glow red. There is still a lot of room for exploration, as the marked path is only a suggestion, and rarely the fastest. You don’t have to play with Runner’s Vision, but it does help keep the intensity high and the pacing moving. Running circles around a rooftop in search of a way off is the last thing you should be doing with a helicopter-mounted turret passing overhead.

Death is frequent even with Runner’s Vision, which is what you might expect to happen when sliding 20-stories down the side of a slanted building and surfing on subway trains. The controls are the epitome of refinement, with a button for upward motion, downward motion, and a quick-turn to control everything, but the game demands the utmost precision. I have rarely experienced such extremes of proud satisfaction, and such depths of aggravation. Considering the inevitability of death, you might expect a tuned system of checkpoints. Instead, respawns place you one step before a massive gap, disoriented in an area ahead of where you left off, and for the most difficult sections, all the way back at the beginning.