TIL Mirror's Edge (2008) was written by Rhianna Pratchett, daughter of Sir Terry Pratchett

It was a seriously underrated game, my main complaints were too much clunky combat and not nearly enough indoor areas. It felt like I had to run the same outdoor loops dozens of times for what should be serious missions.

Edit: I really think the combat could've been awesome with some Ratchet & Clank style gadgets. Not the guns, but the things like the bundle of mini-robots that chase and attack enemies, or the sentry device you throw that slows down/freezes enemies. Feels like a good way to keep the asymmetric fighting where they have actual weapons but you need to be strategic.

The reason I quit Catalyst early was the insane loading times. The game just doesn't play right when you're too afraid of making mistakes.

Story-wise the original is perfectly adequate, I'd say even good. You can't put too much story in that kind of game, it's much more about the vibes and unlike say Doom you can't hide lore in the environment either, investigating that would destroy the overall gameplay flow. It's a well-paced game, but the quiet parts aren't still the quiet parts is when the running is easy and straight-forward. Ideally, you never stop, and the points where you have to stop (elevators) are orchestrated to make you feel restless.

As flawed as the original is, it's one of my all time favourites. To me there's a perfect harmony between gameplay, graphics (art direction), music and atmosphere. The soundtrack is easily one of the best game OSTs of all time. The story isn't deep but the characters are interesting and the world has so much potential. On the other hand I love its "cult" status, on the other there was a lot of lost potential for a truly exceptional game franchise.

Catalyst is... not terrible. For me it's just average and it never reaches that real Mirror's Edge atmosphere of the original. It's even worse today because it never got an update for PS4 Pro or PS5, so it looks kinda awful tbh, and I'm usually not too picky with graphics and fps stuff. Finished it once back then and tried replaying it a couple of years ago but dropped after a few hours.