Potential paths and objects that Faith can use to propel herself through the environment are indicated with vibrant splashes of primary colour. Routes that will lead to certain death tend to be marked with shadow, while safe paths are illuminated, giving the player an instinctive sense of how to navigate the perilous rooftop paths without having to stop and check ahead.

Unusually, Mirror’s Edge departs from the videogame industry’s obsession with grim, gritty dystopias – and is all the more terrifying for it. In many ways a vision of aspirational urban design, the cityscape is a pristine utopian metropolis.

“Our city’s a hybrid of east and west,” says O’Brien. “It looks clean, attractive. It looks like a nice place to live. People seem to be happy. It’s crime-free. It’s almost a utopian city, but a modern city, a contemporary city. But this is the catch: it’s fine for you so long as you’re willing to be part of a system – it’s actually a very controlled city.”

There’s a sense of underlying menace that is perfectly communicated by the city’s sterile perfection, an austerity compounded by the splashes of primary colour, which begin to look like transparent attempts to enliven a world that is emotionally dead, its diversity stifled, its people subjected to draconian unity of thought and behaviour. The image of civil order that Mirror’s Edge paints is a chilling extrapolation of policies being enacted today for the protection and comfort of citizens but which, all the same, signal a disturbing restriction of liberty.

“It’s set in a fictitious city, but it’s a city that could exist today,” says O’Brien. “We’ve taken a lot of things that are happening in the world and amalgamated them and exaggerated some of them slightly. Some cities are already starting to be like this. There are congestion charges at the moment – we’ve taken that to the next step: vehicles need a licence which only the rich can afford, so movement by vehicle is very controlled. The city has clamped down a lot on internet traffic, and mobile phone traffic is monitored. The streets are safe to walk, but that’s because they’re patrolled by a very efficient, almost paramilitary police force.”

moscallout“How much personal freedom are you willing to give up for a comfortable life? Thats the crux of the game”/moscalloutBut the fear of such authoritarian government is really a fear of that power being misused, as O’Brien explains: “Like any utopia, if you scratch the surface things start to fall apart. It’s being run by a coalition of corrupt politicians and police, controlling the citizens for their own means. For me, this is the core of the game and the message, if it has a message: the greater good has come at the expense of personal freedom. It’s what’s happening around the world a lot. How much personal freedom are you willing to give up for a comfortable life? That’s the crux of the game. A lot of people in this city don’t even realise they’re kept.”

The protagonist, of course, is well aware of the city’s oppressive order, and chooses to exist outside of it – or on top of it. Illicit behaviour, eradicated from the streets, is pushed upwards to the roofs, creating a criminal overground. With the means of communication so stringently monitored and restricted, criminality is served by a more low-tech mode of information transport – athletic couriers, known as runners, who can move around on foot, mostly at height. And in one such runner, Faith, they have found a protagonist of ambiguous morality, one who exists in a state of liminality, between corrupt  authoritarianism and ferocious criminality. She is, as you might expect from the team’s other nonconformist design decisions, an atypical game heroine.

“We wanted to get a strong female character,” says O’Brien, “one who didn’t have pneumatic breasts and wasn’t overtly sexual – someone who is strong and athletic but also realistic.” Whether or not she will become iconic in the way the team hopes remains to be seen – but at least the attention the designers have given to her character should make you feel more comfortable inhabiting her body. DICE clearly hasn’t made easy choices in the creation of this new property, pursuing a design that deviates bravely from the firstperson groupthink. Not only should this disregard for convention be applauded for itself, but it is particularly important in a genre whose most recent mechanical innovation was Marathon’s implementation of free-looking mouse control 13 years ago.

“If you look at thirdperson games there’s been a lot of evolution there,” says Farrer. “We haven’t seen that in firstperson games.” O’Brien continues: “I think what we’re doing is cool and innovative, and we’ve broken a lot of taboos and overcome lots of problems – but I also think it’s the next logical step for firstperson. Like most great ideas, once you’ve done them everyone goes: ‘Well, yeah, why doesn’t everybody do that?’”

And hopefully, once the game has demonstrated what is possible, not simply with the mechanics and presentation of firstperson movement but with the game’s imaginative vision and politically informed narrative, others will follow suit. You’ve just got to have faith.