Mirror’s Edge Catalyst
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst shows its teeth, but never bites down.
Full spoilers for: Mirror’s Edge Catalyst (EA games, 2016)
The game is about the future and fears of big tech, fears of what it might take to stop it, and fear of committing to saying any one perspective too loudly. In brief: You are Faith Connors; a runner, daughter to two scientists who the dominant force in the city — KrugerSec — had killed when they refused to help create Reflection, a program that could be injected into every citizen in the city to control their emotions, mind, and potentially heart. You, naturally, end up trying to stop this from happening.
The game spares no effort emphasizing that KrugerSec, both as the institution and the individuals that compose it, are evil. The mind control chip, for one, but also the side missions where you stop their soldiers from mugging and/or killing civilians (loCaste in the game’s vernacular), the secret prison/torture facility they run below the city’s surface, and the villain monologues their CEO/supreme leader Gabriel Kruger gives (more on those later).
This is the foundation that the game is built upon. KrugerSec is evil, and you are therefore good in apposition. The security forces you bulldoze through or the trespassing you commit is not only justified but vindicated. But the same cannot be said for the other main players.
Dogen is a crime boss who regularly threatens to break or remove your legs over the course of the game. Rebecca Thane is a terrorist who doesn’t care about civilian casualties and isn’t above shooting an unarmed, defenseless captive. And Noah, your adopted father figure, is kind, doesn’t promote violence, and is killed by KrugerSec after they torture him for information on your whereabouts.
Dogen and Rebecca don’t make the cut as villains compared to the corp, but are certainly antagonists, leveraging information or resources to get you to go on runs for them and threatening violence if you don’t comply. They aren’t positioned as role models or heroes in the game, but at the end of the campaign they unite — along with the previous head of research on the mind control project — to help you stop said technology from being launched. And you, the player, never have to accept their worldviews or make a choice. There’s a larger, more cartoonish evil at hand that grants permission to disagree with their methods and still accept their help.
In the final Rebecca mission, Top of the World, she tells you over the gridlink, “I wonder about your ideals, Faith. Something tells me you care about all of this more than you let on, but where do you really stand? I’m not expecting an answer. You might not even have one, but the question should still be asked.”
Asked, and never answered. In the end, Reflection is stopped and you never need to commit to a side. You’ve opposed KrugerSec, not because they are a corporation that is stealing water from the loCaste to use in elaborate water features, or because they have a secret torture facility, or because maybe their unregulated police force have some issues, but because mind control is so blatantly, obviously, patronizingly evil.
Except for Gabriel Kruger. The mastermind behind the mind control plot and the person who killed your parents, killed your adopted parent, and adopted your sister to become his perfect daughter and heir. But in the final mission, he gives his earlier-mentioned villain monologue and it’s so… normal. He feels like a CEO. He throws out excuses and justifications; he didn’t want to kill your parents, Reflection is necessary to cure your sister’s lung disease, the new tech is super popular among employees, everything that he can. And in that moment, he feels like a businessman with too much power and not enough consequences for his actions, and so was able to tell himself whatever he needed to in order to sleep at night.
You call out every lie, point out the contradictions in his own stories, and when he is on the floor, huddled back in fear of what you might do to him, he calls out to your sister for help because — as seen in audio logs throughout the game — while he has lied to her and molded her into the ideal successor… he genuinely cares for her and when given the opportunity (in a future cutscene) to gun you down for good, he holds off because she is in the way.
Gabriel Kruger is a mundane evil who sees Reflection as a means to improve stockholder shares and ensure willing workers. And doesn’t mind ordering the deaths of a few obstacles along the way, but draws the line at what affects his personal reality.
And this (and one other thing mentioned later) is what made me sit up and take notice. It felt like the writers knew what they were doing and, when given the opportunity to set up a strawman punching bag who was diabolically evil for no reason, made him a human instead. And then said that he deserved what was coming anyway, that his humanity did not excuse him from the consequence of his actions.
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In the end, Gabriel doesn’t die, but your sister replaces him as the head of the company. She is more sympathetic — stolen from her family, lied to her entire life, but she supports KrugerSec anyway, and opposes the revolutionaries who would tear down what she is meant to run. She benefits and inertia is hard to fight against, so there is no change, there is no revolution even after word of the failed mind control program spreads. The status quo returns so you can run side missions and improve your times. And Faith seems fine with that. Dogen continues to run his criminal empire and Rebecca continues her own quest of vicious retribution against KrugerSec.
Ultimately, you are the only hero, surrounded by antagonists whose methods you cannot agree with. And this is a happy ending for Faith, because you the player are not shown the loCaste who KrugerSec exploits, or the employs who Rebecca sees as acceptable losses in her crusade, or the other runners whose debts are held hostage by Dogen to get them to carry out his bidding. Faith’s motivations throughout the game are personal. Anger for her dead parents, remorse for her lost sister, fear for her friend who was infected with Reflection. In a game filled with ideology, Faith never seems to have one of her own, and that makes her feel hollow in comparison.
In the same mission, Top of the World, we get a peek at other worldviews in the game. Isabel, your lost sister, believes that the world is a meritocracy, and those who work hard will be elevated, seemingly blind to the numerous advantages she has as the adopted daughter of the most powerful man in the city.
Meanwhile, Rebecca sees things another way. In her own words: “Black November intends to create a society where everyone contributes equally, which is matched by everyone being equally valued. […] The only way to create a sustainable society is to accept that the individual must always be less than the collective, not more as it is here.”
I don’t have a political science degree, but I’m pretty sure she’s describing communism. Of course, there must be balance in all things (and this is a game produced by a major publisher in the 2010s) so it’s followed up by saying, “There will be those unable to accept these basic truths. Invariably they are the same people who profit most from the current system. If necessary, they must be destroyed.” Cue flashback to the time she told us not to bother with evacuating the innocent construction workers at a site we were about to destroy.
The game isn’t subtle. KrugerSec and the other corps create and benefit from hierarchies, while Black November wants to tear them down. Dogen will prey off anyone he needs to in order to benefit himself, corp or runner. And Noah — dead, martyred Noah — just wanted his own small family to survive. But even that has its cracks, as his passivity against KrugerSec left him and many other runners vulnerable to become victims of the system he refused to oppose.
Catalyst wasn’t the first game to present these perspectives, and it won’t be the last, but I suppose it felt particularly relevant in the year… (checks date) 2025, as testing for the Neurolink is underway, several companies are richer than God, and God ain’t doing too bad for Himself either (according to one analysis, the LDS church has a net worth of ~$293B as of 2024). The class divide seems to be widening and at least in the US, we’re staring down the barrel of four years of tax cuts for the most wealthy and increasing prices for housing, groceries, and other necessities for everyone else.
And similarly, there are a lot of voices and opinions surrounding what should be done, if anything should be done at all, what lines can or won’t be crossed, etc. And Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, with its narrative showing you multiple answers and then telling you that all of them are wrong, fits right in. I guess some things never change, and one of those things is corporations and people in power telling you that the best thing to do is nothing, or to work within the system that they provide and believe that one day they will choose to listen.
Sidebar about Plastic
Plastic is a character in the game who serves a pivotal role. She is a hacker, someone who stays in her home but has connections all over the city. Depending on the mission, she’ll open doors for you, find you a way inside secure buildings, warn you when security forces are incoming, and on a few occasions, hack VTOLs and drones to give you an escape route. And in-turn, you complete side missions that provide her with increased access to city infrastructure (and unlock map functions for yourself).
Plastic also barely feels like a character at first. She lives alone, with only a robot she created for company, spends her time surfing the gridnetwork, and shows a disregard — if not active disinterest — in other humans, emotions, and in general anything besides hacking. In dialogue she is awkward, tactless, and blunt to the point of rudeness. It can feel like characters are putting up with her, suffering her eccentricities for the sake of her vital skills, and she in turn is helping you because it’s interesting and you have promised to increase her access if she does. She is a caricature of someone with autism but no coping skills or ability to mask. It almost feels heartless, including a stereotype of the uncaring supergenius to fulfill the role the game required.
But over the course of the game, she shows that she isn’t an unfeeling, robotic character like the worst depictions of autism in media can portray. She shows concern for you in small ways, and works to stop the mind control program despite not being at risk. And in one side mission, she calls you her friend, an event that made me pause the game to take a moment and consider what that meant.
The city of Glass, with its gridlinks and pervasive technology, was made for someone like Plastic. Even without the exaggerated hacking abilities, it’s a world shaped around her special interest. The game’s story doesn’t share how she ended up alone, but at some point, before we arrived, she built a friend. Even with so much at her fingertips, she still wanted connection. And despite some of the overly patient or patronizing dialogue as characters would explain an idiom she had taken literally or ask her to just “do the hacking” and ask less questions, these were people who would talk with her, do her favors without strings attached, and cared about her as a person, not just as a tool to use for their own needs.
I can hardly speak for all autistic people and there are still reasons to be frustrated at a near-decade old depiction of neurodivergence that stumbles in several places. But in the end, I liked Plastic, and I liked that she could be annoying, or blunt, or lacking empathy, and she was still accepted and treated as a friend by (some of) the game’s cast. It’s oddly affirming to be shown a piece of media where social masking isn’t a necessary step to being socially accepted, albeit couched in a context where one is only given the opening because of their usefulness.
