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Innovation is risk, and Mirror’s Edge puts everything on the line. In the opening cinematic, lithe protagonist Faith tells us of the Flow, the way that Runners — information couriers in the game’s sterile, totalitarian metropolis — see the city. “Rooftops become pathways and conduits, possibility, and routes of escape. The Flow is what keeps us running, keeps us alive.” While narrative in its delivery, her sentiment echoes the design aspirations of Mirror’s Edge, a first-person adventure like no other where the world is viewed as more than a shooting gallery or a tactile means to an end.

It gets things very right very early, distilling its first-person platformer ambitions into a very manageable control scheme. One button stands in for all “up” actions — jumping, hurtling over obstacles, scuttling up vertical surfaces, and pulling Faith onto ledges — while another is for all “down” actions: sliding under pipes, ducking into vents, and tucking and rolling out of dangerously high jumps. It’s a sublimely simple setup and allows for the level design to take center stage. Once you’re familiar with Faith’s abilities and their limitations — imparted through a much-needed tutorial — it’s easy to see potential routes through the world.

As the setting and story establish themselves, you receive plenty of reasons to run. And Mirror’s Edge is simply at its best when you’re doing so — the game subtly funnels you through its environments, and the visceral momentum of running communicates a need to keep going. Seeing Faith’s hands and feet in her field of vision (when appropriate) and the physicality of her animations — like throwing her weight into opening doors and picking up speed as she runs — goes a long way toward conveying that same urgency.

The surroundings — mostly rooftops, office buildings, sewers, and subways — are meticulously built, aesthetically and structurally. The glimmering, oversaturated world is striking in its composition, a vivid but effectively stark interpretation of Mirror’s Edge’s conformist culture. It straddles the line between solitary and lonely; sure, police are regularly at your heels, and dispatcher/fellow runner Mercury is always an earpiece away (assigning objectives and barking at you to keep moving), but the world feels sparse at times and vastly underpopulated with normal people. Scurrying through abandoned office floors is exhilarating, but this could’ve been even more so with a bustling crowd of worker bees dropping their coffee as you hurtle over their heads. And I’d love to see, say, a mission amid a pack of fellow runners. The game’s few foot chases really get your blood pumping and hint at the possibilities of what a more scripted design focus could accomplish in places.

I wish they’d stuck with the first-person perspective for all narrative purposes, too; the cartoony, stylized cut-scenes seem oddly pedestrian when contrasted with the in-game ones, which convey more than enough style while maintaining a purposefully mature tone. At least the sound design is universally excellent, with a phenomenal ambient soundtrack that fits the world like a glove, and Faith’s strained and measured breathing takes the immersion a step beyond.

Faith’s Runner Vision helps lead you through the world, highlighting specific objects in red as you approach them and effectively designating the correct path. What first appears to be hand-holding evolves into something much more substantial — as you advance, red’s increasingly associated with confirmation rather than instruction. It doesn’t lead you; it tells you that you’re indeed going the right way. But thinking more ambitiously can certainly pay off, as most environments feature at least one “advanced” route. Experimenting with unsure jumps and leaps of Faith (pun intended) doesn’t always pan out, but they feel incredibly satisfying when they do. The harder paths also make use of Faith’s fancier maneuvers, such as pulling her feet up for tighter jumps, executing Prince of Persia-style wall-running, and making 180-degree turns in midair.

Mirror’s Edge slows down at points; the more thoughtful platforming sections aren’t always as engaging. They provide a nice change of pace, and methodical action can be fun…but having to think your way through a series of jumps isn’t nearly as satisfying after having just done it on instinct for long stretches. The lack of an on-demand “restart from last checkpoint” option compounds this. In one very large, platforming-heavy room in a latter section of the game, I scaled my way to the top and hit several checkpoints along the way, only to slip up and fall all the way down and survive, leaving me with the option of doing it all over again or quitting to the main menu and reloading.

More problematic — and perhaps more inherent to general game design — is the way Mirror’s Edge makes you retry certain sections of the game ad nauseam. Especially when forced into combat (which I’ll get to in a second), I forcibly replayed many 30-second portions of the game until my trial-and-error approach just worked. Thanks to the fundamentally in-the-moment design, the illusion breaks when you have to repeat the same 10 seconds for a second time — never mind countless subsequent times. The checkpoints aren’t always ideally spaced, either, so I had to replay sections I’d mastered just to get back to the parts I needed to try again. And with some actions never really clicking with me — like jumping off pipes — I found myself bottlenecked in a few too many places.

One of Mirror’s Edge’s most amazing accomplishments: It empowers players to run away from enemies rather then engaging them. But in the few times you’re forced to — or want to — fight, combat’s a bit inconsistent. Accomplished with a single button in combination with jumping and ducking (for jump kicks, sliding kicks, or even wall-jumping into a kick), you can either bludgeon foes into submission or — ideally — attempt to disarm them. This takes a very specific window of timing, which you can extended by firing up Faith’s reaction time, which slows everything down and provides a few extra seconds to think and react. Disarming only takes a single button press when an enemy’s gun turns red, but it doesn’t always work when it should; you can fire a few rounds from an enemy’s gun once you get your hands on it, but I found myself casting most weapons aside to maintain my speed and minimize casualties. Mirror’s Edge is ultimately a game about love, not violence — and considering how refreshing it was to play from a first-person vantage point without the barrel of a gun bobbing along, I wanted to keep it that way as often as possible.

While most elements of Mirror’s Edge’s are refreshingly new and unique, I found it even more interesting when it stepped outside its comforts — a subway escape, hopping across the tops of speeding trains, or a very brief but surprising “boss” encounter. These few moments elevated the game even higher and left me swimming with ideas of what the next Mirror’s Edge could be. And that leads me to the inevitable quandary — is this simply a great game that stands on its own innovations, or is it a great first game that hints at the potential for so much more? I’m inclined to go with the latter, but I can’t deny how expertly it delivers on its most important ambitions (and the package is complete, too: Chasing downloadable ghosts for leaderboard Time Trials will keep you busy long after the eight-hour story wraps). As a game steeped in immediacy, Mirror’s Edge is an absolute must-play despite its idiosyncrasies. And as a pied piper for progressive design in first-person gaming, it’s all the more important.

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Portal uses a concept that’s a bit hard to wrap your head around without actually seeing it in action. The only “weapon” you’re given is a portal gun that can shoot a portal entrance with the right mouse button and a portal exit with the left mouse button. Once both portals have been placed, you can walk though the entrance and find yourself at the exit. Walk through the exit and you’re back at the entrance. The portals can be shot across a distance but only on certain surfaces, which creates the puzzle atmosphere. You’ll have to figure out how to get across chasms, up and over obstacles, and around automated turrets. The trick is that you can only have one entrance and one exit meaning sometimes you’ll encounter several kinds of brain teasers on how to use the portals correctly, and in some cases, quickly and often. It’ll make you think about which portal you’re placing, the exact location of where it needs to go, and the timing of when portals need to be switched.

The fun thing about many of these puzzles is that you’re not the only thing that can move through these portals. The weighted companion blocks can be used to take out turrets by placing a portal over the turret’s head and another under a block. Energy spheres (like those found in Half-Life 2) are used frequently where players have to negotiate their path using portals to activate a switch. There are some really fun uses of the portals here, especially in all of those strange moments where you can see yourself through a portal across the room entering the portal you’re stepping through. It’s pretty easy to find yourself plopping portals on the ceiling and the floor to go into a constant freefall or place two portals in the corner of the room and chase your own tail. Very bizarre.

The main problem with the game is that it’s so short. While what’s there can certainly be satisfying, we shot through the first 15 levels of the game in about 30 minutes with the last four taking up a bit over an hour. We really wish those first 15 missions had been squished into a couple of quick missions to teach the basics and then had the following 17 missions really up the ante. We know they can do it after playing some of their sadistic advanced versions of six of the levels from the game that (in most cases) are much more difficult than the originals. We would have loved to have seen more of that throughout the game rather than the very long string of basic tutorial type levels.

The story is best left unsaid (mostly because saying anything might give what little there is away) but is build like a short story from a novelist. It’s a piece of a bigger puzzle and one that while tiny is certainly entertaining as it goes. There are little clues here and there hinting at what you, an older Asian woman, are doing in Aperture Labs and even more clues on how this all relates to the Half-Life universe.

Any and all information you’ll receive in the experience comes from the computerized voice that you’ve likely heard in the trailers and previews. It’s largely that voice that gives the game such personality. Some of the lines and jokes it cracks are synthetically deadpan and all the funnier for it. By the time you puzzle your way through all 19 challenges, you’ll miss hearing the strange disembodied companion you’ve had for the last couple of hours.

It’s not just the one computer voice that’s so fun. The sound design, while minimal, is great. Turrets say stuff like “I don’t hate you” after you drop them on their heads while the same muzak plays any time you wander past a clock radio. There’s also something uniquely and strangely satisfying about the thoomp of the portal gun. You’re not shooting at anyone or necessarily shooting a gun that requires the powerful sound, but this particular gun sound is pleasant and almost comforting in its quality.

While the main game is short, Portal doesn’t only finish with one of the best credits songs ever created. After the story is done new challenge levels are unlocked. These extras are six levels that you’ve already played. The difference is that they have new challenges associated with them. You’ll have to see if you can complete the puzzles in a certain amount of time, a minimum number of footsteps, or using only a certain number of portals. These challenges are really interesting because they make you consider puzzles that were somewhat simple to figure out in a different way. You’ll learn that the obvious way is definitely not the shortest and you’ll bust your brain and may become obsessive trying to figure out the best possible method.

Finally, those same six challenges come in “advanced” mode which basically means they’ve been re-worked to be more difficult. And they are much, much more difficult. Not necessarily for being able to figure out the problems (though there are some brain benders) but for the increased need for timing and coordination that wasn’t necessarily an issue without the changes to the level. There’s a lot more dying and a lot more frustration, but also a sense of satisfaction when they’re complete.

The idea behind Portal ends up being more brilliant than Portal itself. Regardless, we definitely had a lot of fun with what is there and appreciate the level of polish and thought that went into the presentation. We’re definitely interested to see where Half-Life 2: Episode Three goes now that we’ve seen what the portal gun is capable of and how everything in Half-Life and this new character really fit together. We definitely recommend getting this with the Orange Box package rather than on its own.

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With the release of Lost Coast, Valve showcases the newest trick up the Source Engine’s sleeve: High Dynamic Range lighting, commonly referred to simply as HDR. While HDR is already available in the Source engine with the recently released Day of Defeat: Source, this is a free add-on for Half-Life 2 owners showcasing the current state of the Source engine. Gabe Newell and company have also increased the image quality by cranking up texture resolution and improving character model rendering.

High Dynamic Range lighting is the centerpiece of this technological demonstration. The main purpose of HDR is to allow a wider range of contrast values to be shown in the same screen. For example, a bright area no longer requires overly lit, washed out shadows. In the case of the Source engine, the most apparent effects viewed in the game are achieved primarily through Dynamic Tone Mapping and Blooming.

Dynamic Tone Mapping is the Source engine’s way of mimicking the human Iris in the way that it responds to changes in light intensity.

In the human eye, the iris reacts in response to different light conditions to maintain uniform vision in differently lit areas. For example, if you walk outside on a sunny day from a dark interior you will be temporarily blinded somewhat until your iris closes slightly and allows proper vision. Turn around and go back inside after getting used to the exterior lighting conditions and the interior space will appear too dark to see. Once again the iris adjusts to allow proper visibility, although by opening slightly this time.

In the Source engine’s HDR implementation the light values onscreen are analyzed and when a large, relatively sudden change is detected the scene’s exposure is adjusted dynamically to recreate the effect caused by the closing or opening of the iris.

Blooming is used in the source engine to simulate light values beyond that which your monitor is able to reproduce. The edges of objects in front of bright light sources are blurred and often even occluded somewhat which imitates overexposure.

These two techniques add a large amount of reality to the lighting in the Source engine, which really has to be seen to be believed. Before playing Lost Coast, I saw countless screenshots of Valve’s HDR implementation and can honestly say that none of them did justice to how good it looks in game.

Even more impressively is this particular HDR implementation’s ability to work on a wide range of hardware. While other recent “HDR” lighting techniques have required shader model 3.0, Valve’s HDR will also run on older shader model 2.0 hardware (any fully compliant DirectX 9.0 hardware). I witnessed the same rendering results achieved on both a computer running an ATI Radeon 9800XT and another running an Nvidia 6800GT. Due to the many improvements in Lost Coast however, the 9800XT didn’t run at what I consider a playable framerate at any resolution above 800×600 with everything set to high and full HDR on. Other less resource hungry implementations of HDR will run on the previous generation cards such as the 9800XT just fine, albeit still not as fast as Half-Life 2.

The only new character in Lost Coast is rendered with more detail than seen in Half-Life 2. The extra detail comes through taking an extremely highly detailed model and converting the small surface irregularities into a normal map, which is then included with the texture. This allows the same look to be achieved as a high polygon count model with far fewer polygons. While this technique was used in Half-Life 2, Valve took what it learned from that experience and built upon it to create the fisherman found at the dock in Lost Coast. This is another area where seeing for yourself is more powerful than any screenshot, but here’s one anyway.

The level itself has you scaling a cliff with Combine coming at you from all directions, and battling at the top in and around an old Byzantine church. Sadly the playtime is short, but this is just a tech-demo after all. There are a lot of Combine to deal with and they have a new trick or two that may surprise you.

An interesting feature also included with Lost Coast is a commentary mode that provides you with information on the level’s development as well as info on HDR as well. The commentary is by the developers with an introduction from Gabe Newell himself.

As one would expect from what is essentially a playable tech-demo, the gameplay is secondary. The level is short if you are playing with the purpose of reaching the end. In this instance it is definitely advisable to enjoy the trip, although advice is hardly necessary as it would be harder not to enjoy this level in all its beautifully rendered glory – even after you’ve broken all the windows and spattered the walls with Combine blood. If your computer is up to the task, do yourself a favor and play Lost Coast. I suspect it’s a good indication of what to expect from Valve’s next offerings such as Half-Life 2’s coming expansion: Aftermath.