I recently played through the original Mirror's Edge and now I'm playing through Catalyst.

Two things have struck me: firstly, Catalyst feels so much better moment to moment.

But secondly: this game has a really weird relationship to gender.

With the side characters that you find in the runner safe houses and such, there are plenty of women.

But the characters who play an important role in the story? They're basically all men.

You get introduced to 1 important woman about halfway through the game, and 1 other important woman about ¾ of the way through. And then that's it.

There's this weird discrepancy between the world/level designers filling spaces with an even distribution of men and women, and then the writers basically saying "the only important people in this story are men".

Over the course of the first 3 missions you meet the following characters:

• Icarus
• Noah
• Nomad
• Birdman
• Dogen*

(who are all men)

and 3 nameless side characters with a single line of dialogue each, 2 of them are women.

*Dogen is not actually met, but he's introduced through dialogue.... by the 2 nameless women characters who each have a line like "Dogen expects you to pay your debt, and he's getting impatient"