Playing a recent demo of Mirror’s Edge, I had been trying to shave a few extra seconds off of my time trial run, and after all the obvious routes were exploited, I passed along the controller. I watched mouth agape as, instead of directing Faith to run up the stairs like a normal person, the journalist next to me sent her careening off a nearby wall and up over the guardrail, all ninja-like. Is this an example of practice-makes-perfect, or a new kind of exploit?

Mirror’s Edge has a unique hook—it’s a game featuring the platforming of Assassin’s Creed meshed with the first person perplexity of Portal. This stylistic choice does have some pitfalls, though: The first person view does make distances hard to judge, and the animations that you desperately want to see all occur off-screen.

Although it takes some time to get used to the unusual controls, which use L2 for sliding and L1 for leaping plus the X button for grabbing onto handholds, they’re not your biggest hurdle. Instead, the trick is figuring out the limitations of your moves without actually seeing your character interact in the world.

To wall jump, for example, you can run up to a wall, hit L1, and then hit the R1 button to spin around to see the other side. While third-person games like Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell show your character interacting with their environment, here all you have to go on is a bouncy, jarring perspective.

This leads us to the astonishing shortcuts I discovered in Time Trial mode. I never would have guessed that you could circumvent those stairs by wall-jumping up and over the guardrail. Since Time Trial is all about repetition and speed, it’s easy to miss those not-so-obvious routes.

Time Trial mode is also missing the combat and cutscenes of the main game, but from what we saw it is otherwise the exact same level design. However, you do get to see a red silhouette “ghost” racing just ahead of you, suggesting the ideal routes and helping you plot out a course. Since this is the only way you’ll actually get to see your character in action from an outside perspective, it’s a pretty weak substitution for an actual player character model.

The single “wow” moment from the demo of Mirror’s Edge comes at the end, when you make a huge leap and grab onto a helicopter, as it pans around giving you a view of your reflection in a skyscraper’s windows. Other than that, though, it was a whole lot of misjudged leaps and clanging over catwalks. The demo will be available soon enough, and if you preorder the game you can demo the time trial mode as well, but so far we’re not very impressed with the gimmicks in this first-person platformer.