Tattooed eyeballs and wall climbing

Question

Ben Aaronovich's Tales from the Folly contains a short story A Rare Book of Cunning Device which has Peter spending the night in The British Library searching for a magical explanation for strange goings on.

It contains the following passage, which seems to be an explicit reference to another work of fiction, presumably a science fiction work, that I do not recognise. Does anyone recognise this allusion?

Everything that wasn't painted 1970s Sci-Fi white was a brilliant red or blue, causing me to have an almost irresistible urge to tattoo my eyeball and parkour my way up the walls.

The red, blue and wall-climbing make me think of Spider-Man, but I have no idea why that would involve tattooing your eyeball.

A later passage suggests the reference might be a computer game.

Unlike the book storage area below, which had been mainly grey and white with red trimming, the plant rooms were silver with huge cylinders painted blue, connected with yellow pipes.
Definitely the boss level, I thought as we crept through it.

Answer 1

I understood Peter to be referring to the Mirror’s Edge series of games.

• The protagonist has a tattooed eye
• The gameplay involves parkour
• The game is set in a mostly white city which gets painted red or blue.

Answer 2

I think this could be a reference to the Super Mario series of platforming games, where jumping is indeed Mario's main skill.

Mario wears a red and blue outfit...

In Mario's first appearance, in Donkey Kong (1981), everything had a red and blue color palette, too:

In addition, his games are known to have a variety of brightly colored pipes, which fits with the second reference. In fact, the pipe theme by itself in conjunction with video game lingo would already seem like a Mario reference, even without anything else.

The reference to tattooing eyeballs is probably just because Peter has brown eyes, as can be seen in this answer, whereas Mario has notably bright blue ones.