Rediscovering the joy of Exploration- Director's Cut (Patreon)

Fun fact about this episode- and a small part of the reason why it took so long, is that what was originally going to be a single video has split and mutated into three different episode concepts!

It all started with me playing Batman: Arkham Asylum for the 10th anniversary of the game and getting the idea to do a bit of a series retrospective. Long story short, all the different ways the Arkham games have shifted and changed over time to match changing design trends took so long to explain that I may as well have made the primary talking points into their own videos.

Enter: a video about open world design, and a possible upcoming one about how to make a fair and fun stealth system. Even with these videos either done or sketched out, there’s STILL room for an Arkham retrospective at some point in the future, it’s wild. 

Anyway, because the real Arkham video won’t be coming for a while if at all (still not fully decided if it’s a good idea or not) I wanted to quickly break down my thoughts on why Arkham Asylum in particular was so damn good, and it might come as a surprise to some people that I don’t think it’s because the game “lets you *feel* like batman”. 

I’d argue the opposite is actually true. The Arkham games, for those who don’t know, put you in the shoes of The World’s Greatest Detective- ManBat himself. You get to fight baddies with Assassin's creed style combat, solve puzzles, swoop around a vaguely metroidvania-ey open world, it’s good stuff. But the real appeal is the unique aesthetic and tone you get when the comic book style and mythos of batman is treated very authentically. 

The game doesn’t play like your regular brawler, fights are strategic, with you either surgically taking out foes from the shadows, or dancing between mobs of goons to isolate and take down the heavy hitters. The combat is really quite basic, but looks incredibly flashy, with batman flowing from punching to counters effortlessly with a push of a button- creating a great flow-statey combat feel. The cast of villains, too, are far from being one-dimensional excuses to punch baddies, a large portion of the game is spent watching the back and forth between batman and his nemeses, all of which have themed areas. Killer Croc has a sort of stealth section, Poison ivy lives in a big plant, and The Scarecrow’s levels are platforming gauntlets taking place in a twisted nightmare mindscape. The game is spent bringing these guys to justice in epic fashion before a final showdown with The Joker- played by the brilliant Mark Hamill.

You’d think from this that the game - much like other superhero titles - is all about power-trips, and making you feel like an unstoppable crimefighting badass, but it really isn’t. Arkham Asylum makes you feel incredibly vulnerable. If you’re not paying attention, regular goons can take you out in a few hits, and a straightup fight with even two baddies wielding guns is usually suicide.

The world is relatively hostile too- there are very few safe rooms in the entire game, with your current bad guy as well as some minor villains like The Riddler constantly badmouthing you as you explore the world, as well as sending respawning goons to get you. Even Batman’s famous array of gadgets are relatively narrow in use and usually can’t incapacitate an enemy alone - you’ve really got to think on your feet to make the most of them as a tough enemy like a shotgun goon is baring down on you. These threats and enemies aren’t much more than an annoyance, but they all help to reinforce the theme that batman is alone and outmatched. 

The game also goes out of its way to show you the tortured psyche that lies underneath Batman’s cowl through the aforementioned Sacrecrow drug trips- you get to see the murder of Batman’s parents, what would happen if the joker was put in charge of Arkham Asylum and get to grips with the fact that Bruce Wayne is just a costume Batman puts on, not the other way around.

These great moments, which often incorporate some brilliant meta scares like the game pretending to crash work so well because you’re a helpless observer- watching batman deal with this stuff with full knowledge of the context of these character beats. Just like how the free-flowing combat looks technically demanding but is actually controlled for the most part with two buttons, you’re simply watching batman do his thing, not stepping into his shoes. Even the mystery solving is mostly handled without the player’s input, with the only thing the player is required to do being following trails of fingerprints or chemicals.

This all helps to give us an outside, disconnected look at the character, both in his element swooping down on panicking bad guys but also in tense, dangerous situations where we get to see just how fragile (both mentally and physically) old bats is. Arkham Asylum doesn’t get you to feel like batman, even though that would be much easier- a game that lets you feel like batman would be a straighforward brawler romp- because batman is in denial about how much he’s actually helping, and how sane he really is.

However, what the game does do is the far more ambitious task of giving us a birds-eye look at the character of Batman’s deeply-wrought flaws. Flaws that we would never be able to spot from the more intimate perspective of a game that actually put you in Batman’s shoes, rather than an observer of his exploits. 

Unfortunately, not everyone picked up on this, and over time - the series came to revolve around Batman as an unstoppable crimefighting force, rather than the broken, vulnerable person the best comics portray him to be. And whilst Arkham Knight in particular has its fair share of technical and gameplay problems, its this lack of emphasis on what really makes the dark knight tick - as well as how that psychosis is mirrored in all his foes - that affects the game most strongly, with the story beats lacking the emotional punch a much lower-key story like Asylum could conjure effortlessly.

Using video games to pretend to be another person is fine, but we’re kidding ourselves if we believe that’s all the medium can be used for - games can also be used to explore concepts, places and characters from a variety of vantage points simultaneously, and offer a unique connection to a story, even without giving players a personal stake in it. And nobody understood that idea better than Rockstar circa 2009. 

Phew. I’ve rambled enough. Wouldn’t want to spoil the video in the event it actually gets made.

Okay, hope you enjoyed reading, and see you around!