Welcome to Beyond! Game Club, a new segment for podcast Beyond! where each month we will be picking games to play as a group and talking about our experiences as we progress through them. The games will range from various classics to quintessential PlayStation games we consider must plays, and even revisiting some recent favorites to prepare for upcoming sequels (looking at you Ghost of Tsushima and Yotei)! However, for March we decided it would be a great time to revisit one of our favorite superhero games of all time: Batman: Arkham Asylum.
It's been at least 10 years since many of us dove into 2009's Batman: Arkham Asylum and now feels like the perfect time to revisit the game that almost singlehandedly revitalized the superhero genre. Whether it was the excellent freeform combat of snapping back and forth between enemies with precision, to unleashing devastating kicks or takedowns, or the way it trained our detective skills to solve the numerous riddles by the Riddler – Arkham Asylum gave us the best depiction (for its time) of Batman and what it would be like to wear the cowl.
Mid-Month Update:
Jada:
I've been sort of on autopilot on this trip back through Arkham Asylum; the combat still works (though I have my gripes with it), the story is engaging enough, and the drip feed of abilities and upgrades has been enough to keep me happily coming back every couple of nights. The save system has been a bit frustrating as I've had a few instances where I thought it had saved only to return to the same fight I just finished in my next session, but that's mostly being spoiled by how good the autosave feature has become in modern games.
I'm currently around 64% completion, and I've gone toe to toe with Bane, Scarecrow, Killer Croc, Victor Zsasz, and, technically, Harley Quinn. Still, the craziest thing is that I've forgotten how few villains are in the first Arkham Game as bosses and how few feel like traditional boss fights you usually expect to see in Metroidvanias or just superhero games in general. Harley Quinn and Zsasz aren't even real bosses. Harley is taken down in a cutscene after fighting a bunch of regular enemies where the stage itself is an enemy as she cycles the electrical current under the floor in three separate areas, and Zsasz is served on a platter not once but twice as tutorials for doing stealth or gadget takedowns in the first couple of hours. Meanwhile, Scarecrow is this horror-focused platforming section, leaving only Bane to fulfill the traditional boss battle, requiring you to utilize gadgets and standard attacks to take him down. And there is nothing wrong with this formula, to be honest. Batman has almost always been a work smarter, not harder kind of hero because he knows he's outmatched in pure strength against some villains, so if we gotta drop Killer Croc into a pit instead of fighting him tooth and nail, that's just more on brand for Batman.
This also speaks to the game's centerpiece, the cat-and-mouse game of chasing after the Joker (and man, does it feel nice to hear Mark Hamill in the role again) all over the island. And while I still have to take on Poison Ivy and eventually Joker to round out the rogues gallery featured in Arkham Asylum, this will only bring my total up to seven. That number may seem low compared to other games in the genre, but it never feels that way while exploring Arkham Asylum. It was a new direction for Batman games, and it saved other villains like Freeze and Clayface for future entries, which was great because we didn't even have to wait too long to see them, with Arkham City releasing just two years later. Bosses are often the most memorable parts of games for me because I like seeing how they challenge me. Revisiting Arkham Asylum has been great because it reminded me of how it subverted my expectations of what boss battles could look like.
Max:
One thing I forgot about Arkham Asylum is how rooted in horror it is. Obviously, Batman's always been spooky, striking fear into the hearts of cowardly and superstitious criminals by dressing like a nocturnal animal that people associate just more with vampires than they do with crimefighters. Still, Arkham Asylum (the game and its setting) is essentially a funhouse full of monsters. Arkham's namesake is borrowed from the fictional setting of several H.P. Lovecraft stories, and architecturally, it's more gothic than Gotham City itself. In Batman mythos, it's a maximum security facility to house the Dark Knight's most twisted foes, and it's as much a prison as a mental hospital. In the game, it's all of the above, but it's also a bit of a haunted house. The Joker's constant hamming it up over the PA system keeps the atmosphere from getting too suspenseful, and there's nothing particularly scary about the hordes of trash-talking goons patrolling the place (especially after Batman beats them unconscious), but there are plenty of monsters in between. Repeated hallucinations of a giant scarecrow with hypodermic needle Freddy Krueger hands, a giant crocodile man who lives in the sewer, killer plants, and lumbering Frankensteinian mutated test subjects would all fit right in at a Spirit Halloween store but work just as well as part of macabre spin on the Caped Crusader. Arkham Asylum has all the ingredients of a survival horror game, but it's first and foremost a Batman game. A good survival horror game generally hinges on the player having limited resources and being up against insurmountable odds, but obviously, that's antithetical to a good Batman game, which makes you feel like a billionaire detective with ninja training and lots of cool gadgets.
Final Thoughts on Batman: Arkham Asylum
Jada:
After finishing Batman Arkham Asylum, I'm left with quite a few thoughts: how did we get a follow-up only two years later, and when will we see another Batman game that evokes such a strong positive feeling about the character and franchise? Batmanz: Arkham Asylum was one of those games that we all hoped would be good, but how it delivered on everything from the casting, the action, the stealth, and everything else that encompasses Batman was a breath of fresh air after spending what felt like decades of mostly getting bad to mid-tier superhero or licensed games, especially if they weren't Marvel. The highlights of that era boiled down to Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, nearly every Spider-Man game, and the big team-up games like X-Men Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance but besides those examples most licensed games weren't well received back then.
This reintroduction made a new Batman game in 2009 unique; it was the hopeful start of seeing DC characters get their chance in the spotlight. Arkham Asylum also impacted the industry, as it gave a vision to other developers for what combat could look like in a superhero game, effectively leveling up the competition, which made everyone winners, including us, at home playing the games. Sure, not every game has been able to replicate the freeflow combat system perfectly, but even an imperfect imitation was better than what we had gotten in the past. Looking at the landscape of games today, you can still see where the Arkham games had an impact, and while we haven't seen unanimous acclaim in the recent DC games as we did in the past, those who have played them can still see some of the DNA hiding in the shadows just waiting to be utilized. Here's hoping we can see Rocksteady and other studios eventually find their way out of the shadows and back into the spotlight.
It's been a blast going back through Batman: Arkham Asylum this month, and as the month draws to a close, it's time to decide on our game for the month of April. We all had separate ideas for which game to revisit in April so we thought we'd put it to a vote for the audience so let us know what game you'd like to see and hear us dive back into next month.
