It's been a long time since 2009 when Batman: Arkham Asylum first released and yet, despite the passage of time eroding my psyche like the patience of an exhausted parent, it has maintained a podium position as one of my favourite games of all time. Even after its sequel, Arkham City, received oodles of praise and awards, there has always been something that brings me back to Asylum for my preferred dose of billionaire baddie beating.
(Image property of Rocksteady Studios and Eidos Interactive)
I'd like to state, for the record, that I was planning on writing this retrospective before the Nintendo Direct announced the Rocksteady developed Arkham Trilogy coming to Switch. That said, I shouldn't complain about timeliness. In fact, this poses the perfect opportunity to reflect on what made Arkham Asylum the kind of monolithic game that justifies a re-release almost 15 years later.
Thus, let us discard our post-truth, late capitalist cynicism and stride gaily back in time to the golden age of 2009 to explore why Arkham Asylum spits in the face of the ageing process.
(Minor spoilers for Arkham Asylum but my god this game came out 14 years ago, you've probably either played it or had it spoiled by now)
When in doubt, ask the experts
As most Arkham fans or nostalgia-blinded nerds like me can happily tell you, the first two entries in the Arkham series were brought to us by Paul Dini, a Batman veteran and one of the creators of Batman: The Animated Series. To give you some perspective, amongst Batman fans, he holds a significance somewhere between the inventor of spandex and the second coming of Christ. You can decide which holds the higher importance.
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| (Image property of Warner Bros.) |
The result though, is that Arkham Asylum is distinctly well-written, and I don't just mean in the dull sense of whether it is accurate to the comics. Characters like the Joker stand out for their big personalities and devilish schemes that only make more sense the more you come to know about them. On top of that, the game utilises the cream of the crop from Batman's rogues gallery with Scarecrow serving as a particular highlight with his fear toxin interrupting gameplay to force Batman to fight through trippy side-scrolling hellscapes.
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| (Image property of Rocksteady Studios and Eidos Interactive) |
For me though, one of the strongest indicators for how well Dini understands these characters is his treatment of Batman himself. In most by-the-numbers Batman media, the titular vigilante is depicted as a highly capable, isolated misery-guts. I suspect that this is mostly a deliberate over-correction to offset the silliness of the 1960s TV interpretation...
However, in Arkham Asylum, the game doesn't fall back on those same tired tropes. With a surprising level of frequency, Batman criticises a pokes some fun at his villains while talking to Oracle on his headset. Unlike most versions of Batman, it really comes across that this one was raised by everyone's favourite sarcastic British butler.
The character remains his usual serious self when the going gets tough but he carries a surprising self-awareness. It makes him feel like an actual human character who knows what he is doing and how to manage the problems he faces, in most cases because he has done before. This quiet confidence also helps create synchronicity between him and the player. When the gameplay requires you to beat up a room full of hardened murderers, that feels totally believable because Batman has already been presented as seasoned and highly capable in the spine shattering department.
Of course, the strong characters and narrative design would not be possible without the stellar performances from Batman veterans Mark Hamill (Joker) and Kevin Conroy (Batman) who are both on the top of their game. It's something about these actors having worked together for years that gives them this perfect chemistry that bleeds through into their fictional counterparts. Even as someone who was relatively new to Batman when he first played this game, their history was clear to me just in how they spoke to each other.
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| (Image via Mark Hamill on Twitter) |
That being said, expert character-work does not a good game make. It goes a long way towards it, don't get me wrong, but this is very much not the only string to Arkham Asylum's bow. No, the bow is packing some serious heat seeing as another string was that it effectively revolutionised third-person combat systems. Talk about over-achieving.
Free-flowing fisticuffs
Having been in production for quite some time before 2009, Arkham Asylum was originally envisioned as a rhythm action game with punches being thrown in time to a beat. Unfortunately, my dreams of a Batman-Guitar Hero crossover were scuppered by the developers who felt it wasn't working. Instead, they had to settle for creating one of the best combat systems in games at the time. Gee, it must be hard being talented.
Based around the four face buttons, the game gave the player four moves to pull off: Punch, Dodge, Stun and, above all else, Counter. While most are self-explanatory, the Counter button was important as it allowed you to use enemy attacks against them, helping players to keep the Caped Crusader as characteristically aggressive as possible.
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| (Image property of Rocksteady Studios and Eidos Interactive) |
However, counter combat was nothing new. Even mainstream series like Assassins' Creed had been using it for years before Batman. What lit the necessary fire under Arkham Asylum's arse was the fruity infusion of the combo meter. As you rack up more hits without taking damage or pausing for too long, Batman gets faster, stronger and can pull off special bone-breaking finishers. The result of this was that players needed to use all of Batman's moves equally in order to be most effective. Standing in a corner mashing counter like a horde fight in the original Assassins' Creed was no longer enough to get by.
Not only did this energise the core gameplay of combat, it also played so well into that aforementioned characterisation. Through its combat system, Arkham Asylum depicts Bruce Wayne as needing to be one step ahead at all times. In the context of the plot, this is necessary for Batman's survival. In the context of the player, you want to plan out how to maintain your combo. Like all the best combat systems, it makes sense both behind and beyond the fourth wall.
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| (Image property of Rocksteady Studios and Eidos Interactive) |
However, the brutal Bat-brawling only tells half the story of Arkham Asylum's gameplay. My personal favourite part of how the game played was the not-to-be-quoted-out-of-context Predator system. Comprising the game's stealth mechanics, this was used for when Batman had to take on the Joker's gangs of gun-toting goons through any means other than head-on. Usually, this means hanging from a gargoyle or sneaking round corners to silently knock them out from behind, all with the aid of the X-Ray Detective Vision to see where they are.
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| (Image property of Rocksteady Studios and Eidos Interactive) |
Again, what works is that it is so quintessentially Batman. Waiting on a gargoyle for an overconfident inmate to stroll past so that you can string him up by his legs never fails to put a smirk on your face. Locking up a hardened lunatic without being seen gives you a sense of self-satisfied pride almost as large as the implied piss stain now coating the front of his pants.
Between the Freeflow combat and Predator stealth, Arkham Asylum effectively hits every note that people enjoy Batman media for, all the while using this gameplay to reinforce the rock-solid (or should I say Rocksteady, ha ha.) characterisation.
However, as I not-so-subtly foreshadowed at the beginning of this piece, Arkham Asylum remains my favourite of the Arkham series and all of the highlights that I've pointed to so far to demonstrate its greatness can also be found in Arkham City if not Arkham Knight as well. Therefore, it is important that I make clear what it is that I prefer about Asylum specifically.
The devil is in the details
Something that makes the Arkham games something of an odd duck franchise is that, despite only having four main entries (Rocksteady's trilogy and WB Montreal's red-headed step-child), these games actually cover two different genres. Arkham City, Origins and Knight are all open-world action adventure games involving a lot of grappling and gliding around urban sprawl.
What sets Asylum apart is that it is a Metroidvania, not an open-world. Thus, rather than gliding and grappling wherever you want, the game restricts your access to its world with Arkham Island opening up as you gain new traversal and puzzle-solving abilities. It's this narrower focus of design that lends Arkham Asylum its concrete pacing, allowing the narrative to slowly build over time as just another day in the life of the Batman escalates into a nightmare scenario.
(Image property of Rocksteady Studios and Eidos Interactive)
Another benefit to the tightness of design that Asylum displays is how memorable and detailed all of the environments are. I can still picture the interiors of all the major buildings on Arkham Island, something that I cannot say for City or Knight. While there is nothing wrong with their open world design, there are simply fewer small details for the mind to latch onto and it's that latching-on that helps the game to remain a cemented-in fixture in my memory.
Above all else though, what makes Asylum such a memorable cut above the rest of the series is its atmosphere. Striking environmental features like Intensive Treatment's electrodes that look more suited to torture than treatment coalesce with the dingy offices strewn with paperwork to create a nightmarish tapestry of a facility no longer fit for purpose.
(Image property of Rocksteady Studios and Eidos Interactive)
This feeling of decline and decay both serves to explain why Joker was able to take over the island and creates an oppressive atmosphere where the player feels the crushing inevitability of the facility's collapse hanging over them. The atmosphere reinforces the narrative idea that you are now as much of an inmate in this Gothic penitentiary as any of the criminals.
Incidentally, this atmosphere is also the reason why I'm grateful that the Arkham Trilogy version of Asylum appears to be the original rather than the Return to Arkham up-rez. That version had a bad habit of undermining some of the dark, muddy visuals by altering the graphics. It also gave Batman this weird Kardashian lip-filler treatment.
After Asylum, by relinquishing control over the pacing and creating much larger environments, the Arkham series sacrificed the claustrophobia that situated it uncomfortably close to the horror genre at times. Thinking back to the idea of what makes games stand out in our memories, Arkham City never made me nervous or afraid. By contrast, I can't say that I was proud of the colour of my boxers the first time one of the screaming inmates from Extreme Isolation jumped around a corner and rapped their arms around Batman's throat.
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| (Image property of Rocksteady Studios and Eidos Interactive) |
Thus, if I had to articulate why you should play Arkham Asylum regardless of your interest in the rest of the series, it creates a unique blend of excellent characterisation, innovative gameplay that still holds up today and an atmosphere that you usually don't get in a licensed action game. The melting pot of these elements creates what feels like a unique experience that, unlike Arkham City has not been followed-up on since its release.
Because of this, I will always find myself gravitating back towards Arkham Asylum every few years so that I can re-live the game's pioneering spirit. While I'm undecided on whether I will pick it up at release, take my word for it that, if I do buy the Arkham Trilogy for Switch, it will be more for this game than any other in the package.
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