On a fundamental level,Batman: Arkham Shadowis doing all it can to belong to the Arkhamverse ofBatmangames without any suspension of disbelief or dissonance as a VR title. So far, the obvious Meta Quest 3 functionality ofBatman: Arkham Shadowis truly the only distinguishable delineation, and even Batman’s POV has been represented before in ventilation ducts already as well as Police Commissioner Jim Gordon and Joker’s POVs shown inArkham Knight. Everything it has revealed for gameplay is faithfully adapted with brilliant interpretations of over-the-shoulder actions that wouldn’t be plausible in VR, and its brand-new story is highly enigmatic.
The story itself represents a fine balance between established characters who haven’t had their backstories formally or thoroughly told and obscure characters who either haven’t been given a role in-game besides a supplementary Easter egg or mentioned at all in the Arkhamverse beforehand;Otis Flannegan’s Ratcatcheras one of the former, for example, and Lyle Bolton’s Lock-Up as one of the latter. But perhaps whereShadowis most noticeably unique as anArkhamgame is the fact that it is set across a handful of days and nights as opposed to a single night.
The Arkham Games’ One-Night Endeavors Apply Dramatic Urgency and Suspense
An unwavering staple inArkhamgames has seen them all narratively be the length of a single night and that tradition has been an instrumental part in their authentic storytelling success.
Asylum,City, andOriginscan take anywhere between five to 15 hours depending on how much optional content players indulge in—withRiddler’s recurring collectible huntsbeing responsible for a huge chunk of that content—whereasKnightis the longest by a wide margin. Narratively, though, they all begin and end within a night’s time. This has been monumentally significant for a few reasons:
Asylumdepicts Joker’s orchestration of a hostile takeover on Arkham Islandwith Blackgate inmates having been shipped there, for example, and Batman being able to thwart it in a single night ensures that he was able to largely contain it and prevent Joker’s diabolical Titan scheme from coming to fruition in a remarkably short amount of time. Had the game taken place over a week, let alone a couple of days, it might not seem as impressive, catastrophic, or suspenseful.
Only having one night to resolve this conflict also meant Batman could reveal that he had a Batcave built beneath the island for such contingencies.Knightis harder to suspend disbelief for given everything that occurs on Halloween night, however, whileOriginsis succinct as its base game tells a compartmentalized Christmas Eve tale and itsCold, Cold Heart DLC tells a compartmentalized New Year’s Eve tale.
Batman: Arkham Shadow’s Slowed Pace Needs to Maintain Tension
If nothing else, this narrative structure has let the Arkhamverse flourish withBatman’s legacy told across eight years up untilArkham Knightand only a handful of punctuations within that framework, and this is whereShadownow belongs. Eight years doesn’t seem like a relatively long time with how much occurs in the lore in under a decade; rather, if even half of those years were full of nights like the ones inAsylum,City,Origins, orKnightthere’d be no end to how many tales Batman and the Bat Family have battling villains in Gotham City.
IfShadowdoesn’t somehow replicate that fluid momentum in its story, which breaks from tradition to take place over multiple nights, it could be ruinous and negatively alienate it from the pack. One of the only obvious advantages of this approach is that Camouflaj will be able to depict more of Bruce Wayne when he’s not donning a cape and cowl and potentially the relationships he has with other characters likeAlfred, Barbara Gordon, and District Attorney Harvey Dent.
Plus, it’s been shared that with numerous Bruce Wayne sequences there also comes myriad suit-up sequences and plenty of time in the Batcave as a result.Shadowdoesn’t need to be a one-to-one copy of previousArkhamgamesto excel, and yet it’ll need to prove why a multi-night story is a wiser choice for its own narrative when it launches in October.
