Batman: Arkham Asylum Set a High Bar Its Sequels Never Reached

This month marks the 15th anniversary of Batman: Arkham Asylum: the universally acclaimed video game developed by Rocksteady Studios that started an entire gaming franchise. Loosely inspired by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s best-selling graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, the 2009 game has DC Comics’ iconic superhero take on the Joker and a whole host of escaped inmates when they take over Gotham City’s asylum for the criminally insane. Over the course of a single, long night, Batman moves to stop the supervillains and their private army from wiping out the personnel trapped on the island as he moves to stop the Joker’s most dastardly plot yet.

While Arkham Asylum’s various follow-ups, including 2011’s Batman: Arkham City and 2015’s Batman: Arkham Knight, have earned well-deserved acclaim for continuing the story and expanding the world of the original game, Arkham Asylum is vastly underrated in what it uniquely brings to the game series. Rather than being focused on upping the scope, Arkham Asylum’s story and focus arguably make it the definitive Batman game in a way that its sequels never quite fully replicated.

An Enduring Gaming Foundation

Even as the inaugural game in a long-running series that received three direct follow-ups and number of spinoff titles, so much of Batman: Arkham Asylum holds up beautifully 15 years after its initial release. The game’s signature freeflow combat system, which go on to inspire similar combat gameplay in Marvel’s Spider-Man series and 2015’s Mad Max, remains intuitive and a joy to navigate as the Dark Knight deftly clears a room of intimidating crooks. Similarly, detective vision is present, not just for following clues on where to proceed next, but also key with the silent predator sequences that has Batman pick off heavily armed enemies in a given environment one-by-one to avoid attracting unwanted attention.

Other foundational elements introduced by Arkham Asylum is its darker and violent depiction of the Batman mythos than many were familiar with, more vicious than filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and before the DCEU’s lethal Caped Crusader played by Ben Affleck. This tone would be amplified in the later games, as would the already impressive number of Easter eggs to the wider Batman lore and series of puzzles set by the Riddler. But there were things that Arkham Asylum also did that its sequels downplayed or discarded completely.

What Batman: Arkham Asylum Does So Well

Arkham Asylum takes place entirely on a mountainous private island where the titular asylum is located, with the Gotham skyline visible on the horizon. Batman ventures into different facilities as part of the asylum’s sprawling campus, in addition to waterways below the asylum and an intricate network of caves in the mountains around and under the buildings. Players become very familiar with this environment, unlocking additional parts of the island to explore as the story progresses and Batman obtains new gear to help him traverse hard-to-reach portions of the hub.

This carries on into the finest Metroidvania tradition in a way that many modern 3D action-adventure games have left by the wayside. Unlocking access to each new part of the hub feels well-earned, a reward in itself, as each section yields its own Easter eggs and puzzles to solve. This is compounded by the Riddler challenges and messages players can find, each unveiling new parts of the story and greater mystery about the asylum and its twisted inhabitants. 

Similarly, the game’s structure makes for a more claustrophobic experience, from isolated rooms and narrow corridors, culminating in a memorably terrifying encounter with Killer Croc in the asylum’s sewers. This sequence forces players to move quietly and slowly to avoid creating vibrations in the water alerting Croc of Batman’s location, with the reptilian supervillain bursting out unpredictably from below. When Arkham Asylum does open up, it’s occasionally in nightmare sequences that have Batman hallucinate under the effects of Scarecrow’s fear gas.

Simply put, Arkham Asylum has plenty of moody atmosphere and tension that its sequels largely lack and a genuine sense of mystery that unfolds, particularly for first-time players. Tonally, the game feels like a horror-thriller in the vein of Zodiac or Se7en compared to preceding Batman games and even outdoor environments have an unsettling quality to them. This is a game that just exudes chilling ambiance and is all the richer for that attention to detail and mood.

What Arkham Asylum’s Sequels Left Out

The follow-ups to Arkham Asylum, including Rocksteady’s own Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Knight along with the WB Games Montreal-developed prequel Batman: Arkham Origins, understandably go with the bigger–is-better axiom in scope. The core gameplay mechanics are retained but the player is no longer confined to a single island, but rather portions of Gotham City itself, with Arkham Knight taking place across the entire city. This ambition certainly pays off but it does feel like there’s something missing in translation by expanding the scale of the game compared to Arkham Asylum.

Gone is much of the claustrophobia and tension from Arkham Asylum and, in the game’s open-world hub, they can simply grapple up to a nearby rooftop if they ever feel overwhelmed. The Metroidvania elements are still present to a degree but they’re noticeably downplayed in favor of open-world exploration. The horror undertones are still there, particularly in Arkham Knight, but it’s horror without the mounting sense of dread that Arkham Asylum provides. Comparatively, if Arkham Asylum feels like a stripped-down horror-driven experience like The Terminator or Alien, Arkham City and Arkham Knight ramp up the action to feel more like Terminator 2 or Aliens.

Part of the reason for this change, from a narrative standpoint, was a creative shuffle behind-the-scenes early in development on Arkham Knight. Paul Dini, a writer and producer on Batman: The Animated Series, wrote the story for Arkham Asylum and Arkham City but was replaced by an internal team of Rocksteady writers, working alongside DC Entertainment writer and executive Geoff Johns, for Arkham Knight. The change in creative vision is acutely felt in the 2015 game, with many of the subplots and tonal coherence from the first two games downplayed or completely absent in Arkham Knight in favor of pivoting to a new antagonist in the titular Arkham Knight and different narrative direction.

The Less Is More Approach

What Arkham Asylum perhaps lacks in scope and scale it more than makes up for in focus and a thoroughly cinematic presentation and mood that elevates the game considerably. In a lot of ways, Arkham Asylum feels like a perfect game for Halloween, more so than Arkham Knight which actually takes place on Halloween night in Gotham City. With its island asylum setting, Arkham Asylum eschews the themed hideouts for each of its major supervillains, while telling a definitive origin for its depiction of Batman through flashbacks fueled by Scarecrow’s fear toxin. This level of storytelling isn’t matched by the sequels as those games try to balance their expanded casts and heightened stakes.

This, of course, isn’t to say that Arkham City and Arkham Knight are significantly inferior sequels to Arkham Asylum, but rather, in going bigger, some of the defining charm from the first game was lost in translation. The quality-of-life improvements and additional features that the follow-ups bring to the series are largely well-executed, the overpowered Electrocutioner gauntlets from Arkham Origins and the clunky Batmobile missions in Arkham Knight notwithstanding. But the Batman: Arkham series lost sight of major aspects that made Arkham Asylum such a universally acclaimed hit upon its initial release in 2009 and never looked back.

Batman: Arkham Asylum Remains the Standard

Batman video games had certainly existed before Batman: Arkham Asylum, but often rooted in television or film adaptations and in serious need of a change in quality after disastrously received titles like Batman: Vengeance and Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu. Arkham Asylum provided the iconic superhero with his own standalone video game adventure relatively faithful to the comic book source material while adding its own distinct take on the franchise. With Arkham Asylum, Rocksteady Studios set a high bar for superhero video games moving forward that clearly inspired titles like Marvel’s Spider-Man.

With the benefit of hindsight 15 years after the launch of Arkham Asylum, we can see that Rocksteady created a unique, atmospheric take on the Batman mythos that its sequels never quite fully replicated. There are certainly dark and horror-fueled moments in the follow-ups to Arkham Asylum but by keeping the narrative focus tight on Batman and the constant feeling of being trapped in a remote location filled with enemies that might strike at any moment, Arkham Asylum knew that the secret to an effective horror game is keeping players confined and in suspense. The most underrated game in the entire Batman: Arkham series, Batman: Arkham Asylum is more than just the game that started it all but the most masterfully told title in the franchise.

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