Review: Telltale’s Batman Episode 1 — Realm of Shadows
Early days in the Batman career for both Telltale and Bruce. Both seem to be off to a good start.
Easily one of the most recognisable characters in the comic book world, the dark knight has had hundreds of iterations across over 50 years of adventures, retcons, rewrites, spinoffs, parodies, and pretty much every kind of media adaptation people can imagine. If you look hard enough there are probably homebrew D&D campaigns inspired by Gotham and its batshit (pun intended) crazy inhabitants.
So with Batman’s popularity strong as ever, most recently in the gamersphere due to the staggeringly impressive Arkham games made by Rocksteady (the trilogy of which I consider to be probably the absolute best superhero videogame series of all time) it was inevitable we’d see others rise up with an attempt to put their own spin on the Batman. Today’s subject is one Telltale games, who have earned a reputation for games that are basically a step up from a visual novel — primarily focused on narrative and plot, with the meat of your time spent making dialogue choices and important decisions, interspersed with light sections of puzzles and varying levels of quicktime event. They’ve received some criticism for their rather outdated game engine and what seems to often be some poor optimisation of the games, but it’s clear they’re putting their eggs in the writing and story basket, with each game opening with the message that your choices will shape the story and how things play out.
Now, before I get into the nitty gritty I’m going to lay out a few ground rules for how I’m going to review this. Because the game is almost entirely plot and character scenes playing out back to back then if you’re the sort of person who thought a screenshot of the very first area in Dark Souls 3 before it released counted as spoilers, get out now. I’m going to avoid spoiling major twists or commenting too much on the end of the episodes beyond general terms, but I will a) be discussing major characters and b) I won’t be against spoiling a previous episode (once further episodes come out) if it serves to inform or add context to a discussion about something in a current episode. If someone dies at the end of episode 4 and episode 5 spends a lot of time dealing with the repercussions then I’ll probably talk about that character’s death in a review of episode 5 for example, but my episode 4 review would politely leave that out in favour of at most a vague statement along the lines of “the ending provided a strong twist, and I’m extremely interested in how episode 5 will play out with the result.”
All good? Still here? Great. Let’s talk about Episode One: Realm of Shadows.
Off the bat (yes, suffer my punny wrath) I noticed a little stuttering between camera cuts. Might be my computer, might be the game, but Telltale doesn’t have a great track record of optimised games. It wasn’t too distracting after a while, but it didn’t feel very natural.
It becomes immediately clear that this is a Batman story set early in his career. Makes sense, these often allow a lot of groundwork to be laid for twists and turns later down the track, and it makes a lot of the encounters with villains new again when Batman hasn’t already profiled them down to which of their teeth are most crooked following his beatings. This also allows for several characters to appear in their pre-villain forms, which I’ll go into per character further down.
The police still don’t trust him, Gordon is yet to make commissioner but seems open to vigilante aid, and — and this was one of my favourite parts of the episode — Gotham’s crime lords aren’t currently themed supervillains. Carmine Falcone and the mob are still the heavy hitters with their fingers in all the pies, though there are of course hints and murmurs of more going on in the city.
Combat is something that, as a Batman game, needs more of a twist when contrasted with Telltale’s other games. Most of the time the two-note QTEs accomplish their purpose with about as much panache as a toy dog wrestling a Doberman, with the only exceptions I can name being the Wolf Among Us and its early episodes showcasing some fight choreography and Tales from the Borderlands’ final episode playing out a fight sequence that actually took choices throughout the game into account.
I wasn’t expecting a lot, and I imagine anyone who had grind designs would be disappointed, but I’m pleased to see Telltale making an effort. Fights are still a series of timed buttons, but the range of them has increased a bit, and the way they use them means that instead of a single miss typically ending in death and restarting, the overall fight plays out with a meter building up as the player inputs buttons correctly and in time. I didn’t fail enough of these to see what happens if you haven’t filled your bar at the end of a fight — whether it’s a game over or the fight ends with Batman on the back foot and his opponent giving him a new scar/getting away unharmed/whatever else — but it certainly makes the overall system play out much more smoothly — in the past a sudden button miss would kill you and restart the fight sequence. It was irritating and it took you out of the action. Repeated failures, though rare, would make it oh so very much worse. Instead, as long as you generally succeed then the game will happily forgive a few misses throughout the fight. This flows immeasurably better.
The other half, showcased in a later segment and more or less returning from Tales from the Borderlands, is Batman’s ability to scan a situation and the goons involved before he steps into a room, formulating a plan of attack. This basically allows the player to choreograph a fight before it happens — this goon is near the door, do you slam his head into that pillar or toss him over the balcony to hang upside down for a bit? This guy standing in the middle of the room is a prime target for dropping a light on his head via batarang-assisted gravity, but if you’re feeling different you could always see what gangster plus modern art equals. These individual bits all link together so that there are no breaks in the action when you’re kicking ass and taking names, flowing from one button to the next until you’ve ploughed through each piece and whatever follow-ups might come after your plan hits its back end.
It’s nothing ground-breaking. Honestly, anybody who expected that from Telltale was barking up the wrong tree, and with the Arkham games basically redefining hand-to-hand combat in games for the better part of the last decade nothing they could have done would have met the bar anyway. So with that in mind, I appreciate what they did do.
Beyond the actual Batmanning that got done throughout the episode though, I was surprised, pleasantly, by how much Bruce Wayne there is in this Batman game. Often times his life as a somewhat reclusive billionaire occasionally funding good initiatives is glossed over for a story about Batman versus his many foes. Telltale wisely gives the player a look at what it is to be Bruce Wayne trying to help the city from the political battlefield as well. It’s definitely playing to their strengths to do this, as there is far more nuance to interactions as Bruce Wayne than Batman’s brutal approach can manage most days. His stance on crime is pretty bloody clear — you’re bad, he’s going to feed you your teeth. Have fun. As Bruce Wayne though I found myself choosing my words carefully as the host of a fundraiser for Harvey Dent’s mayoral campaign, determining how gracious a host to be when it came to undesirable guests and so on.
The management of relationships between characters, the nature of political dealings coming back to bite you in the ass and the little things like choosing between roughly shrugging off Alfred’s suggestions or taking them to heart with a kind word, all of these things are Telltale’s bread and butter already, and given how little time Bruce Wayne has in some Batman stories it’s a good idea on their part to do it. There’s a lot of groundwork laying during the first episode that will presumably pay off down the track, so there isn’t a lot to say about much of the pieces of plot and character interaction so far beyond “looks good now, hopefully it’ll be important later”, but the twists and intrigue of what’s going on even in the world of Wayne kept me pressing forward and eager for more.
What major twists there were, notably one towards the end of the episode, had me absolutely intrigued for what will come next. My Batman experience isn’t great, so I can’t say what else has been done along similar lines in the past, but the focus on the Wayne family in general and Bruce’s parents as something other than a plot device for people to feel sorry for him over opens some channels I haven’t seen as often, and I’ve certainly never seen it done this way. Again though, I haven’t read every Batman story there is, and while I’ve dipped out of the mainstream a little to get my fixes, it’s far from an extensive knowledge.
Going beyond the storyline itself, there are so far two characters I’d like to talk about primarily. The first is Harvey Dent, who in Telltale’s story looks like a bigger brute than Bruce. Kind of surprised by the design of him on a physical level myself. Playing off Troy Baker’s Bruce Wayne, Harvey Dent is of course voiced by Travis Willingham. It does amuse me a bit to see the same names in everything, but I guess that’s how VA work goes. What screen time Harvey does have painted him as a fairly well politically motivated candidate with a corruptible side that is of course up to Bruce to defend or help him learn how to make use of it. Honestly there isn’t much to say about him so far. I don’t see any hints of a Two-Face emerging yet, but based on his origin story and how closely mob ties seem to be to the core storyline here there’s absolutely potential to see that fateful moment. Honestly though I’m just confused by the design choice to make Dent look like a roided up body builder.
The second of these, and currently far more interesting to me, is Oswald — affectionately referred to as ‘Oz’ by Bruce. Telltale seems to have decided to look at the currently in-use models for the Penguin in their construction of their own variant. Firstly and most obviously, he’s not tiny. I’m always conflicted by the idea to do this because the Penguin’s Napoleon complex is his character’s defining trait — it gives explanation for his parents’ disgust towards him in the varying shades it exists across the mediums. Instead Telltale seems to have looked at the physical characteristics of the Penguin’s character in the show Gotham and added a sweet coat and a douchebag haircut. For his personality we see a tampered and played-with form of the cockney gangster Penguin seen in Rocksteady’s Arkham series. It’s a few back-to-back decisions that have me curious as to what they’re planning.
Topping the Penguin’s current form and flavour off is some tinkering with his history. Telltale’s Penguin grew up with Bruce Wayne as a school boy, mentioned by Alfred as being the sort to pull Bruce into pranks and having more of a “firecracker’s in the toilet” idea of fun. Presumably the result here is that Oswald is supposed to come across as an anti-Bruce. A boy who started off with a more anarchistic view of the world that only got worse when things went bad for him in ways that ruined him and his family compared to Bruce’s essentially infinite money. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m actually totally fine with all of that. I’ll even put up with the douchebag haircut because he’s got the kind of cockney anarchist thing going that I really dig. It’s just… this doesn’t feel like the Penguin. This doesn’t feel like any Penguin. Honestly, it feels more like Telltale just plastered the name Oswald Cobblepot on him because nobody would recognise him if they’d called him Thomas Elliot — a name I think would have fit him far better even with the cockney angle on top. The fact that you’re now googling Thomas Elliot to see which Batman villain he is kind of proves my point on Telltale just wanting to play it safe though.
This is a pet peeve of mine: the vicious cycle where only a few Batman villains on top get any screen time in Batman media beyond the comics. Admittedly the Arkham games have done well to pull in some of the lesser known villains, with characters like the Mad Hatter and Killer Croc being used to great effect, but as far as most Batman media beyond the comics is concerned Bane is thinking outside the box. Maybe I’m just annoyed there are so few stories I’ve seen lately where Hush is used to decent effect, or that I don’t think I’ll ever see Prometheus show up in one of these games. Still, the bottom line here is that while I’m digging the actual character Telltale has created with their proto-Penguin, I also think he’s a piss poor Penguin so far and it’d make more sense to have used someone else for it.
Going back, one more point on the technical issues (which Telltale has assured fans they’re working on) with the version I was playing on PC, during one of the last scenes of the episode I experienced a sudden crash to desktop. It’s not hard to get back to where you were by choosing the same dialogue choices and whatnot, but it definitely takes you out of the action, especially since I was in a fight scene at the time. Hopefully that won’t take long to fix, as the threat of the game crashing again drove me to smell the roses a little less towards the end of the episode — Telltale’s checkpointing system only kicks in at scene breaks, and some of these can last a good twenty minutes. 15 minutes lost progress isn’t too bad normally, but when it’s all the exact same dialogue again it’s a pain.
Ultimately what I can say about Telltale’s first leg into the Batman world is that I’m keen to see where it goes, and I’m excited to see more of the story it’s creating. For an episodic game, that’s really the biggest piece of the puzzle and it’s hit the mark straight away. That said, I don’t agree with everything they’ve done so far. Some of the main characters don’t quite feel right to me, and I’m worried about what some small hints now could mean for villains later. I really hope Telltale’s release schedule is consistent and frequent for this, because I need to see more, but I’m living in fear of the moment an interesting story about Gotham politics and investigating the mob turns into yet another instance of the goddamn Joker stealing the show.
