Arkham Asylum: What Was And What Could Have Been
The Arkham Asylum graphic novel, A Serious House on Serious Earth, tells a strange, hallucinatory sort of a story, and when it was first published 20 years ago, the bold way in which it toyed with Batman mythology was incredibly controversial. While there had been stories before that hinted that the Dark Knight wasn’t much saner than the crazed villains he fought against, this Batman was ill-at-ease right from the start, and began questioning his sanity and moral authority with very little need for encouragement. It all had a dreamlike quality to it, from the ambiguous but beautiful drawings, to the plot, which left enough loose ends for die-hard fans to continue debating all these years later whether the book should be considered official Batman canon at all.
The Arkham Asylum videogame comes closest to recreating the feel of the graphic novel at the points where Batman encounters the Scarecrow. (And this is probably where I should warn that I’m about to ruin a number of surprises in the game if you haven’t already played it.) Reviewers were forbidden by the publisher, Eidos Interactive, from detailing even a single moment of the Scarecrow’s appearance – which, as well as being a somewhat heavy-handed review condition, has left a weird critical vacuum around the game’s most interesting sections. Six months on from its initial release, let’s now try to put that right.
At the most basic level, Scarecrow’s important to the game because he reminds us of Batman’s humanity. Up until his introduction, Batman is the emotional stonewall that he has to be. That’s fine, and totally consistent with the character, but the comics and films nearly always had Bruce Wayne to remind us that the man under the mask is just that: a man. He’s the superhero with no superpowers, one of us, and his fallibility is a major part of why he became one of the most popular comic book characters ever created. As far as is possible with a man who wears tights and dons a cape in order to fight crime, we can relate, and the parts of the game where Batman is stumbling around hallucinating are the only times we get to see any of our own weaknesses in Batman.
GAS ATTACK
That’s only scraping the surface, though. It’s after Batman’s first exposed to Scarecrow’s notorious fear gas and Joker asks, “Having trouble figuring out what’s real, Bats?” that things get really interesting. Anyone who played the brilliant Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem on the Gamecube will have recognised the trick being used here. It’s not just Batman who’s confused about what’s happening; it’s the player as well. After a couple of hours of straightforward narrative exposition in cut-scenes, it’s genuinely unsettling for a game to sweep the rug from under your feet and leave everything up for grabs. It’s not only the sequences themselves, but their ability to cast a shadow over everything that follows that makes them such an important part of the game.
Batman “recovers” from his first run-in with the Scarecrow abruptly. He’s still obviously disorientated as he speaks to Oracle over his intercom, and as he moves into the next corridor and finds the guard he’d previously believed to be the murdered Commissioner Gordon, he says to himself, “Crane’s gas must have affected me more than I thought.”
It raises the question: is it possible that Batman is still under its influence? Or worse still, has he been hallucinating right from the start?
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That was a damn good article and you’re absolutely right about the missed opportunity for such an astounding end to an already wonderful game.
Here’s hoping the sequel takes note.
For me, the Scarecrow parts of the game were some of the duller and more obvious bits of the game. I was never left wondering. That might be because for me the whole “what’s real?” thing has become kind of a cliché these days, and if you still want to address it, you have to do it really, *really* well. Scarecrow’s levels never came even close to that, I thought.
@Greg Giddens: Thanks!
@qrter: I suppose you’re right (although perhaps a little too harsh)- and my point is really *imagine if* Dini had dared to go further with how he used the Scarecrow character. I totally agree there’s a danger that the easily exploitable “ooh what’s real?” trick that videogames can deploy with very little effort is on its way to becoming clichéd if not used intelligently, and as I see it that’s all the more reason to be disappointed that Arkham Asylum didn’t push the idea further.