Reader Taliesin was nice enough to get me a copy of Batman: Arkham City. If I’d played it before the new year, it would have made my list of memorable games of 2011. Like Arkham Asylum, this is a balanced, polished experience with tons of content. The difficulty modes run the spectrum from “I’ve just arrived from the Middle Ages and have never seen a computer before” to “OMG this game is so hard I’m bleeding in real life”. It’s got a wonderfully detailed world and buffet-style gameplay.
This game has a plot twist. It’s a good one. This is hard to pull off. I mean, any writer can just execute a sudden “it was a clone / evil twin / time-travel” twist at any point if they want to. That’s not hard, but it’s basically cheating and it’s not satisfying for the audience. A good twist is one where we don’t see it coming but we can plainly see it in retrospect. This means telegraphing your twist and using misdirection to hide these clues.
Playing through the game a second time, I could see they never cheated. Okay, I’m not a hardcore Batfan and maybe there are cues I’m missing, but from my casual familiarity with the lore, it was telegraphed fair and square. Nicely done. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a plot twist like this since Jade Empire or KOTOR. There’s no way around it. If you want to pull this off, you need to be a good writer with a subtle touch, even when dealing with subject matter as loud and frenetic as comic book superheroes. In fact, it might be harder, because comic book fans have seen these sort of twists done again and again over the years, and can usually see them coming before you even start dropping clues. It’s hard to pull off a good con without cheating, and moreso when the guy doing the con is…
Look, there’s no way to discuss it without spoiling it. From here on, we’re going to be spoiling the game in absolute terms. I don’t have space to outline the whole plot, so if you haven’t played then you might have trouble keeping up. Here we go:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Batman Arkham City: Joker’s Last Laugh”
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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