Revisiting Batman: Arkham Knight
The Dark Knight faces his greatest enemy yet: guilt.
In the Revisiting series, I replay games that I really enjoyed, that had a significant impact on me, or that I just can’t stop thinking about. I explore what made these games have an effect on me, and how they hold up now.
SPOILER WARNING: This article will include full discussion of the story of Batman: Arkham Knight.
Batman: Arkham Knight is a strange game for one particular reason. Following on from Arkham Asylum and Arkham City before it, it continues the trend of absurdly dramatic, comic-book style stories with over-the-top characters and absurd plot twists. Unlike its predecessors, however, Arkham Knight focuses heavily on a deep psychological exploration of Batman and what it means to be a rich white guy dressed as a bat going around beating people up. The previous games largely focused on zany plots from the villains, like stealing a formula to make someone super strong or bombing a city full of criminals, and the extent of Batman’s arc revolved around his rule of not killing anyone, a well-known character trait. Batman was a gruff and focused hero with little time for emotional exploration or depth, because he was too busy leaping across rooms to drop kick the working-class.
In Arkham Knight, there is once again an insane plot, revolving around Scarecrow using fear gas to envelop what is at once point the entire Eastern US Seaboard, before his plans become focused on the much more reasonable target of just the city of Gotham. The central theme of fear, however, is used as an excuse to delve into Batman’s psyche and explore just what makes him tick. The Batman we play as in Arkham Knight has been doing this for quite a while, and he’s tired, worn down, and as the night goes on, increasingly desperate. More than either of the previous games, we get to see Batman’s relationships with his various sidekicks, companions, and allies. We see how the guilt of supposedly getting an ally killed weighs on him and drives him to increasingly desperate measures, including torturing a guy for information by threatening to flatten his head with the wheel of his car, a very normal thing for a superhero to do.
You see, Arkham Knight is a direct continuation from the previous games. In City, Batman was infected with Joker’s poisonous blood and, at the end of the game, Joker dies. In Knight, we see that despite consuming a cure, Joker’s blood has lasting effects on Batman. He’s running tests on individuals who’ve also received transfusions of the blood who have started to exhibit symptoms of Joker’s madness, and whose bodies have begun to alter themselves to resemble Joker’s appearance, with some of the most bullshit pseudoscience explanations in the history of videogames. Batman is becoming more and more like Joker, with his methods becoming more brutal and his fears of becoming like his nemesis manifesting before him. But we also see his determination to carry on and push through even as Joker becomes more and more a part of him.
This manifests through gameplay as a hallucination of Joker acting as a constant companion to Batman, making snarky comments towards other villains and providing exposition for important plot points. Most importantly, though, Joker acts as a sort of conscience for Batman, guilting him for getting his allies put in danger or killed, teasing him about how much of a hero he really is. In this way, we see Batman’s fears made manifest, and we get a direct voice from Batman’s inner psyche that allows us as a player to gain insight into what’s going on inside the brooding superhero. It’s a rather surreal experience where, in between bouts of beating up criminals and solving mysteries, we get to see just how afraid and broken Batman really is.
Batman’s desperation as the game progresses is demonstrated through the good old-fashioned medium of physical violence. I always like when videogames address the fact that their main method of interacting with the game is through incredible feats of violence. Yes, Batman is a superhero, but he’s a superhero without powers whose main character trait throughout the games is his ability to punch and kick the hell out of some bad guys, and use gadgets to knock out, electrocute, and freeze them, in many cases likely causing lasting injury and trauma. The games have always made fun of this through the dialogue that can be overheard from thugs, where they discuss how Batman has broken their various limbs or left them with lasting psychological scarring.
Nowhere is this violence made clearer than through the game’s use of the Batmobile. A new addition to Knight, the Batmobile is repeatedly referred to in-game as a tank, and tank it is. In gameplay, it’s used to blow up drones, send thugs flying across the street, and pull apart buildings. Visually, the thing is a beast, a hulking mass of black metal that causes everything around it to flatten and crumble. It is violence embodied, as demonstrated by the earlier mentioned torture via car wheel, and every aspect of it is big, loud, and destructive. As superhero vehicles go, it’s a particularly violent and intimidating one, and it serves as a representation of just how brutal and direct Batman has become, or perhaps always been. Despite his reputation as a detective and his infinite belt full of various gadgets, Batman’s problems are usually solved by beating someone up, because at the end of the day these are videogames whose primary method of gameplay is hurting people. Where Knight differs from the other titles is in exploring this level of violence and brutality, and just how dark it can be. As Batman becomes more and more like Joker, the violence is shown in a new light, and he gets to see just how similar he is to the people he fights against.
After all, like most superheroes, Batman works as his own moral authority with no oversight or accountability. He does sometimes work with the police, and the Gotham City Police Department, much like real-life police, are famously never corrupt or acting as agents of state violence. But at the end of the day, he himself decides who deserves to meet the end of his fists, and the game conveniently tells us at the start, “don’t worry, all the good people have left the city, it’s just the scumbags left, feel free to fight, maim and torture to your heart’s content”.
It's a strange fantasy to have and a stranger one to directly take part in – a ‘hero’ who decides that these criminals, many of whom are clearly in need of intense psychiatric help, should be physically attacked and reintroduced into the same broken state systems that haven’t yet been able to rehabilitate them, and that they famously keep escaping from. Some Batman media explores the other side of his personality, where, as his alter ego Bruce Wayne, he works to improve these systems, because we all know that broken social systems can be fixed if a rich enough white guy with a kind heart involves himself in the situation. But the games never really touch on this, and so we see Batman, now more violent than ever, apprehending criminals by brutally injuring them and going, “this time I’ve really got you”. In fact, one of the villains you apprehend in a side mission literally breaks out from his cell at one point. The GCPD weren’t able to contain him for a few hours, but Batman is happy to go, “yep, this seems like a good institution to help these people get better”.
The game ends with Batman inside his psyche forcing the Joker away forever, implying that he has cured this toxic blood infection by being built different and just willing it hard enough. Psychologically, though, this implies that he’s now fine and healthy, and ready to give up the mantle of Batman. Except for in the true ending, where it’s implied that either he’s still out there doing his thing, or he’s trained someone else to take up the persona and go beat up the mentally ill.
Arkham Knight is a weird story. By exploring the inner violence and desperation of Batman, it draws attention to just how strange and inappropriate said violence is, all while inviting the player to participate in it through fun game mechanics. And that’s just the thing – violence in videogames tends to be fun. It’s visceral, it’s impactful, and it can be done in a million different ways to challenge and excite players. But when your story is all about questioning and exploring said violence, making the player an active participant in it invites them to feel guilty. This is something that can be done well. Take, for example, Undertale, which dares to ask players, “hey, why’d you kill that guy?”. It works because the game presents another option from the start, namely working out ways to negotiate with enemies through conversation, jokes, and perseverance. Or Griftlands, a deckbuilder which allows you to build decks around both fighting and negotiating and decide which is the better option in each scenario. Arkham Knight tries to tell the player that the violence they’re taking part in might be a bit extreme, but doesn’t offer any alternative, as it’s the only way of engaging with the game. It’s a similar problem to the one I had with The Last of Us 2, which presents a pseudo-deep story about how bad it is to perpetuate the cycle of violence, but only offers gory violence as a gameplay mechanic. If you present a game with only one way to play it and then try to send a message about how bad and evil that method is, you’re not making an insightful point, you’re laughing at the player for engaging with your game in the way you designed. “Hey, look at this idiot over here, perpetuating the cycle of violence in this videogame where the only way to play is to perpetuate the cycle of violence. What an idiot!” It gets worse when you understand that The Last of Us 2 uses said violence to represent Israeli politics, and doesn’t necessarily represent a cycle of violence but instead a fascist tendency to keep getting involved in, and keep causing, extreme violence, all while painting it as a cycle beyond their control that cannot be stopped.
Arkham Knight does something similar by acting as if it is only through this Joker blood infection that Batman has become an agent of violence and brutality, when in reality that it is his entire identity as a superhero. He’s not cool and edgy and mysterious, he’s a representation of the upper-class fantasy of being able to “teach those lower classes a lesson” through extreme physical violence. And even within Batman stories, it doesn’t work - his villains return time and time again, having never changed nor become rehabilitated, and in the Arkham games, they remain comically evil people doing evil things because, well, they’re evil. It can be fun to look past all of this and view this a simple story about stopping a crazy guy from unleashing a chemical weapon on a city, but really it’s a critical indictment of how mental illness is treated so badly in this world that a guy with unlimited money and his own set of deep-seated issues can go around fighting other mentally ill people and putting them back into the systems that can’t help them, and everyone praises him for being a hero.
At the end of the day, Batman stories are always going to be a bit ridiculous, because they’re about a grown man, a very powerful and privileged man, dressing up in tights and beating up people who are victims of social systems beyond their control. They can be fun stories, and they can sometimes even manage to make a point. The Batman (2022) looks at how corruption can become so deep-rooted that it drives people to extreme lengths to draw attention to and challenge it, and it even forces Bruce Wayne to acknowledge how his reluctance to engage with the world outside of being Batman has led to his own company becoming corrupt. I’m sure that in the sea of Batman comics out there, there are some that might have something interesting or complex to say. Batman: Arkham Knight is a fun game that tries to make a point about how violent Batman has become and how scary that is, but when you pay the least bit of attention you go: no, he’s always been like this, and it’s actually really fucking weird.