So Arkham Asylum Is Quirkier Than I Remember

I love Batman: Arkham Asylum, and after many long, long years, I decided to pick it up again. I threw on the boots of the eponymous Bat and promptly set to rehabilitating Gotham's mentally ill en masse with merciless kung fu! Oh, 2009, you were a different time…

Something that I noticed this time around — with these old eyes of mine — was that Asylum has a unique visual presentation, one not replicated in any sequels. This is especially clear when you consider that Batman: Arkham Knight (the series’ final entry) established a more realistic look — well, as realistic as mad, old Gotham can be portrayed, anyway. Before my recent Asylum replay, though, all of the Arkham games had Knight's truer-to-life visual presentation in my mind, and so it was a pleasant surprise to see that Asylum, in fact, actually had its own thing going on.

Almost immediately, I spotted the game's disproportionate character models, and no, I'm not just referring to Batman's ridiculous muscle structure. Big hands and small heads (or vice versa) plague many of the characters, with Commissioner Gordon being the most obvious offender. I mean, just look at the poor guy…

Whilst this is odd, it is not the only area where the game channels cartoonish energy. On the contrary, it was as if Tim Burton had been a part of the art team, as most buildings and structures are always a little larger and more misshapen than they should otherwise be. By design, everything effectively looms, making Arkham Island all sorts of uncanny. And weirder still, Tim's own Batman movie wasn't even this strange.

Building upon its Burton vibe, Asylum is a spooky game, too, and I say that while understanding completely the campiness attributed to such a word. No, Mr Wayne, oversized human skulls adorning the hidden entrance to your second Batcave is not terrifying, it's just a bit cheesy. Yes, the game is absolutely riddled with this flavour of tacky yet fun Halloween aesthetic: there's a graveyard with unearthed skeletons and crooked tombstones, a sarcastically huge moon that lingers in a permanent nighttime sky, and there's even a literal ghost posing as one of the side characters. It's kind of a crazy world, and that's ignoring the whole superhero thing.

Ultimately, I did like what I saw. It was like the art team took into account that their source material was a long-running comic book series, allowing that to help them sculpt their version of the world. It creates a very interesting space to run, punch, and glide around in, especially when some of the more vibrant foliage clashes with the game's darker areas — I found all of that very pleasing in particular.

And so, with all that said, if you haven't picked up Asylum in a while, I really recommend that you go and do so. Sure, it may be quite clumsy in comparison to the games that followed it, but it remains a short, sweet, and most importantly, spooky outing 15 years later.