Every Halloween I return to the Arkham games. It’s as much a ritual of mine as playing Super Mario World in the lead-up to Christmas – a personal yuletide delight I absolutely recommend. Batman is made for Halloween, for shadows and hauntings and pumpkin faces leering from misted windows. He dresses up. His enemies dress up. They plan tricks. He’s a total treat.
Normally I head to the first game, Arkham Asylum, because it has the bit with the second Batcave that I love so much, and because, for me, it’s best at capturing the all-in-a-single-night feeling that these games draw so much potency from. This Halloween, though, I headed somewhere else, to Arkham City, the second game in the series, and its challenge rooms.
There is a reason for this. Over the last few weeks, Arkham challenge rooms have been blowing up on Tiktok. I can’t scroll for more than five videos without seeing one. The challenge modes are Arkham at its best – just you, dropped into a single, complex map, with a bunch of goons to take down. Sounds simple? It would be, but you have to stay away from brawling, because you’ll get shot to pieces. Instead you have to use everything else in the Batman arsenal: the gadgets, like explosive gel, Batarangs and smoke bombs, your traversal skills, such as the glide and the the grapnel swing, and the environmental stuff – weak walls you can knock through, grates you can dive in and out of, gargoyles you can hang from.
Let’s start there, in fact, because I will go to my grave believing there is no sweeter pleasure in life than the perfect inverted takedown in the Arkham games. You’re up on a gargoyle, monitoring the patrols of oblivious baddies far below you. You spot one moving close. You duck underneath the gargoyle, and the screen catches a wonderfully surreal glimpse of that bat cowl hanging upside down, its ears pointed earthwards. Then the button prompt! The elastic drop and pull of the rope, the echoing clap of sound that means your enemy is out of it, and then you leave them trussed up and you move on.
I love this move – it’s my absolute favourite – and this means that I tend to abuse it. Given a room with five baddies and five gargoyles, chances are I’ll finish the match with nothing but inverted takedowns. But I’ve started to wonder: maybe this move has been holding me back. Tiktok seems to suggest as much, with displays of ingenuity that see Batman moving around the environment for ages before attacking, rigging every spot with something nasty for his foes, before waiting for the right moment and clinching victory in a single second. Three gels go off. A Batarang flies. A wall explodes. A final swoop and thump and it’s done. Like magic.
It turns out I can’t play like that. I’ve tried, this Halloween, in two great Arkham City maps, covering Wayne Manor’s main hallway and the Batcave. These are great maps, tricksy, intricate and deeply evocative, hallowed ground for any real Batfan. But when I try to get all precise on them, when I try to plot and plan and move unseen, I get clumsy, or I get distracted by something. Is that a moving bookcase? I love those! Is that the Batmobile parked on its own plinth? The pre-Arkham Knight Batmobile? My soul! And then, distracted, the plan falls apart around me.
At least it falls apart with a bit of flair, though. A stray Batarang will miss its target and just alert people to my presence, or I’ll trigger the gels I’ve carefully laid down while trying to move the camera. I’ll switch off Detective Mode to take in the scenery just as three baddies round a corner and catch me off-guard. I’ll glide, but then press the wrong button and fall to the ground in front of everybody.
But it’s moments like these, when things go terribly wrong, that the game reveals its true brilliance, if you ask me. Challenge rooms are fun if you just breeze in, picking people off as chance allows. And they’re fun if you try to plan and micro-manage the whole thing like you’re playing Mousetrap. But they’re most fun, and they make you feel most like Batman, I reckon, when all these impulses converge. You’re planning something clever, and it works, but it leaves you exposed, so you have to freestyle. You run away, but not for long. You’re a cameo in these goons’ lives before you take them down for good.
I genuinely think this is what Batman is all about, particularly in the Arkham games, which had the genius to turn him into a hyper-evolved glass canon. Batman changes things up on the fly, reacting as much as acting, switching tactics as easily as he switches gadgets, and using absolutely everything – tools, movement, the environment – to get the job done.
So while I love to see the Tiktok brilliance on display as Arkham virtuosos play challenge rooms as if they were concert grand pianos, I like my Bob Ross, happy accident way of playing too – stumbling now and then, taking in the sights, dropping back for a bit and then coming up with a new way of proceeding.
And it reminds me of something. Long before Tiktok, back when Arkham Asylum was first on the scene, I went to a preview session where the developers just showed the challenge rooms. A lot of us journalists were a little disappointed initially: you want a bit of campaign to write about, a bit of plot to speculate with. But actually, it was a stellar move, a show of real confidence. These challenge rooms are Arkham’s Batman captured in a single moment. They display everything that’s ingenious and potent and frightening about him. I remember we played all afternoon that day and had to be turfed out of the venue. And over a decade later, every Halloween, I’m still back at it again.