Arkham Asylum Is Still The Best Batman Game, And It's All Down To The Setting

thegamer.com:

Play Batman: Arkham Asylum after sequels City and Knight and it's striking how quiet it is. The latter two games in Rocksteady's trio of Batman adventures are some of the most relentlessly chatty video games ever made. As you explore Gotham, in both walled prison and regular city form, the voices of goons on the street are a ceaseless, irritating presence. Once I realised they sounded exactly like Prison Mike from The Office, I just couldn't take them seriously. "Yeah, I fought da Batman once. He broken my arm in t'ree places."

Asylum is a much leaner game. It's not shouting at you constantly, flooding the map with distractions, side content, and collectables. That's what makes those times where you're exploring in relative silence so refreshing. Even the music is used sparingly, allowing you to soak in the atmosphere of the setting without feeling like your brain is being overloaded with stuff. Triple-A games have only gotten louder and more forceful when it comes to leading players towards content, which makes playing Asylum today extra nostalgic.

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I know it's fashionable to insist Asylum is the best Arkham game, especially in light of all the functional improvements in the sequels. But it is, and that's entirely down to the setting. This ominous gothic asylum has featured in countless Batman stories over the decades, but in this game it's the real star of the show—and fleshed out in a way it never has been before. It's dense with history and mystery, and scattered with traces of the many infamous Batman villains who have, against their will, called the place home.

Rocksteady had decades of Batman mythology to use as the basis for creating this setting, which makes