Turns out there was a Batcave in PlayStation Home. So he has this internal life that we are not privy to. But we didn't need to know until now, even though we are him. All this time he's known there's a Batcave on the island. Batman knows something and he hasn't shared it with us. The Batcave sequence works because of a sort of reversed dramatic irony. Maybe we know they earned Class President, or got expelled! Maybe the kid's come home from school and we know what they got in that test but the parents don't. Maybe one character has had an affair, and we know about it but their partner doesn't. And it's rarely used only to create suspense. Dramatic irony rarely needs a bomb in order to work. Below the table, though, we, the audience, are screaming: get away! Stop talking! Don't even tip! There's a bomb you idiots. To use a simple Hitchcock example: two people are talking at a table, but only the audience knows there's a bomb underneath the table and it's counting down to the explosion.ĭramatic irony! At table level it's all chats about holidays and what the weather's like. Dramatic irony occurs when the people in the audience know more than the people on screen. Dramatic irony, I was told, is one of the most complex tools a writer can deploy. Years ago I was taught about this concept: dramatic irony. Which is weird, because aren't you Batman in the first place? Isn't that the premise of the whole game? The Batcave reveal works because Batman knows something that you don't: that he has a cave on this island in the first place. But the real reason it works is much more complicated, I think. The sheer star power of actually being in such a hallowed place. The growing awareness that Rocksteady is so comfortable with Batman's world that it's willing to create its own elements. There are a lot of reasons why this works. You walk through, into a corridor with electric lighting, through a shimmering wall of water - another lovely moment - and wow. You dive - or rather Batman dives, because we're in cutscene territory - from a cliff edge and then, swish, you're being scanned by lasers, and a wall of rock reveals a secret door. You go to Dead Man's Point in North Arkham, a lovely bit of theatre that takes you away from the main stomping grounds of the narrative, and also gives you a melancholic view of Gotham itself, separated by water. This is it: my favourite moment in Arkham Asylum - in any of the Batman games, in fact. Like the bit-part doctor in a million soap operas, he decides he has to do more tests. But then at a certain point in the game, Batman encounters Bane, and after defeating Bane, he's disturbed about something.
Batman talks to Oracle and what have you, but that's fine for the most part, because you're the one sneaking him through vents and deciding in which order to take down goons. Watch on YouTube Zoe went hands-on with Gotham Knights.īack to Batman. But they have a sliver of life that you will never quite get control of, because if you did, the game's narrative wouldn't work. You are the people on the screen, and you must be, because you tell them when to duck, when to reload. You control the characters in GTA, for example, but when you're driving to a mission they're talking, and they're saying stuff that is probably a surprise to you, the player, so there's that gap there to ponder. I'm intrigued to see the results, but the whole discussion has also made me think about the first Batman game in this series, Arkham Asylum, and how you definitely play as Batman in that - except when it comes to my very favourite moment in the game, which is also the point at which the relationship between player and onscreen avatar becomes a little more complicated.įirstly, yes, a lot of games complicate this relationship. Gotham Knights is already a Batman game not made by Rocksteady, and now it doesn't have the main character either - as far as we've been told. In fact, this is probably what you've been reading about if you have been reading about the game. Batman's dead, so instead you play as four members of the wider Bat family. The truth is - as far as we've been told - this is actually a Batman game in which you don't play as Batman. I'll call it a Batman game for simplicity's sake. I don't know if you've read much about the new Batman game, Gotham Knights.
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