TA Playlist Wrap-Up for June 2023 – Batman: The Telltale Series

”Bruce, you can’t keep doing this.”
“I have to, Alfred… No one else will.”
~Batman: The TellTale Series

The Caped Crusader. The Dark Knight. The Batman. Arguably the most iconic superhero of the modern era, Batman made his debut in Detective Comics #27 back in 1939, and has since been featured in dozens of different comic series, TV shows, movies, and pretty much every other form of media you can think of. Wikipedia’s List of Video Games featuring Batman counts no less than 65 video games featuring the Caped Crusader, including this month’s TA Playlist Game of the month, Batman: The Telltale Series.

For June 2023, we offered up four detective-themed games for your summer sleuthing enjoyment, including Disco Elysium, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, but perhaps inevitably, it was the “World’s Greatest Detective,” Batman, who won the poll.

As the name suggests, Batman: The Telltale Series was developed by Telltale Games, in association with LCG Entertainment, and published by Warner Bros. Interactive and Athlon Games. As with many Telltale games, the series was released episodically, with the first installment arriving in August 2016, and the remaining episodes following over the next four months. Caution: spoilers ahead from this point on!

Batman: The Telltale Series combines two fairly well-known quantities. Even the most casual gamers know that Telltale games have a pretty tried-and-true formula, licensing established IPs and spinning a new narrative that allows the player to choose dialogue options to shape the outcomes (to some degree, at least), while interspersing quick-time events to add some action. And you don’t have to have ever picked up a comic or watched a superhero movie to know that Batman is the superhero alter-ego of billionaire Bruce Wayne, playboy entrepreneur by day, vigilante protector of Gotham by night. The question is, would these two great tastes taste great together? Or would the flavors feel too familiar and leave a stale taste in players’ mouths? Opinions in the forums were mixed:

Catching ZZZs said:

As a huge fan of anything and everything Batman, as well as a fan of the Telltale games, I knew I was going to like this one.

halohogg said:

One of the first Telltale games I experienced. I found it kinda boring. Not my kinda game really (interactive story).

Hurn Weasel said:

If you’ve played one Telltale game you’ve played them all, for better or for worse. If you’re interested in Batman and want some easy GS this will do it, along with a reasonably entertaining story.

o Heres Jonny o said:

Thought this was the best Telltale game. Really like Batman as a character so it sways my opinion anyway but I did really enjoy this one.

The story shows Batman in the early stages of his career, already feared by Gotham’s criminal underground, but not yet facing off against any true supervillains. This allows Telltale to put their own spin on several notorious foes, such as “Two Face” Harvey Dent, “Catwoman” Selina Kyle, and “Penguin” Oswald Cobblepot. While these characters don’t stray too far from their comic roots, they’re given backstories that fit within the narrative of this particular story, going so far as to make Oswald a former boyhood friend of Bruce Wayne who turned to crime after falling on hard times. But the character who saw the most change from established canon was Bruce’s own father, Thomas Wayne.

HawkeyeBarry20 said:

[One] thing that stood out about the game was Thomas Wayne. I normally see him portrayed as this beacon of humanity. He has everything people want and yet still cares for people down on their luck. So the first time you find out about his shady involvement I was intrigued. It was a nice change that didn’t make some huge change to Batman’s story but it was enough to be like, “I need to find out more about what exactly Thomas was doing.”

Over the course of the first two chapters, while investigating a shipment of dangerous illegal drugs belonging to notorious mobster Carmine Falcone, Batman learns that his father was a partner with Falcone in his criminal enterprises, and that a large part of the Wayne fortune was gained through extortion, murder, and other criminal activity. Using his authority as a doctor, Thomas Wayne even had people committed to Arkham Asylum in order to seize their financial assets, including the land upon which Wayne Tower was built, which was stolen from the Cobblepot family.

Catching ZZZs said:

What I liked most about this game was the different takes on certain characters. Some people most likely won’t like when established characters are changed, but after so many decades of the same thing, changing it up to throw fans for a loop is interesting in my opinion. As others have mentioned, exploring the not so clean-cut past of Bruce’s parents was especially interesting to me.

Penguin has returned to Gotham in order to reclaim what he believes is rightfully his, and is working with a gang known as the Children of Arkham in order to bring about his revolution. While Gazette reporter Vicki Vale and other members of the Gotham press attack the Wayne family reputation by day, Penguin and the Children of Arkham wage war against Gotham City at night. This culminates at the end of Chapter 2 with the Children of Arkham attacking the mayoral debate between incumbent Mayor Hill and the challenger, Bruce Wayne’s best friend Harvey Dent.

COSM1C JOKER said:

I respect they chose to tell their own story, doing something new with an IP as established as Batman is tough.

One of the challenges of telling a new story in such an established universe is that people who are familiar with previous Batman material probably knew what was going to happen to poor old Harv from the moment his name first appeared. The cause of Harvey’s disfiguration and transformation into the villain known as Two-Face might change from story to story, but as soon as you hear the name, you know it’s the inevitable fate of the character.

In this game, though, you can influence that outcome a little bit. During the attack at the mayoral debate, I chose to save Harvey instead of helping Catwoman (I figured she could take care of herself). I stopped Penguin from burning off half of Harvey’s face, and thought maybe I prevented his villain turn. Unfortunately, the combination of trauma and the Children of Arkham’s drugs were still enough to drive him off the deep end (though catching Bruce at Selina’s apartment in his underwear sure didn’t help), and he still became a villain, just without the obvious disfigurement.

To some, this is a flaw with this “choose your own adventure” style of game. While Telltale promises that “the story is tailored by how you play,” all choices have a way of ending up at the same point anyway. This is shown again in Chapter 4, after Bruce loses control of Wayne Enterprises to Penguin and gets drugged by the Children of Arkham, finding himself committed to Arkham Asylum, where he meets a certain green-haired patient with an unnaturally wide grin.

HawkeyeBarry20 said:

Not one of my favorite Telltale games but it was ok. There are two things that stand out to me about this game and one is the choice to accept John Doe’s help at Arkham Asylum. Knowing he would later be the Joker obviously made me want to decline but I felt I probably would have accepted his help to get out of there, so I did. This is a good example of why the Telltale formula fails. If you accept the deal you get out but have basically made a deal with the devil. If you don’t make the deal, he still causes a riot and you get out of there anyways. The choice was an illusion.

Osmo76 said:

[This] is too often the feeling with TT games. I did enjoy the game but I feel like it could’ve been much bigger if TT made clearly different endings/storylines based on your choices.

Whether you like Telltale-style games or not largely depends on how you feel about these “illusory” choices. They’ve got a story to tell, which means that there are certain plot points that just have to happen, so regardless of which path you choose, the differences will either be temporary or minor enough that the story can still proceed. If that feels like they’ve cheated you out of the consequences of your choice, you’re probably not impressed with the game overall. If, however, you appreciate the choices that you can make within the framework of the story, you’re probably much happier with the game overall.

J2B9 said:

It makes sense though when even just thinking about the amount of extra effort, planning, and time that’s required in order actually [make separate endings for each choice]. […] So as long as it tells a good or decent story I enjoy it even though it’d of course be better with those real choice and consequences.

Telltale evidently heard some of the criticism of the lack of impactful choices, because they made a more divergent story for the second season, which several of our commenters appreciated:

Dresden N7 said:

The first season was ok or mid, but season 2 aka Batman: The Enemy Within is excellent. It’s one of the rare times where your choices matter because there are two entirely different versions of Episode 5 in Season 2 depending on your relationship with one specific character.

J2B9 said:

Which does make it special when the choices do actually matter in Season 2 like mentioned here. Even if it’s not the biggest thing ever, having a mostly different final episode is satisfying and worth noting.

But that’s a conversation for another playlist… “John” only has a brief appearance in this game, although somehow he already knows the secret that Bruce only learned just before being sent to the asylum. Lady Arkham, the leader of the Children of Arkham, is none other than Gotham Gazette reporter Vicki Vale. Born Victoria Arkham, Vicki’s birth parents were among Thomas Wayne’s victims, and she’s taken on the persona of Lady Arkham to exact her revenge.

The Noto said:

I thought the look of the game was awesome, but I really don’t know how I felt about the villain reveal. But writing for characters like these is hard. You stray too far from the common knowledge of a character and you get yelled at for not being a purist. You stay too close and you simply have a boring story. So I fully recognize the conundrum these writers had. I REALLY liked this version of the Joker (as John Doe), but I never felt satisfied with the Vicki Vale plot.

After Bruce escapes the Asylum and whips up a cure to the Children’s toxin, he’s got a lot on his plate; Harvey has sunk into full-on paranoid schizophrenia and turned Gotham into a fascist police state, Penguin is hacking his way into Wayne Tech security and will soon discover Batman’s secret identity, and Lady Arkham is hatching a plot to infect more of Gotham’s citizens with her nerve gas. We don’t want to give everything away, so we won’t spoil the ending, but suffice it to say that restoring peace to Gotham will push both Batman and Bruce Wayne’s limits.

Khyser Bier said:

You know what you’re getting when you start a Telltale game, and this is very much that. Decent enough but not amazing, like every other game they’ve ever released.

Several comments remarked on the predictability of Telltale’s game style, although there were a couple of innovations in the Batman games that set them apart from the dev’s other properties. For one, there were several scenes where you are presented with an option to try to achieve your objective as either Bruce or Batman; go as Bruce to try to convince your target to give up some information, using the Wayne family’s power and influence, or put on the cape and cowl to use fear and intimidation to reach your goal. As noted above, the two options will tend to end up in the same place, story-wise, but this is an interesting way to allow the player to control the path to that destination.

Another mechanic that isn’t present in other Telltale games is the detective mode, where Batman is able to analyze a scene and search for clues, linking them together in order to reconstruct a sequence of events, or to plan a course of attack when entering a room full of goons. It’s used sparingly, but it offers a welcome change from the structured dialog choices and QTE combat sessions.

wildwest08 said:

I thought this did well working in the Telltale formula. You can get into the detective side of Batman more than the action. I liked the game and would put it in my top Telltale games

xuxicroptop said:

If there’s one big downside to this game — and many others in Telltale’s portfolio — it’s the technical glitches that crop up now and again. The smoke from Jim Gordon’s cigars seemed to really throw my console for a loop, rendering as an opaque white blob taking up half the screen rather than a wispy trail of smoke. I also had whole scenes where characters — or parts of characters — just didn’t render, and other similar graphical hiccups. These experiences were shared by many in our forums.

EarthboundX said:

Remember enjoying this first season. I played the Xbox 360 version, which really showed how little Telltale cared about game optimization. A game that looked this basic shouldn’t freeze and stutter like it did.

Cleaner7x said:

I played through the game this week and enjoyed it despite experiencing several glitches. A couple of the achievements didn’t unlock even though they’re all story based. […] Also, I ran into a couple of graphical glitches. In one scene Batman was having a conversation with a character and the character wasn’t visible at all. In another scene all the background textures weren’t loaded completely. This is the 1st time I ran into any issues with a Telltale game.

Despite the technical glitches, most of the commenters in our forums were able to get past the performance issues and appreciate the game’s story, although where it ranks among Telltale’s titles was up for debate.

I8ITackyticsI8I said:

I really liked this Telltale game, the story is great. It’s not as good as the Walking Dead or the Wolf Among Us but I’d safely slot it just after — I’m glad it won the vote this month. The second one didn’t quite hold up to the same standard for me story wise.

Rinckenstock said:

Not as good as Tales From The Borderlands or The Walking Dead but better than The Wolf Among Us and Game Of Thrones I thought. A solid Telltale game.

The Cripplers said:

I thought the first one was a little better, but I enjoyed both of them. I’d probably put them in the middle to slightly upper tier of Telltale games. Not as good as the top ones, but better than average.

Although, of course, not everyone was on board…

TymanTheLong said:

Batman is boring (and kinda sucks). Before you come at me, I’ve consumed and continue to consume a lot of Batman content. This post isn’t so much about this month’s game but this game is included in it so let me explain:

There’s not room in this article to cover all of Tyman’s explanation for that bold assertion, but feel free to pop in to the forum and read his full post, which is quite excellent and raises some interesting points, even if you disagree with his conclusions. And with that, on to the stats…

There are three tracked versions of Batman: The Telltale Series on TrueAchievements, and between them, we had 455 tracked gamers playing along during the month of June. Of those, 256 started the game for the first time, while 97 completed it during the month. In total, 5,655 achievements were unlocked, totaling 186,540 Gamerscore and 216,490 TrueAchievement score.

Given that all the achievements are story related and unlocked in a fixed order (minus the occasional bugged achievement that doesn’t pop when it should), it’s no surprise that the most-unlocked achievement was Welcome to Gotham in Batman: The Telltale Series for completing Chapter 1 of Episode 1 in the Xbox One version of the game, unlocked 220 times in June. At the opposite end of the spectrum, surprisingly, the least unlocked achievement was Broken Memories in Batman: The Telltale Series (Windows), for completing Chapter 1 of Episode 2 in the Windows version of the game, with only four unlocks.

For a relatively short and easy completion, we expected a long list of Shout-Outs this month, but it turns out only 53 people earned a Shout-Out by completing at least one version of the game. Special kudos go out to DarkRye16 for the quickest completion, with just ten hours and 29 minutes from start to finish in the Xbox One version of the game, and to UpliftGecko for being the only gamer to complete all three versions during the month. Great work to all of you!

This article took even longer to get out than usual, thanks to an unexpectedly deep GTASC run (sorry!), so that doesn’t leave much time to join in the discussion on July’s TA Playlist game of the month, High On Life, by either unlocking an achievement or posting in the Spoiler-Free and Spoiler Threads to tell us about your wacky outer space adventures. And get ready for the August TA Playlist game, Planet of Lana, when the new month starts. See you then!

Thanks to BetaSigX20 for this news suggestion.