When you’re moving around in an environment you’re interacting with it. It can mean almost any action within a game. Of course, interactivity is a broad term. And yet, by denying the player complete control over everything the Bat does, the experience feels slightly hollow.įor me, a game lives or dies by two elements:Ģ.The competency of that design’s execution. Of course these games hardly aspire to Shakespeare they’re the most bombastic kind of simulator out there: be the super hero, save the world, brood, look good in black. The Arkham games do dive into the tragic mindset of the Bat but it’s almost always via a cutscene, an interruption of your control over him.
You’ve gotten an orphan killed, your love life is constantly slipping back and forth between crushing loneliness and chaotic violence, and you feel some weird urge to take care of a city that, by all accounts, is probably better off left to the wolves. As rad as it is to have those nifty gadgets and stacks of money, man, it has got to suck to be the Batman.