With Telltale Games making so many games with so many different franchises, including the goddamn Minecraft, I shouldn’t have been surprised about the existence of Batman: The Telltale Series. But I was. Maybe it was due to the Batman: Arkham series which managed to be not just incredibly fun action adventure titles, but also tell fun interesting stories, but it was hard for me to imagine a purely story and dialogue driven game about Batman being good. Maybe I should let my imagination be less skeptical at times.
Batman: The Telltale Series is a very interesting attempt at finally making a game that spends as much on Batman and his importance for the events in the Gotham city, as much as it goes into the importance of Bruce Wayne and how a rich person can help his city without donning a mask and a cape. Story events happen only about a second year of Batman’s work in Gotham and, as such, things are only getting crazy. City is full of danger, but of a more easy to understand kind. Thieves, robbers, gangsters, police and political corruption all of which tarnish the city reputation, yet something Batman can easily understand and try to fix or help fixing. Due to this, a lot of the familiar faces you’ve seen countless times in Batman comics and related media often make their name during the events of the episodes. And Telltale were smart to not try and go completely against established character ideas, but instead try to explore what makes each character, each villain or hero, be who they are and let them evolve as the story goes. And with the player choice influencing how specific things about the characters change.
But despite the really strong ideas, despite the really interesting twist on the events surrounding Wayne family and despite the genuinely interesting character interactions and the central conflict, the game lacks… something. And it results in a rather “okay” game made out of really great elements. A game that is suffering from severe technical issues as well. There’s constant stuttering, animation glitches, weird performance demands that annoyingly often impact the QTE sections, that are rather unfun in it’s own rights without any additional issues mentioned. And because of the issues specifically I would almost not even recommend checking the game out, if not for some nice character exploration that gets developed further in the sequel.
Batman: The Enemy Within has everything that the first season was lacking. You still spend a lot of time with Batman as both a caped crusader and a rich dude, you still focus most on the dialogue-driven storytelling and watch how familiar established characters from the Batman media blossom into their instantly recognizable selves or turn into something fresh based on your choices. But where the first season was lacking something, some spark that would make everything truly exciting, The Enemy Within has that and more. Most of the dialogue feels like everything you say truly matters, like everything is at stake all the time, but without being overwhelming. There’s just a perfect amount of tension, perfect amount of fun, perfect amount of mystery and perfect amount of silly entertainment. And not just because you can be the best friend of Joker – there are way more interesting layers to the story than that, as it evolves and shifts focus with each episode, never boring, never stale.
With that said, I did feel like at the same time there was a lot less importance placed on Batman/Bruce Wayne difference and identity secrecy, something that felt really fun in the first season. Perhaps it was de-emphasized to make room for all the rest of the story threads, so the players are not overwhelmed, but in this season it felt as if every second person you meet knows that Bruce Wayne and Batman are the same person and it was just weird. The QTE’s still tend to be a bit annoying, but at least the game runs really well this time around, with some obvious technical improvements that make the game both look better and run better. Perhaps, Telltale Games were overwhelmed when they were working on the first season, but here they clearly had all the time to make the game and it paid off.
I feel like Batman: The Telltale Series could be skipped, but if you can take the technical issues and set your expectations correctly, it’s certainly not a bad game, nor a bad story. It could’ve been much more, but it has a lot of fun story bits. Batman: The Enemy Within however is an absolute must play for anyone interested in story driven adventures and isn’t tired of the “Telltale formula” or Batman. It’s a fantastic game with genuinely amazing moments and is possibly one of the best titles the studio has ever produced.