Batman: Arkham Shadow’s Challenges are Camouflaj’s Labor of…

Ever since its initial announcement and piecemeal reveals, Batman: Arkham Shadow has more than demonstrated how much of a love letter it is to the Arkhamverse franchise it belongs to. It’s been intriguing to see how certain Arkham elements would be adapted from the series’ traditional flatscreen games to VR, and within that framework on Meta Quest 3 it is clear that Camouflaj and Meta have sought to make that experience feel one-to-one in many ways while still iterating on beloved tropes and formulas.

Batman: Arkham Shadow now launches at the tail-end of October and, beyond anything that’d surely be breaching spoiler territory, it seems like the core gameplay loop and enough dangling story threads have been exposed. However, according to an interview The Best War Games had speaking with game director Ryan Payton, the campaign is not all that players get to look forward to when Shadow is released. Revealed today, Shadow will include challenges at launch similar to ones players are familiar with from previous games in the franchise—but that wasn’t always going to be the case.

Batman: Arkham Shadow’s Challenge Mode was Previously on a Knife’s Edge

The challenge Camouflaj demoed with Kinda Funny Games today went over the basics of combat movement as well as enemies who wield different weapons and the actions required to deal with them, with design director Ryan Darcey expertly varying maneuvers with gadgetry.

A challenge mode may be a feature that the Arkham games’ community has grown accustomed to now: honing in on the Arkham games’ two signature strengths, combat and predator encounters, these challenges test players’ skill and mastery with such techniques while brawling waves of enemies in rhythmic freeflow and taking out enemies silently and strategically in stealth. Unlocked sequentially via campaign progress, Shadow’s seem to work similarly. That said, Payton made a note to The Best War Games about how the decision to go full-tilt on the development of challenges was ultimately in response to fan feedback:

“It was really on the bubble from a development perspective a few months back but, once we announced Arkham Shadow and through the community’s voice hearing just how passionately they were hoping the game would ship with it, we put the extra effort in and all credit goes to the team for squeezing in the time required to ship with the challenge maps for both combat and predator.

Our hope is to be able to update it with additional maps with free, post-release content updates.”

One of the most rewarding aspects of challenges is that they tend to repurpose or recontextualize maps where encounters occur during the game’s campaign, and the same is true in Shadow as well.

Batman: Arkham Shadow’s Challenges Reprise the Arkhamverse’s Sense of Competition

This ensures that Camouflaj has an ambition to support challenges further than launch itself, which is terrific news for anyone itching to indulge in such supplementary content once they have rolled credits. Challenge maps have also made their rounds internally with developers competing against one another:

“I love that the leaderboard feature’s now enabled within the dev build, and I wasn’t sure I was going to stack up, but I’m quite proud of my score. I’m also super excited to see what the community does because they’re going to blow away all of our scores probably on the first day, I would assume [laughs].”

It should be a fun treat for players to immediately see how they compare to each other and begin working tirelessly on eclipsing their scores. Having optional content as a cherry on top of Batman: Arkham Shadow’s narrative campaign content is fantastic to see, especially if it might not have always been a shoo-in for the game. Thankfully, anyone eager to hop into these challenges—which can likewise behave like a training ground for freeflow combat and predator stealth in VR—only has less than a month to wait.