Batman: Arkham Shadow’s Boldest Choice is Its Character POV…

Major story spoilers for Batman: Arkham Shadow ahead.

Batman: Arkham Shadow, not unlike every Arkham game before it, has its core plot or theme bundled intimately with its subtitle. The idea of someone’s shadow in relation to their ego or id is assessed heavily while interacting with Drs. Jonathan Crane and Harleen Quinzel, and this theme runs parallel with the story and its depiction of characters until credits roll, sometimes subtly and other times brazenly. Many characters have sides of themselves they conceal, for example, and how someone presents themselves isn’t always a particularly truthful shade of who they actually are, leading to conflicting personas.

In Harvey Dent’s case, this surfaces as a traumatic and sinister form of dissociative identity disorder that he’s seemingly unaware of. Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne has always fostered an intriguing balance between his life as a billionaire philanthropist and a caped crusader. There’s an endlessly fascinating argument to be made that Batman is no less ill than the foes he puts behind bars, and Batman: Arkham Shadow’s story is immediately captivating because players do go behind bars at Blackgate Penitentiary—not only as Batman but also as a lowlife criminal who is technically a different character altogether.

Batman: Arkham Shadow is a Game of Many Masks and Faces

For all intents and purposes, Bruce Wayne is a completely different character when he removes the cowl and Batsuit and dons blonde hair, a mustache, and forearm tattoos to become Irving “Matches” Malone. Even if this premise is initially difficult to accept as believable, Batman: Arkham Shadow makes the brilliant decision of opening coldly with Malone’s POV.

Here, there’s a high unlikelihood that anyone would have assumed this was Bruce in disguise even after investigating his face in the rundown apartment’s bathroom mirror, not unlike how nobody at Blackgate would make the same assumption. The most convincing aspect of Malone’s disguise, though, is his voice—with Roger Craig Smith deserving of all praise in his performances throughout Batman: Arkham Shadow.

Likewise, Batman is a whole character unto himself, even if his angrier voice is still only sometimes a minor modulation to his ordinary voice.

If Bruce abandoned Malone’s voice the second he was out of earshot of anyone, let alone speaking to Dr. Leslie Thompkins, then perhaps a case could be made that Malone was nothing more than a cheap disguise he labored beneath while trying to get answers out of colorful Blackgate prisoners. But, because he uses Malone’s voice when making comments to himself as he’s escaping out his cell window and traversing beneath the prison toward the Batcave, it’s clear that he inhabits the disguise with wholehearted dedication.

Similarly, Dr. Thompkins knows full well that Bruce is both Batman and Malone, and she promptly and sternly thwarts him from using either his Malone voice or Batman voice when alone together. This scene is a perfect illustration of how Bruce dissociates and becomes the character he needs to be at any given time. Indeed, with Bruce’s hatred for crime being so palpable, he’d probably need to resort to a disguise so ingrained and fleshed out in order to actually stomach playing the role of an inmate himself.

Batman: Arkham Shadow’s Malone Keeps the Story’s Pace Steady and Impactful

Then, the fact that Camouflaj made a choice so brave as to have players inhabit Malone’s shoes nearly as much as Batman’s cannot be overstated. Up until release, the entirety of Batman: Arkham Shadow was marketed purposefully as if players would be grappling to gargoyles and throwing batarangs exclusively, and yet there’s an entire half of the game devoted to a slow burn of character development and Easter eggs paired with combat where players toss pocket sand to stun enemies rather than swiping a cape at them.

Bruce has had playable sequences where he’s not in a Batsuit in Batman: Arkham Origins’ Initiation and Cold, Cold Heart DLCs as well as the opening of Batman: Arkham City, but Shadow takes that gameplay to an unprecedented level and goes as far as to portray him as another character whom players can easily disassociate from Bruce. Shadow indulges Malone with a ton of combat sequences, too, which is necessary because the pacing might’ve been disastrously disjointed otherwise.

Players may not have access to Batman’s arsenal of gadgets or be able to traverse as dynamically when they’re dressed as Malone, but as Malone they get a perspective that the Arkhamverse hasn’t given a lens to before and that’s a treat in and of itself.

It’s also helpful that there is a Batcave beneath Blackgate that players actually traverse into since it creates immersive, fluid transitions between Batman and Malone sequences that the story hops back and forth to, especially with displays for both the Batsuit and Malone disguise that players actively interact with and swap into. Because of this revelation, Police Commissioner Jim Gordon’s first line of dialogue is profound: “For a second there I thought you were a rat.”

Shrike’s suicide even looked like it was a murder by Batman’s own hand, lending to the idea that those lines are blurred indiscriminately. Gordon doesn’t say he thought Batman was a Rat because of his appearance, but it’s a cute nod to the fact that Bruce does play the role of a criminal and it’s not always so easy to tell the difference. Nearly every character in Batman: Arkham Shadow is nuanced, even if they’re inevitably fated to become a ne’er-do-well in the Arkhamverse, and that punctuates why the series and its treatment of character development are extraordinary.

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