Batman: The Enemy Within

I'm going to be updating this review as I continue to play the game. I am currently at the end of episode 3. So far it's somehow been both a delight and one of the most frustrating gaming experiences in my life. First of all, I love Batman and I love realistic and dark takes on him. I love choice-driven games. I find them, when done right, to be the most fulfilling.

I was up to a rough start as I was just starting episode 3 and really get into the game when I realized that my save data/choices that were carried over from the first season was somehow scrambled for some reason.
I made sure to be on good terms with catwoman but for some reason she hated me all of a sudden. And for some reason my ear was intact. Other than that I think my choices carried over.
So, thank you very much, Telltale, you made me have to replay 3 entire episodes just to be able to fix a game-ruining story-issue due to a bug. It also forced me to do the generic and extremely imprecise create-a-save rather than having my actual choices from the previous season matter.
Alfred, for example, had an eyepatch and was pretty roughed up in my first try on this game. But in my manual "create-a-save" version, after making the SAME choices, he was fine. There wasn't even a choice for that. Not sure how many other important story choices and details that were left out from the manual save creation.
Not a good start. I almost quit the game right here and it has severely affected my view of it. You should be able to edit your stories and saves in detail if you want to and at THE VERY LEAST be able to replay a chapter without having to replay an entire episode. ABsolute madness. Some chapters are really fucking long. Making one mistake can ruin the entire story and believe me, it's happened to me several times. Which leads me to my other major issue with this game:

Choice-driven games are obviously completely reliant on several aspects, such as;

1.. You feeling like your choices actually make a difference
2. You caring about the subject matter
3. Choices are clear, comprehensible and not ambigious

The choices in this game are extremely ambigious and at times downright misleading. I don't mind having my mind blown with a plot twist, there being realistic dialogue and not always knowing how a character will react to your choices... but having every choice to be potentially game-ruining is ultimately a bad thing. This game makes EVERY SINGLE CHOICE a game-changer and it's staggering how often you have to make a really important choice without any context at all. Hell, there are even sevral moments where you don't understand what kind of impact a choice had until the end of the episode. It might say "relationship changed" with a character and you have no idea why it changed or what it changed into.

I think it's extremely important story- and dialogue-driven game such as this, that the dialogue and choices are comprehensible. It doesn't have to be dumbed down at all, just give us a little more context before choices. Maybe take better care when you're using ONE WORD to represent an entire choice. Maybe not have two extremely similiar choices that are both extremely unclear where it's heading.

And for god's sake, why isn't there a way to turn off the timer? Or to at least slow it down? I can't imagine how stressful it must be for people with dyslexia or people who just read slowly. I for one have ADHD and I don't know how many times I've been distracted by something only to miss something crucial and having to replay an entire chapter. Absolutely infuriating. Not to mention how stressful it is to make game-changing multi-layered choices with little context, unclear options and only a few seconds to think about it. I mean let's be real, who hasn't paused this game in order to buy more time? Maybe even to look a choice up. Just include the option to switch it off....

*UNFINISHED*

Despite not being a fan of story experiences and walking simulators, I tend to really enjoy Telltale Games’ products. I’ve never read the Batman comics but have watched some cartoons and all the films so I am somewhat familiar with the general story of Batman. I’ve recently played the first season of this series.

The first game made a revelation that the Wayne’s amassed their riches by illegitimate means which tarnishes the Wayne legacy. In this game, Bruce uses that to his advantage by going undercover as a new recruit in “The Pact” which comprises of Harley Quinn, Bane, John Doe (Joker), and Mr Freeze.

Like the other Telltale Games, it has plenty of twists and turns and gives you a good illusion of choice (even if your choices don’t really matter until the final episode).

You really feel like you are managing your relationships with the cast, which largely focuses on John Doe. John calls you a friend and wants you to repay the favour after he helped you escape Arkham Asylum in the first season. This gets you into The Pact where you need to convince the crew that you are one of them. With John’s erratic behaviour, you can’t quite tell if he is being sincere; does he really want to be your friend, and does he actually believe you want to be his?

This time, there are barely any scenes as Batman, and therefore you aren’t making decisions based on managing the reputation of Bruce vs Batman. The decisions are based on managing relationships with The Pact and managing your relationships with the few people in law enforcement.

The fights mainly involve pressing WASD and QE, then it throws in the combination of Shift + E/Q for finishing moves. There’s no hammering buttons - it is just single key presses. In the previous game, some scenes ask you to plan out your attacks in advance so you can choose whether to slam enemies into a table, or into another enemy etc. These choices are still here but this time you decide moment to moment - so the fight slows down for a couple of seconds to wait for your input.

I didn’t fail any fight scenes in the first game, but I did in this game, usually because I didn’t make a choice in time, or the more complex input took me by surprise. Failing takes you too far back in the cutscene in my opinion.

Outside the fights, sometimes you need to right-click then move in a direction. I was a bit confused with these inputs because sometimes it seemed to register the mouse movement, whereas others it seemed to register if I tapped the corresponding keyboard button.

There’s a few detective sections like the first game but they don’t feature as regularly. These were a good idea in principle but these are usually too simplistic because there’s not enough objects. So you might look at a dead body and look at a torture device and obviously you are going to link both and it's usually the correct thing. Once you have matched all the clues, then Batman deduces what happened in the scene. It’s a nice idea but it needed to be enhanced further to perfect it. I liked the theme of some of these which were Riddler “escape rooms” but there should have been more of them.

I think I prefer the first season since it had more variety with the Batman/Bruce dynamic and the relationships with Catwoman, Harvey and Alfred seemed more developed. I did like the story in this season but the relationships were often fake (based on deception), although you had a certain degree of sympathy for some characters, especially John. Mr Freeze doesn’t get enough scenes, and Alfred takes a backseat for a large part of the game. Harley is a great character and it is interesting that she is the one that is manipulating John whereas the standard Joker character is the reverse. I’d think I’d still score them the same though.

I don't think any individual moment in this is quite as effective as the Lady Arkham reveal was in Batman: The Telltale Series, and I do feel the first episode here is a little weak, but ultimately this is the better game overall. I must confess that I didn't have the highest of hopes for this when Joker (at that point just an Arkham inmate named John Doe) was weaved into the first game to set up this sequel, because truthfully I'm not a great lover of what most writers do with Joker, but it's precisely what Telltale choose to do with him that makes this story so compelling. They hold him back completely for a surprisingly long time, really drawing out his origin story, and in doing so, they invert the dynamic between him and Harley Quinn, making her the one to corrupt him (which makes Quinn's character more interesting than it usually is, too). Keeping him as the wide-eyed, impressionable John Doe lets the story really lean hard into his relationship with Bruce Wayne specifically, not just Batman - and depending on how you play it, Wayne might end up being the one that's responsible for creating and shaping Joker. I won't pretend to know anything about comics, but of all the Batman adaptations in other media I've seen, this feels like the most engaging Joker has ever been, and the deepest under his skin I've ever been taken - and it's probably the most gripping, complex interpersonal relationship in any Telltale game. Lee and Clementine may hit higher emotional heights, and the villains in Game of Thrones certainly inspire a more visceral disgust and hatred, but no dynamic has ever felt so weighty throughout. Each interaction with John Doe feels significant in its own way (and they literally are this time; there are two different final episodes, and which one you get depends on precisely what kind of Joker your decisions have created). Add in the presence of Amanda Waller and the friction between her and Gordon, the return of Catwoman, and what the events of the story end up doing to Alfred....once the game really gets into full swing, it's some of the very best work in Telltale's gameography. It ends on such a total, unexpected bombshell - one of the most dramatic decisions they've ever had their players make - that a sequel feels impossible, and while it's a great ending, it's also a shame; this has ended up being one of my very favourite takes on the Batman universe.