Batman: The Telltale Series

Batman: The Telltale Series offers a unique take on the Batman mythos, focusing its attention on Gotham and the role that the Wayne family has in shaping it as a hopelessly corrupt and violent city. Despite following Telltale’s uninspired formula, the game’s story shines by framing politics and wealth disparity as the core reasons for Gotham’s downfall, instead of just some bizarre villains.

When the game starts, it is business as usual: some toughs are breaking into Gotham City Hall and they are murmuring about this mythical figure of a man who likes to dress as a bat and beat up criminals. They are visibly frightened, and when Batman finally shows up, he appears as a menacing figure on the screen, emerging from the smoke with glowing eyes. During the robbery, he meets Catwoman, who is also acting like her usual self – arrogant and flirty – and manages to retrieve from her a drive that will make him unravel a plot to shake Gotham’s status quo.

It’s when the game shifts its attention to Bruce Wayne that it starts to show that it has something interesting to say about these famous characters. Bruce is supporting the local District Attorney, Harvey Dent, to run for mayor in Gotham City, and is hosting a party to gather some funds and meet important people for the campaign. One of these people is a local crime lord, Carmine Falcone, who is seen as a necessary evil by Harvey.

Episode 1 from Batman: The Telltale Series focuses on Harvey Dent’s campaign and the social problems regarding Bruce’s fortune. Harvey is being considered a great candidate for mayor because he’s honest and trustworthy, yes, but mainly because he is efficient as a District Attorney, locking people up in jail or sending them to Arkham Asylum. For Bruce, a good mayor is a man whose main job is to fill prisons; not schools. Security is the chief concern in Gotham City and the solution Bruce is endorsing is based on more repression and violence. It’s no wonder that one of the main choices the player can make in the first episode is whether or not Batman is going to become a brutal vigilante who thinks violence should be paid in kind.

To make matters worse for Bruce, the noble origins of his fortune are quickly called into question. It’s usually said that there are only three ways for a person to get filthy rich: inheritance, exploitation of labor, or crime. Bruce inherited the money from his parents, but how did they get rich? Through sheer talent and merit? Not according to the news that starts to circulate in Gotham, accusing the Wayne family of having amassed their fortune by having constant dealings with Falcone and the mob. This news shakes Bruce’s righteousness to the core and brings everything he stands for into question. “The truth is they were billionaires, Bruce,” Alfred starts explaining the basics of capitalism to him, with his usual tendency to kind euphemisms, “You can’t amass that kind of wealth without making certain moral compromises.”

Meanwhile, Bruce’s old-time friend, Oswald Cobblepot – here a slick and sly conman – plans what appears to be a social revolution. He’s a terrorist who wants to eliminate the rot in Gotham, a city so corrupted that there is “a widespread distrust in the institutions that supports” it, “from the mayor’s all the way down to the street sweepers.” Episode 2 presents his first big public move, as he invades the auditorium where Harvey Dent and Mayor Hill are broadcasting a political debate. His actions, however, insert even more fear into Gotham City, and his disregard for human life makes it clear that he’s doing it not for the cause and the people, but for himself, to avenge his family.

Harvey Dent’s fall from grace is also prompted by personal vendettas, but it’s his ideas on the importance of police repression that make Two-Face reign be marked by martial law and terror. After all, here, it’s Bruce Wayne the true root of Gotham’s problems: his fortune was built on blood, his political ideas reinforce oppression, and his selfish actions make him lose the support of dear friends. The Wayne name, in one way or another, is what creates all of the story’s villains.

This makes Bruce a compelling protagonist, a man who is torn between his guilt and his righteousness. The game reframes his “superpower” – being very, very rich – as a source of injustice and evil: amassing such wealth was only possible by exploiting and destroying families. Therefore, when he’s Batman, prowling the streets at night to defeat Two-Face and the Penguin, he’s delivering “justice” precisely to those he helped wrong. If Bruce Wayne publicly supports a candidate that promises a better-equipped, more efficient police, Batman functions as a role model for them, showing what that actually entails. It’s a somber ending, then, when the final choice in the game is all about what Bruce should spend his fortune on, but the only two options available are Gotham Police Department and Arkham Asylum: it shows that the character learned nothing from the events and still supports repression as a solution to violence – which means it will continue to spread.

Mechanically, the game follows Telltale’s bland formula. It’s composed of a sequence of cutscenes in which the player chooses some of the protagonist’s answers during conversations or, if it’s an action sequence, partake in easy quick-time events. Batman’s investigative abilities are also portrayed in scenes where the player must find clues in the environment and connect them when there’s a logical link – connecting the bullet to the mark it made on a wall, for example. Some action sequences also show Batman planning his moves, since it’s possible to connect the toughs to what Batman will use to defeat them – which is a nice touch.

However, since this is a Telltale game, it means that most of your choices are basically meaningless, leading to pretty similar outcomes no matter how drastically different they may seem at a first glance. This wouldn’t be such a glaring issue, though, if the game didn’t put frequent warnings on the upper-left corner of the screen stating things like “Alfred will remember this,” which are very cringeworthy and misleading. After all, sometimes he won’t remember a thing and the subject in question will never be raised again. Being a Telltale game, this is also pointlessly divided into five episodes that don’t stand very well on their own, but at least form a good, cohesive whole.

Batman: The Telltale Series manages to rise above the company’s usual catalog with a story that has something relevant to say about its source material, depicting Gotham as a doomed city, that is hostage to an ideology that favors police repression and incarceration, and to a family so rich that grant Bruce, either as himself or as Batman, the power to alter the fate of the whole place… alone.

February 28, 2020.