I don’t believe in manifesting—I don’t make dream boards, and I don’t think the universe is listening to any positive vibes I put out. I will, however, take a moment to tell you about the Batman game I’ve always wanted (you want proof? Here’s a messily written blog from three years ago). My desire has not faded—if anything, I think the soil is ripe for it, and I’m honestly staggered it’s never been attempted.
Let me first set the stage: Rocksteady is in deep water after Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, meaning we’re unlikely to get a good Arkham game any time soon. Meanwhile, we’re entering a golden age of Sekiro-likes—Lies of P: Overture and Nine Sols both accelerated the genre, meanwhile we’ve got Nioh 3 coming next year, as well as the promising-looking Phantom Blade Zero. If you like parries as much as I do, videogames are kinda poppin’ for you right now.
In other words, if you’re Warner Bros, you might want to try something new. Not live-service new, but something different, something bold. I realise a soulslike is kinda neither of those things, being the second-most imitated genre next to deckbuilders, but let me dream, okay?
The ground is fertile, my friends—maybe it won’t be in three to four years, such are the woes of game development—but I’ll still be there wanting more FromSoftware-adjacent punishment sims to wear out my L1 button on, and I think a Batman soulslike could be really good, damnit.
Now, you might say that Batman doesn’t work with the genre. You might say he’s too cool to stare down a “You Died” screen a dozen times over. And in some sense I agree, the Arkham games nailed the raw mythological stature of the Dark Knight. He’s pants-crappingly scary to Gotham’s gutters because he is basically untouchable.
In the Arkham games, he strikes fear into the heart of crime, giving those pesky lowlifes life-altering injuries that, while at-odds with my real-life morals on rehabilitative justice, are extremely cool in a fictional setting. However, in these games, this sense of power is simply delivered to you.
Countering enemy attacks is a matter of pressuring a button within three business weeks of their strikes. You flow from mook to mook causing concussions and snapping limbs like twigs. They fulfill a power fantasy, but they’re not actually the best way to convey Batman’s story.
Batman is cool because he’s just some guy whose only superpower is not having to pay rent, and, like, a jet plane or two. Plot armor shields him, sure, but we know that he’s mortal, that he bleeds, and that he’s a little unhinged for not covering his mouth with that mask because, like, surely body-armour doesn’t work if there’s a chance some shrapnel might ping up into your gob.
As a character, he is because he is ruthlessly obsessed with perfection, and too masochistic to quit or have a life. He is self-punishing to the extreme, wholly dedicated to the act of fighting above his weight class. In other words, he’s any soulslike player who does those no-hit runs.
Which brings me to my next point—you know what game did that? Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
That game turned me into (a far more sedentary) Batman. Not just because the Wolf uses stealth and martial arts to take down his foes, not only because he has gadgets and a grappling hook—but because when everything clicked, when I entered that flow state and gave Genichiro what-for, I felt like a mortal going blow-for-blow with a god just by getting, well, gud.
The years of training with Ra’s al Ghul and brooding in ominous caves is, instead, replaced with the gauntlet of die, try, repeat—but the end result is the same, mastery over what should be impossible. I want to do that in a cape, and I will forever have a bat-shaped hole in my heart until this becomes a reality.
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