Arkham Shadow, a Villain’s Story is Doubly Disappointing

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home February 28, 2025 83 Views 6 Min Read
Arkham Shadow, a Villain’s Story is Doubly Disappointing



Batman: Arkham City makes sure to honor Batman: Arkham Asylum’s ending tease by opening with Two-Face once Bruce Wayne gets himself incarcerated in Arkham City and rescues Catwoman at the Solomon Wayne Courthouse. The courthouse is iconic in City as it is themed after Two-Face and his gang, but Camouflaj’s Batman: Arkham Shadow retroactively makes City’s encounter far more profound with this particular courthouse becoming wildly significant in his lore. Indeed, Batman: Arkham Shadow does well by all of its characters and District Attorney Harvey Dent is finally allotted a crucial and tragic piece of backstory in this prequel entry.

Now, even if no future Arkhamverse game ever features Two-Face in a prominent role, Harvey has been done justice in the franchise. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of every minor or major antagonist who’s been established and made an appearance. There are still many antagonists who could be extrapolated on and made richer in prequel or sequel games, such as Poison Ivy, Deathstroke, or Zsasz, but Thomas Elliot’s Hush can never receive the same Harvey Dent treatment now and was teased as a monumental figure only to be written into an inescapably constricted box.

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The Arkhamverse’s Hush is Sadly a Flash in the Pan

Not much could debatably be accomplished with Hush in an action-adventure game like Batman: Arkham Knight as the bandage-wrapped antagonist doesn’t actually possess any abilities. But, considering how excellent his cliffhanger reveal is in Batman: Arkham City, it’s unfortunate that he didn’t or couldn’t amount to more.

Thomas may as well have not appeared in City at all and it wouldn’t have made a difference because he succinctly details his master plan and motive in Knight’s abrupt Wayne International Plaza encounter. Likewise, the swiftness with which Lucius Fox and Bruce dispatch Thomas is so brutal and quick that Thomas never had an opportunity to seem threatening at all—a devastating backslide from City, where Hush cages Batman in an eerie lair and confidently disappears into the night.

Plus, despite stating that he’d “hunt him down tomorrow,” Bruce seems to forget all about Thomas in the nine months between City and Knight, though this is understandable given that he was tirelessly rounding up individuals infected with Joker’s malignantly tainted blood—himself being one of them.

Batman: Arkham Shadow’s Harvey Dent is What the Arkhamverse’s Thomas Elliot Can Never Be

Harvey Dent’s ‘Rat King’ is the main antagonist of Batman: Arkham Shadow and yet he has no boss fight nor do players ever throw a punch at him—a fact game director Ryan Payton is rightfully proud of. In this same vein, Hush never needed to be an antagonist who players put through a table and instead could’ve orchestrated some heinous plot with other villains obfuscating his schemes in the meantime.

Sadly, while Harvey becomes Two-Face in Batman: Arkham Shadow’s final moments and is supposedly robbing banks and flicking coins into the air in Gotham City not long after, there is no such freedom with which another Arkhamverse game could now explore Thomas Elliot since he’s introduced and dealt with definitively. Now that his gimmick has been revealed, there’s arguably not much more that could be done with the character, at least not in any way that would flesh him out tremendously the way that Harvey is in Shadow.

Seeing flashbacks with Thomas and Bruce in the same vein as Batman: Arkham Shadow’s Harvey and Bruce flashbacks could have been great for exposition alone, but knowing Thomas only becomes Hush in Batman: Arkham City with that throughline then resolved in Batman: Arkham Knight is deeply anticlimactic. This has always been tremendously underwhelming—Batman: Arkham Shadow merely emphasizes why. There’s debatably no point in dissecting Thomas further with how saliently the games already tell his truncated tale and perhaps leaving him to be a minor, forgettable side antagonist is precisely the role Rocksteady wished for him to fulfill.

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