Rocksteady’s Next Batman Game Will Hopefully Continue a Fun Arkham Legacy

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home April 7, 2025 32 Views 6 Min Read
Rocksteady’s Next Batman Game Will Hopefully Continue a Fun Arkham Legacy



Batman’s mythology and the setting of Gotham City have always maintained a harrowing, dark tone in their subject matter. DC generally isn’t as lighthearted as Marvel, either, but Batman in particular stews and dwells in material that can be quite dark despite the World’s Greatest Detective being a do-gooder. If anything, this gives Batman stories an opportunity to be graphic, mature, or disturbing in ways that a Superman story might not ordinarily be, and it’s because of that riveting atmosphere that Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum has been pedestaled as one of the most iconic depictions of the character and his mythos.

Batman: Arkham Asylum taking place entirely on Arkham Island did a lot of the heavy lifting in stamping Rocksteady’s signature on the DC universe, but Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Knight would go on to have equally distinct aesthetics in Old Gotham’s Arkham City and Gotham City, respectively. However, there’s a recurring theme prevalent in each of Rocksteady’s Arkhamverse games that, if the studio truly is working on a new Arkham game, should absolutely be honored and reprised: horror.

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Batman: Arkham Asylum celebrates its 15th anniversary and has an unbelievably rich universe of worldbuilding in the DC mythology to show for it.

Rocksteady’s Batman Trilogy is a Treasure Trove of Great Horror

Rocksteady’s Arkham trilogy isn’t composed of horror games and yet each installment is peppered with some of the most successfully unsettling beats. The following examples are at least the most prominent or memorable:

Batman: Arkham Asylum

  • Multiple unique, hallucinatory Scarecrow sequences.
  • Killer Croc’s jump-scare behind a locked door.
  • Arkham Asylum’s so-called “lunatics” shrieking and lunging at Batman from hiding places.
  • Killer Croc’s anxiety-inducing, pursuit-heavy ‘boss fight’ lair set piece.
  • Tame body horror regarding Titan brutes and Joker’s radical boss fight transformation.

Batman: Arkham City

  • Scarecrow’s hidden boat lair housing a patient jump-scare.
  • The Cyrus Pinkney Natural History Institute’s dinosaur animatronic jump-scare and a sudden attack from Penguin’s live shark, Tiny.
  • Eerie, macabre imagery such as in Hush’s makeshift lair.
  • Killer Croc’s jump-scare Easter egg in the sewers.

Batman: Arkham Knight

  • The first-person prologue sequence playing as GCPD’s Officer Owens at Pauli’s Diner during a spell of Scarecrow’s fear toxin affecting the diners within.
  • Batman’s jump-scare while playing as Jim Gordon at the Panessa movie studios, which follows the jump-scare reveal that Batman is now seeing physical manifestations of Joker.
  • Man-Bat’s iconic jump-scare when players are grappling after they’ve gone to the Pinkney Orphanage and met with Catwoman in Riddler’s Most Wanted side quest.
  • Joker’s jump-scare imitating Man-Bat’s.
  • Killer Croc’s jump-scare debut in the ruins of Iron Heights during the “Beneath the Surface” Season of Infamy DLC.
  • Gruesome murders and surgical operations performed by the abhorrent Professor Pyg.
  • Joker’s jump-scare at the Batmobile window while Batman is recovering from being outside in the Cloudburst’s city-wide fear toxin plume.
  • Batman’s multiple hallucinatory jump-scares in the first-person Joker sequence when the Clown Prince of Crime has nearly subsumed Bruce Wayne’s psyche.
  • Batman: Arkham Knight’s “A Matter of Family” Arkham Episode DLC has a grapple-related jump-scare at Seagate Amusement Park with a big fish-like animatronic painted to look like Joker and baring human-like teeth—“a bad joke.”
  • Batman: Arkham Knight’s “GCPD Lockdown” Arkham Episode DLC has a nostalgic jump-scare with Tiny bashing the glass of an aquarium.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a Reminder of How Scary Batman Can Be

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League even indulges in horror and exploits its Task Force X perspective to demonstrate how terrifying Batman is when lurking in the shadows and swiftly taking out criminals, though this Batman—a purple-eyed clone created by Brainiac—has no compunction about killing. The Demon Bat concept that debuted in Batman: Arkham Knight’s Knightfall Protocol ending finally culminates in Suicide Squad’s Batman boss fight, too, and, yet again, Scarecrow’s fear toxin is wielded to craft a sequence that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror game.

Scarecrow may be the most logical and effortless way to infuse an Arkham game with horror, and yet a future entry wouldn’t need to rely on him wholly, as evidenced by all the imaginative instances of genuine horror the series has exhibited thus far without Dr. Jonathan Crane’s toxins. Sometimes, all it takes is a body of water that would seem unassuming if not for the shark that lunges out of it.

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