Clearly I’m a bit behind the times when it comes to TellTale games, as this particular entry released back in 2016. I’m sort of over the whole style of game, though I’m still into their storytelling… and that probably doesn’t make sense. These adventure titles are great when you care about a particular IP, and are a nice diversion from more attention demanding genres, but game play that consists of QTEs and dialogue choices isn’t really game play. Again, when you care about an IP these things don’t tend to matter much. Tales From The Borderlands was a blast, and it was the same sort of game. I’m in love with The Walking Dead series. Batman is sort of hit or miss with me. So that’s why I’m just now playing this title, mainly because it was free with Playstation Plus for January.

That said, it’s not bad. It’s not entirely an origin story, and familiar characters are abound, but it’s definitely more early on in Batman’s career, as he’s only just meeting some of these folks, and people like Gordon aren’t Commissioner yet. If you have some familiarity with the Batman ethos you’ll know these characters and know more details about them than even Batman does at this point, and that’s fine — this is it’s own thing and we can accept that.

Graphically it’s on par with the other Telltale games I have played. It runs fine on the PS4, which is a marked improvement over their titles’ functionality on PS3, but these things are to be expected. The choices don’t seem to be all that difficult to make in this game though. Here’s mine from the first episode:

Literally none of the choices were gut-wrenching. I expect that there will be those sorts of choices to make before the season is over, but nothing here made me stop and think… nor did I necessarily do what I would do were I the person in the situation — I feel like I went along with my preconceived notions of what Batman would do. There’s a terrible bumper sticker idea — WWBMD? What would your bowel movement do?

I chose to have a private meeting with Falcone, who is the villain for this episode. That meeting was filled with veiled threats, but nothing too interesting. Later, the Wayne manor was being raided and a reporter named Vicki Vale took a quote from me. Dunno if that will make a difference later on. I chose not to break a thug’s arm. I chose to give sensitive data about Falcone to Gordon rather than Vale, which seemed the obvious route to go. Finally, I arrested Falcone instead of pounding him to a pulp. Overall boring stuff here. It appears that most of my choices were on par with other players, which isn’t surprising as they mostly seemed obvious.

I’ll report back with my results from the next episode soon!