Developer Camouflaj (Iron Man VR) and publisher Oculus Studios unveiled the first cinematic story trailer for the Meta Quest 3-exclusive Batman: Arkham Shadow today at Summer Game Fest (watch it below), and I spoke with Camouflaj head of studio Ryan Payton to confirmed. a number of new game details.
Set for release in the fall of 2024, Arkham Shadow is an official part of the Arkham-verse and takes place between the events of Arkham Origins and Arkham Asylum. Roger Craig Smith will reprise his Arkham Origins role as Batman, and we’re promised plenty of villain origin stories, including the Scarecrow and Harley Quinn. Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent, among other public figures, have been kidnapped, and the mastermind behind it all is the Rat King. He’s vowed to execute them all within a week for “crimes against the people of Gotham City,” so it’s up to you as Batman to decide how far you’re willing to go to stop these deaths.
Payton promises the full Arkham experience in VR, including a free-form combo combat system, the ability to slide down on unsuspecting enemies below using Batman’s cloak for sneak attacks, using detective mode from the perches above to plan sneak attacks, throwing batarangs to keep combos going , drop smoke bombs to get out of trouble, and use Batman’s Grapnel gun to quickly reach the rooftops of Gotham City. The Unity-powered Arkham Shadow isn’t an open-world game like Arkham City or Arkham Knight, and instead draws inspiration for its structure from Rocksteady’s first Batman adventure.
“Batman: Arkham Shadow is very much inspired by Arkham Asylum in terms of scale and scope, as well as the structure of the game,” Payton told me. “It’s exploration like you have in Asylum – which involves free-flowing movement, so you use the Grapnel gun to snap onto things, slide down, and go through vents. All the elements you’d expect from an Arkham game; it will be largely driven by the struggle of the moment.
“[Our pitch to Warner Bros. was,] We’re going to take all of that and then completely redo it for VR and make it work amazingly for VR and actually feel like an evolution. So you still have that feeling of doing crowd control, but you’re also being interrupted by counters and making sure you’re flowing into the counter and doing it. All in first-person, all in VR, and it’ll make you feel like the bone-crushing combat of Arkham. It will have boss battles like all other Arkham games, [it’ll have] investigation with detective mode. And we’ll also have big Arkham-like cinematics where you’ll be face-to-face in first-person as Batman with these kinds of tough moments. With these classic DC characters. So that was the pitch and that was almost four years ago and here we are with the biggest game Camouflaj has ever done, [and] the longest game we’ve ever done. And Arkham Asylum is our North Star.”
Batman: Arkham Shadow was announced last month following Kevin Conroy’s final appearance as Batman in the Arkham-verse in Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, in which many fans he didn’t care how the developer decided to ship the character.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive demo editor and host of both of IGN’s weekly Xbox shows, Podcast unlockedas well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a guy from North Jersey, so it’s “Taylor ham”, not “pork roll”. Discuss it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.