Batman: Arkham Shadow Trailer Teases a Game Most Gamers Can’t Play

Video Games

Batman is returning in a new Arkham game, but it’s not as cool as it sounds. Today saw the release of a teaser for Batman: Arkham Shadow, an upcoming entry in the popular DC Comics video game series. Little is known about the game, other than it involving Batman, Gotham City, rats, and probably lots of action and gliding, but IGN says that more information will be revealed at Summer Game Fest on June 7, 2024. Now, why did I say this isn’t as cool as it sounds? Because Batman: Arkham Shadow is exclusive to the Meta Quest 3, a virtual reality gaming system that is less than a year old and very few people own compared to, for example, a PlayStation 5; unless you spend $499 on the VR headset, you can’t play it. Batman: Arkham Shadow was developed by Oculus Studios and Camouflaj, the studio behind Iron Man VR (another time they allowed, like, five people to play a game that probably would have been widely popular before eventually dishing out a subpar larger release). If you happen to have a Meta Quest 3, Batman: Arkham Shadow will go on sale in “late 2024.” You can see the trailer below:

Ain’t that a kick in the pants? The less-than-a-million gamers who have a Meta Quest 3 get a cool-looking Arkham game (as far as the cinematics in the trailer go) where you get to kick ass and take names as Batman while everyone else on the planet got to watch Harley Quinn blow Batman’s head off after telling him to check his privilege. Is this how the Joker feels when he sees the world for the madhouse it truly is? At any rate, I like this trailer a lot. It’s short and sweet, has plenty of atmosphere, and I like the use of shadows, which looks like it will figure into the gameplay; it’s very Batman, and that’s great. The use of rats seems to indicate that the Ratcatcher will be the villain; outside of the girl version of him in The Suicide Squad, I’m not familiar with him, so I looked him up; I was particularly curious about whether the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles villain the Rat King was a derivative of him or vice versa. It turns out they debuted in the very same year, 1988; the Rat King was first by two months, but that’s a bit close for it to have been anything but a coincidence. I like the idea of using a lesser-known villain, though, and someone like the Ratcatcher allows for some different challenges for Batman this time. It would be neat if they eventually made this available for other systems, but I’m sure that’s a pipe dream. We’ll just have to play the other Arkham games (not Suicide Squad) again.