Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY

A benchmark — they called it the best comic-book game ever, and meant it

When the original launched in 2009, the industry more or less stood up and applauded in unison: critics called it the greatest comic-book game ever made, it pulled a 91 on Metacritic, and it briefly held the Guinness record for most critically acclaimed superhero game. Remember that until then "superhero tie-in" was practically a synonym for shovelware — players saw the genre on a box and walked the other way. This is the game that hauled the bar up to AAA standing in one swing, and finally gave everything that followed a height to measure against.

More to the point, it hasn't aged into a museum piece you can only admire from a distance. The gothic mood, the returning cast, that addictive combat feel — all of it still lands today. The things that read as "old" — systems less elaborate than later action giants, a structure that isn't the fashionable open-world recipe — never sanded down the core fun. If anything, the sheer focus makes it feel crisp rather than dated.

That's the rare trick a benchmark has to pull: not just topping a chart on release day, but staying playable long after the chart has moved on. Arkham Asylum manages both, and it's the reason newcomers still pick it up cold and walk away converted.

Who should buy it, and who should steer clear

If you want to spend a dozen-odd hours actually being Batman — soaking in combat, stealth and exploration sewn into one tight loop — this is built for you, and buying it is a no-brainer. What it hands over is a dense, low-waste, exceptionally polished action-adventure: combat that's easy to pick up but deep to master, a stealth role that genuinely lands, a plot that stays taut, and an audiovisual identity that pulls in one direction. You finish it remembering "I was the Dark Knight for a night," not "I cleared a map."

But if you lean toward the aimless wandering freedom of a sprawling open world, or you came chasing a script of constant reversals and eleventh-hour gotchas, it may not fill you up — it chose a different road from the start and walks it without apology, never angling to please everyone. On editions, the PC Game of the Year version is the call: all six challenge maps and the "play as the Joker" content are baked in, and you get the full benefit of modern hardware on top.

The series' starting point, and a night that's hard to copy

This is where the entire Arkham series begins. FreeFlow combos and predator stealth — the two load-bearing pillars — were both raised here and carried straight through to this day, with their fingerprints visible all the way out to Marvel's Spider-Man and Shadow of Mordor. It also took home BAFTA's Best Game and Gameplay, a D.I.C.E. award for Game Design, and a stack of other heavyweight honors, while selling over 4.3 million copies — a winner on both the critical and commercial ledgers.

The funny part is that even its own sequel, Arkham City, never truly copied it. The follow-up blew the stage out into a whole city district — bigger, busier — but also looser; on focus, on near-zero waste, this first night is the harder one to top. It isn't an industry-rewriting behemoth, but it is the most complete game of its kind and a piece of homework worth doing in any era. More than a decade on, when you want a game to let you be Batman — short, sharp, exact — it's still the safest answer, and well worth blocking out a weekend to play.