Boss Rush: Scarecrow (Arkham Asylum)
1Batman, DC Comics’ legendary Dark Knight, has one of the most memorable rogue’s galleries in all of comicdom and its members have been re-imagined in numerous ways over the years. The Arkham series of games is no exception to this rule. Although many of the voice actors from Batman : The Animated Series returned to lend their talents to many of the roles of Batman’s adversaries, their visual style was updated to suit the darker tone of the game. While I’m a huge fan of just about every adaption they made to the character’s appearance, when it came to adapting their abilities to the game’s mechanics, a few of them left something to be desired.
The Scarecrow, alter ego of Dr. Jonathan Crane, however is not among them. Not only is he one of the most creatively realised villains in the game, the sections he’s featured in are often counted as some of the top moments in all video game encounters. For anyone unfamiliar with the character, Scarecrow uses fear to dominate his opponents, often utilizing a specially created fear gas to induce hallucinations. In Arkham Asylum this is no different, with exposure to Scarecrow’s Fear Gas causing Batman to see and experience things that may not be real.
In Asylum, when Batman is first exposed to the toxin there is no obvious sign of it having been present or of its effect. There are some small queues that are noticeable in hindsight, but for the first encounter a short monolog by The Joker during a routine elevator ride-cum-loading screen serves to distract all but the most perceptive of players. As a result of this, when we see Commissioner Gordon being attacked and dragged through the halls of the asylum there’s no reason to suspect that this is anything other than a standard kidnapping and attack. This makes the following scene, where Batman discovers an apparently dead James Gordon, quite an emotionally tense one as Batman calls up Oracle to tell her her father is dead. At this point Batman’s eyes begin glowing red and it becomes clear that something ain’t right here.
This neat little introduction is followed by a slow traipse deeper into the asylum, all the way to the morgue. As Batman moves along, there’s a really nice effect where the walls begin to crumble and insects crawl over every surface. It’s little touches like this that help to make Arkham’s Scarecrow memorable. It’s not just that the cutscenes have irregularities, it’s that everything connecting each set piece begins to warp from its normal form. Instead of just having us walk through the normal version of the asylum, eventually reaching the morgue where we see another hallucination, they’ve reworked entire subsections of the environment just for these short transitions, keeping us in fear mode right to the point where Bruce discovers his parent’s corpses on the slab.
This is where the actual boss encounter begins and the introduction for it is just fantastic, mainly because it’s so abstract compared to how the game has been set up so far. In these moments, Arkham Asylum goes from a fairly grim and psuedo-realistic adventure into something from a fairytale. In a scene evoking dark fantasy like American McGee’s Alice, Arkham Asylum completely de-constructs and reforms into a ring of floating platforms, at the center of which stands a humongous Scarecrow. Batman’s attempts to fight off the effects of the Fear Gas take on the mechanic of having to actually evade the giant Scarecrow’s gaze. As you creep around from platform to platform, carefully hiding from Scarecrow as he creeps between floating segments of asylum, Scarecrow darts in between walls, peering over the tops, his needle-tipped fingers curling carefully over the upper ledges of the wall. These fluid movements help sell the hallucinogenic effect as Scarecrow’s motions are much like the gas affecting Batman’s senses.
There are three separate Scarecrow scenes throughout Arkham Asylum. All of them are stand out moments in the game, but of the three my personal favourite involves the asylum transforming into Crime Alley, the location of Thomas and Martha Wayne’s murder. After the player comes across their dead bodies, the control swaps from Batman to a young Bruce Wayne, forcing us through the moments directly after the Wayne’s murder. As the child we’re forced to trudge slowly through the dark alley, all alone and getting soaked by rain, treated to echoing voices from Bruce’s past. This segment always gives me a tingly feeling and that just makes beating The Scarecrow afterwards all the more satisfying.
