Nightmare Fuel / Batman: Arkham Knight

This is why smoking is bad for you.

"Shhhh... it's OK to be afraid."

—Scarecrow

Batman: Arkham Knight isn't just the Grand Finale for the Arkham series, it's the scariest Batman game ever made. If Batman: Arkham City is darker and spookier than Batman: Arkham Asylum, Arkham Knight is one step further beyond.

WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked.

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Main Game

• Scarecrow is back. This Halloween will certainly not be safe for trick-or-treating...
  • He's got a new look.◊ And you thought he looked creepy before... As a matter of fact, his mere appearance made the trailer he appears in to be considered inappropriate for children. That's how creepy he is. In fact, this might be one of the reasons the game got an "M" rating.
  • Even worse if you consider the first game. The last time we saw him in the game? He was being eaten by Killer Croc. As horrifying as his mask is, whatever's underneath it might be even worse.
    • It's even worse than that. Dialogue between a set of watchtower mooks, as well as other random mook chatter, implies that his mask isn't a mask. It's his face, his real face, which he did to himself.
    • This is further demonstrated in his first appearance. His mask's mouth actually moves as if it were his real mouth. Brrr...
• The moment in the finale when Scarecrow forces Gordon to unmask Batman. Instead of looking angry, defiant, worried, or any other understandable expression, Bruce's face looks completely blank. As if all the trauma he's endured as both Batman and Bruce Wayne, all the fighting he's done against the endless criminals of Gotham, have left him hollow and shell-shocked, not a trace of the playful playboy billionaire left. In a way, Bruce's real face is more frightening than his Batman mask.
• In-Universe, Fear Toxin is literal Nightmare Fuel with a reputation to match from the other characters.
• At the end of one of the trailers, we have Arkham Knight with Batman on the ground, with a gun to his face, and the screen cuts to black as we hear a gunshot. Not so much in the game, as the Knight shoots Batman in the torso where he knows he'll survive just to toy with him.
• Imagine being a Gotham cop. No, not in the same vein as Asylum (where you at least had an island to blockade off) or City (where you could just monitor the wall) or even Origins (the department is still in control of the greater Gotham area). Now you're isolated, in a city that's overrun with criminals on what's supposed to be a night of the year made of terror, capped with the most frightening super-criminal of all threatening to make your worst fears real.
  • Now the proud "welcoming face" of this page!
  • The one cop in the very beginning of the game probably suffered the worst out of all the cops and firefighters (which is saying something). Before anything bad happens to Gotham, one cop decided to take a break at a diner and have a quick meal. However, before he gets his meal, one random man walks up to him and asks for him to talk to a man in the corner of the restaurant to stop smoking. When the cop goes up to the man, the man turns out to be a Scarecrow thug who sprays Fear Toxin into the cop's face. Hell literally breaks loose as the cop starts hallucinating everyone in the diner as walking zombie abominations that try to eat him and each other. The cop then brings out his gun and starts shooting them in panic. Mind you, these are hallucinations, which means that the cop is shooting innocent people who have also breathed in the Fear Toxin! The poor cop doesn't get better until far later on into the game and even then he is obviously traumatized. And this was only the start of the game...
    • You want more? Well, according to the game's files, the guy who sprayed the gas in the cop's face was Jason.
    • You don't have to shoot at the hallucinations. The Nightmare Fuel here is that you as a player reacted and traumatized the cop all by yourself. It seems Scarecrow is even able to get to you.
    • If you choose not to shoot any civilians during the sequence, when you come across the cop later in the prison, the other officers will commend him for retaining that level of control over himself. They also note that the restaurant patrons "tore each other apart".
    • The second picture in "Story Synopsis" depicts the shoot-out with a gruesome close-up of the hallucinatory patrons.
    • You can also unlock a character trophy of the nightmare demons. The trophies in Arkham Knight are animated, so you get to watch them writhe and twitch like feral animals. It's... unpleasant.
    • The way that the zombie hallucinations snarl and snap at you is just... ugghh...
• Arkham Knight is Nightmare Fuel in the most definite manner imaginable. He is supposed to be less known, while on the contrary... He knows more about the Batman than anyone else in Batman's rogue gallery. He's versatile, durable, resourceful, cunning and, above all, extremely dangerous. He may appear to be the secondary antagonist to Scarecrow. But in all favors, he must be much more wily than Scarecrow, The Master of Fear himself. And it's implied that he might have followed Batman since his first early beginnings in Asylum and the horrific full-on destruction in City. It may explain why he downright mocks Batman both in his armor's appearance and for embroidering the Arkham emblem on himself. The helmet and style of armor shows him destroying Batman's heroism in Gotham and the emblem of the Arkham symbol is a reminder of the two worst nights in Batman's entire crime fighting career which are Asylum and City. Now the question begs for the previous titles... Who and what is he? Where is he? And finally... What became of him? What drove and caused him to have unfiltered, seething, unbridled, aggressive rage against Batman?
  • It's revealed he's Jason Todd and that, years ago, Joker kidnapped Todd and tricked Batman into believing he was dead, all the while torturing Jason for months in an abandoned wing of Arkham Asylum, causing his mind to snap when he believed Batman had abandoned him. Finding out that Tim replaced him as Robin didn't help his psyche either.
    Jason: What's the matter? Lost for words? I expected more... I'm hurt.
    Batman: Joker sent me the film... I saw him kill you.
    Jason: Don't you dare lie to me! How long did you wait before replacing me, huh?! A month? A week?! I trusted you... and you just left me to die!
    Batman: That's not what happened!
    Jason: You always told me, Bruce... focus on what I want to achieve... and it'll happen. Well, you want to know what I want now, huh? I want you, dead.
    • During the second hallucinatory flashback to Jason's torture, Joker at first has him strung up by his wrists as he circles him with a branding iron. After some more talking, Joker lets him down. Jason's wrists are free at this point, he could have made an attempt to escape or attack Joker during this moment. Instead, what happens is Jason cowering on the floor pleading whilst desperately trying to crawl away as Joker moves in with the iron. In a way, it's merciful we don't see all of what Joker did to him. To have him that terrified and broken is just chilling.
    • Possibly the worst of all is when we see how Jason appears to die.
    Joker: What's the big secret, huh~? His name. Tell me.
    Jason: ... Of course, sir... It's--
    BANG
    Joker: Never could stand a tattle-tale, that's why I like to work alone. No one to spoil the punchline. You should try it sometime. After all, you've seen what happens when you drag your friends into this crazy little game of ours.
    • Even worse, Jason calls Joker "sir". Being so broken you cannot bring yourself to attack your torturer is one thing, but being so broken you call him "sir" like you're his servant?
  • The last clip makes it even worse. If you examine Jason while Joker is filming him, you can see that he's completely unrestrained. There is literally nothing stopping Jason from attacking Joker or trying to run away, but he's so conditioned by the torture that he makes absolutely zero attempt. It's an absolutely chilling look at just how thoroughly Jason was broken.
  • If you look through the character bios, the renders for almost everyone seem relatively normal, often a bit creative or dynamic. When you go to Jason's however, it depicts him during Joker's torture, in stark contrast to all the rest. His head is lowered, face bloodied, and his arms bound above his head...the dude looks utterly defeated. Further worsened by what his occupation is said to be: "Crimefighter (deceased)".
  • Even during his final boss fight, you get some disturbing hints of this. In your final battle against Jason, whenever his militia men are unconscious or not present, he'll start taunting and ranting at Batman. A lot of it is the standard "you're going down" trash talk, but there are a few lines he'll deliver that are downright terrifying, one in particular revealing how fractured his mind has become:
  Jason: I can still hear him laughing. He's still in my head!
  • What's worse is that, while the tie-in comics explain that Jason was kidnapped as a part of Joker's plan in Asylum and that Harley inadvertently named Jason's alter ego, those comics were made after the game. The original plan by Rocksteady was that Jason searched for Joker to kill him but was captured. The resulting torture Jason endured? All just to teach Batman a twisted lesson. Think about that: Joker tortured Jason for over a year, ultimately just to kill him (or so he thought), because Joker didn't want to share Batman.
  • Footage of Jason's torture may have revealed the very room Joker tortured him in. If you replay Asylum and head to the Sanatorium, you might notice that the shower room matches up well with the room Jason was kept inside of - not to mention a large splatter of blood near the vent. It all reinforces one part of his Boss Banter, and really hammers in how much Harsher in Hindsight this otherwise merely creepy background detail proved to be.
  Jason: You wanna know where Joker kept me? I was sooooo close...
• Some of the later missions against the Arkham Knight definitely qualify as this before you get the hang. Namely, the Cobra. The Cobra is a huge tank with search beams that can only be destroyed by sneaking up behind it and waiting until your targeting reticle focuses and locks onto the rear-generator (similar to how the Immobilizer fires) so you can fire the cannon. One mission has you playing hide and seek with four of these, and if you destroy one, then another is inevitably drawn to your location. Worse still, they can take out the Batmobile in TWO SHOTS if they get you directly. This leads to frantically driving away if you get spotted, which can easily bring you into the line of vision of another Cobra tank.
  • The mission to destroy the Cloudburst is even worse. Whilst enduring both visual and auditory hallucinatory effects of having the fear toxin-induced criminals show as clones of Joker along with subtle trademark laughter echoing in the background throughout the entire fight. It's hide and seek against seven Cobra tanks, and the Cloudburst Tank itself is the worst of all, as it has four weak points you need to sneak up and shoot, and whenever you get one, it chases you for longer and longer periods through the city, not to mention that, for a tank its size, it's a very speedy hybrid of a tank when it chases you after destroying one of the four aforementioned weakpoints. Then you have to take potshots at the tank itself while dodging missiles, while the Arkham Knight gets increasingly furious over enemy radio transmissions.
    • Getting trapped in the sewers with the Arkham Knight, who is driving a giant drill. You basically have to let him spot you, chase you, and not get caught while you lead him into a trap. And each time you succeed, the area to move in gets smaller and smaller. Also, just as you attempt to leave, you reach a dead end, with the Knight having cornered you. The only thing you can do at this point is eject and let him wreck your car.
• Despite how nightmarish the sequences in the previous games can be, they had a cartoonish feel to them that kept them to a T rating. Knight, however, got an M (A rarity in superhero games, especially centering around popular heroes like Batman). And no wonder: The scares here are much more visceral, real, and unpredictable. A few specific items were highlighted in the ESRB summary, being two torture scenes involving a car tire and an operating table and a sequence where the players can shoot people and a hostage. These specific scenes are Batman interrogating a Militia soldier for the Arkham Knight's location, Professor Pyg's introduction and the nightmare sequence at the end where Joker hunts down the other villains.
  • The sequence where Batman interrogates the Militia soldier especially bears mention, as when he refuses to divulge the Arkham Knight's location, Batman summons the Batmobile and presses the tire on his face. While Batman has had a history of using Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique for information, many of them take on a playful and humorous tone. This scene, on the other hand, is extremely unnerving due to it being played dead serious and for how terrifying of a situation the thug is placed in. It is only made worse by the fact that the player is forced to rev the Batmobile’s engines themselves (and torture the poor guy in turn) in order to continue. Didn’t think this could get any worse? The player is required to press on the gas for a specific amount of time that the game doesn’t share with you, meaning if you get squeamish and chicken out too soon, you have to start all over.
  • It was later revealed Jason's torture scenes played the biggest part in pushing the rating to an M. While the game was pushing it with the above mentioned items, these scenes apparently took the cake and bumped it up to M. That is how disturbing those scenes were.
• The "Gotham is Mine" trailer has a fair bit of Nightmare Fuel, given that it focuses on the villains. Of special note is the Riddler's face. Looks like he's gotten worse since the last game.
  • Poison Ivy and Firefly are back as part of the Villain Team-Up too. Similar to Riddler, their physical appearances have taken a turn for the worse as well. Firefly in particular has no helmet, just goggles and a gas mask, with his horrifically burned head on display.
    • Though, one could argue that Poison Ivy's appearance seems less freakish compared to her previous design, as she now looks more human.
• The opening cinematic, revealed in the E3 2015 trailer, begins with Joker's grinning corpse being pushed into a cremation oven; rather than the camera cutting away, as it would've done in previous T-rated games, it instead lingers as the rising flames bloodily melt his skin and muscle into a charred, blackened husk.
  • While the opening cinematic shows Joker's cremation, the lyrics to Frank Sinatra's "I've Got You Under My Skin" make an eerie foreshadowing of what will happen to Batman with the Joker blood still in him:
  I've got you under my skin.
  I've got you deep in the heart of me.
  So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me.
  I've got you under my skin.
  
  I'd sacrifice anything, come what might,
  For the sake of havin' you near,
  In spite of a warnin' voice that comes in the night
  And repeats, repeats in my ear:
  Don't you know, little fool, you never can win?
  Use your mentality, wake up to reality.
  But each time that I do just the thought of you
  Makes me stop before I begin,
  'Cause I've got you under my skin.
  • The opening cinematic in New Game Plus has... a little twist to it. A few seconds after you start the flames to cremate Joker's corpse, he'll suddenly spring to life and scream in agony before devolving into insane laughter. Jesus Christ, Rocksteady.
    Joker: This... is how it happened. This... is how the Joker died.
• The very beginning of the Joker hallucinations, with Joker seemingly popping out of nowhere to shoot Batman at point-blank range. The game then goes into a flashback before returning to the present, leaving you to wonder what the hell is happening to Batman.
  • Upon returning to the present, it only gets worse as we're treated to a first-person shot of Batman coming to in the basement of the collapsing Ace Chemicals plant, greeted by his hallucination of Joker slowly saying "Bruce, Bruce." Even though it's only a hallucination, and that the living Joker didn't really care about Batman's secret identity, it's still very unsettling to hear Joker address Batman by his real name, because it's basically saying, "You know that guy who thrived on a toxically intimate relationship with you; he's back, he's inside your head, and he knows everything."
• So you're on Simon Stagg's airship, you've just swooped in like Errol Flynn and took out an entire room of twenty-something bad guys, you've chained combos and utilized gadgets until your fingers ached, and then you saved Stagg. You're feeling on top of the world... and then the goons start getting up again. But they don't attack you, that'd be kinda typical... they just stand there. They sway slightly, as if they're not really stable. And you hit them once, they go down... and they keep on coming, like zombies back from the dead. Finally it becomes clear, it's a Joker hallucination, but that doesn't make it any better, because they still won't stay down, and now they're laughing too...
• One of the Gotham City stories explains how Joker captured Jason in the first place. He bombed a kindergarten, blowing dozens of toddlers to pieces, then sang Humpty Dumpty over the intercom as the parents were left stunned in the wreckage. It was when Jason watched a grief-stricken mother scoop her baby's remains out of rubble that he realized Joker needed to die, forcing him to track him down to Arkham without Batman where it turned out to be a trap. You really can't get more evil than Joker.
• The quarantined blood transfusion recipients. Not only are they starting to behave and look more and more like Joker, but they're degenerating from the inside as well. Batman identifies their disorder as a variant of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, meaning their brains are literally rotting apart as dementia and psychosis set in.
  Batman: The blood's gestated too long. It's altering them. They're becoming…
  Gordon: Joker. My god.
  • Which makes you wonder... is Batman's brain rotting apart too?
  • It makes you wonder if it was a special interaction between Joker's blood and the TITAN that caused it, or if it was just the TITAN alone in its advanced stage. If it was the TITAN alone causing this, was Joker's brain rotting apart before he died in Batman: Arkham City? And what about the little girl in the A Matter of Family DLC? What about Dr. Young's experimental subjects?
    • Here's something else to consider: what if it's not the TITAN? The mutated Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease these people have came from Joker's blood. What if Joker was already sick, and his chemical bath is what kept him alive?
  • During the flashback introducing the Joker's infected, there's a mild Jump Scare when Batman shows up out of nowhere beside Jim Gordon. Batman's even frightening to his allies.
    • A shadow of what looks like Batman's cowl briefly moves across Johnny Charisma's cell when he's talking to Gordon, implying that Batman was in the room the entire time. The whole scene is a glimpse into how sinister and unknowable Batman can seem even to a friend.
  • On a related note, the Jokerification of Batman. From Joker's brief hijacking of Bruce's body in the Stagg Airship encounter with Scarecrow, to his increasingly erratic behavior during and after the Panessa Studios encounter with Harley and Adams, then finally the Joker's takeover hallucination during the endgame, the entire concept is horrifying. Even when in free-roam, Batman hallucinates Joker's face on posters and billboards, and even in carvings in the architecture, and this is not helped by Joker appearing absolutely everywhere, usually with a snide remark and a comment about their shared mental state.
    • Also, Joker's face can appear on the statues in at the cathedral near Wayne Tower.
    • Related to the above, after Scarecrow injects Batman with Fear Toxin and Joker finally takes over Bruce's body, he starts cackling about his "second coming." While the idea of a second coming of Joker is shown to be pretty damn horrifying, there's another layer of horror in this scene: How does anybody else watching, unaware of what's really going on, perceive this sudden mental shift? The player sees Batman replaced with a hallucination of Joker, but the average Gotham citizen sees billionaire philanthropist and beloved humanitarian Bruce Wayne, unmasked, reply that he's glad to see his loved ones hunted down and killed while the city burns, then begin to laugh a scarily familiar laugh in an apparent psychotic breakdown.
  • On another Joker-related note, any time Hallucination!Joker speaks, there's this chorus of cackling Joker voices in the background that never stops.
  • The way Joker appears and disappears at will is a mix of Nightmare Fuel and Paranoia Fuel. Whenever you move the camera, Joker seamlessly slides onto the scene as if he was there the whole time. And when he's said what he has to say and you move the camera around again, he simply vanishes, as if he was never there. There is literally no way to tell when Joker will show up to taunt you.
  • A particularly bad one is Joker's imitation of Man-Bat, as Batman grapples into a rooftop and Joker basically jumps out swiping at Batman's face.
• Combined with Funny Moments: As you slowly use the Nimbus cell to replace the power core of the Batmobile, Joker tries to make Batman give in to the Fear Toxin, first, by telling him to take deep breaths, then pretending to sleep; and then, when the Nimbus is being slowly placed into the Batmobile, he sings a grotesque version of "Rock-a-Bye Baby" that goes like this:
  Rock-a-bye Batsy, I'm getting free.
  Soon you'll be the one trapped inside me.
  So keep taking breaths, great lungfuls of fear.
  Soon Bats will be gone, and I will be here.
• During the final hallucination, when you play as Joker, you get a twisted clown version of the Batmobile. But that isn't the scary part. The scary part is when the game wants you to fire on a room full of mooks using LIVE ROUNDS. This scene is especially unnerving and unsettling if you don't often play M-rated games, but it's also worth mentioning because you've spent the entire game as a protagonist who refuses to kill and uses non-lethals. The scene is jarring, to say the least.
• Stagg's notes, complete with the chambers of his test subjects. Cruelty doesn't even begin to describe it.
• Almost everything about Professor Pyg. His entire "Monster Machine" operating theater, a dank, slimy concrete chamber, is hidden underneath an unassuming beauty salon, where he holds fresh captives in giant birdcages while performing surgeries and singing along to opera music. Pyg himself is a hideously deranged, schizophrenic villain, euphoric to the point of religious mania while he talks of beauty and perfection, and his Dollotrons are gruesome bandaged creatures with all traces of free will, pain receptors, and genitalia cut away. Pyg only barely seems to understand he's done anything wrong, mewling and snuffling about how "Mother" will be ashamed if he's locked up.
  Pyg: Pyg happy, Pyg glad, Pyg gets to play with flesh, make it look pretty after death!
  • The above quote comes from the screen you see if you die fighting him. It's the only death screen available for that section, and it has Pyg reaching into the screen with a knife.
  • One of the side stories revealed by a riddle shows that not even children are safe. It's explicitly described that the little boy's tongue is like a salted slug gasping for air. Ugh...
  • Hell, the entire concept of Pyg's Dollotrons themselves. For example, there's at least 30 Batman has to fight his way through to apprehend Pyg himself; that's at least thirty people kidnapped, gruesomely maimed and rebuilt into a hideous mockery of the human form. Worse is the aftermath that isn't explored; Batman, as usual, only knocks out the attacking Dollotrons rather than killing them, possibly with the vague intent of saving their lives. But what happens when the GCPD roll up and find them? Is there any amount of mental therapy or reconstructive surgery that can bring a person back from that? Would the person even be able to go through with reconstructive surgery after that kind of ordeal? Is there even a mind left to save? And what, if anything, is left underneath those masks?
    • Even better: Maybe there are minds left behind those masks... their bodies are just under control by Pyg thanks to the surgical alterations he made. The first Dollotron you encounter was begging Pyg to stop his surgery, which is followed by Pyg commanding the future Dollotron to say "thank you" for hurting him (he does, with obvious effort not to). What if these Dollotrons are innocent people who were not only forcibly altered in appearance and function, but also with no control over what they're doing? Not to mention looking at the imprisoned Dolltrons (who are all just standing around lined up in two separate rows) with Detective Vision presents you with Condition: TERRIFIED.
    • You see his victims holed up in the GCPD later, and one of them is a woman who has been reduced to a sobbing mess. She was the same when you rescued her.
    • It's possible to break a Dollotron's mask through an environmental takedown. Whatever is under there, it's probably for the better not to see it. Part of it is a strange mass of lumpy flesh at the top of the head. Someone took the time to see what's under the mask through modding◊, and while they don't look terribly hideous, there's still things to note; their hollow expressions, the burns across their faces...their dead, empty eyes...
  • What makes Pyg even more disturbing is that he doesn't think he's doing anything wrong. He sees himself as a good person, and he honestly thinks he is helping the people he kidnaps by making them "perfect". He is SERIOUSLY mentally disturbed. He's not just doing it For the Evulz like, say, Joker (who, it should be pointed out, genuinely calls him crazy) or Mad Hatter.
  • One must question what caused Pyg to believe his life's work are the Dollotrons. He makes them into this gender-less zombie, immune to anything that doesn't force them into unconsciousness. He regards failure as a horrifying realization, and sobs to himself about Mother getting angry with him. What did Pyg go through to make him believe all this?
  • Let's just put it this way. If you're a villain who's insane to such a disturbing extent, to such an unholy level that even Joker admits that you're completely crazy, you're pretty goddamn scary. That's pretty much Professor Pyg - so unsettling and terrifying that even Joker, as Ax-Crazy as he is, as much as he's doing everything For the Evulz, as terrifying as he was in life, pretty much says that Pyg's crazier than the rest of the bunch...not that he's concerned about it, obviously.
• Beyond his haggard look being a bit unsettling, the Riddler's sidequest is much heavier on the humor and the action than the horror this time in contrast to his deathtraps in City, but the primary exception is Catwoman. The whole time she's stuck in his lair with a bomb strapped to her. Beat a challenge? You get a choice of keys. Choose the wrong one... and you get a charming unique cutscene of Catwoman panicking as the camera pans just offscreen enough for us not to see her head explode. All while Riddler watches and taunts you for getting her killed - the dark glee in his voice amps it up, with a eerie reverb from his malfunctioning tech, especially the lines perfectly timed with the explosion.
  Riddler: "Curiousity didn't kill the cat, Batman!" <explosion> "You did!" ("kill the cat" echoes over and over).
  Riddler: "Bzzt! Wrong answer!"-ong answer... <explosion> "Oh, but there's no need to lose your head over it, kitty..." -lose your head -ose your head...
  • How deeply Riddler has fallen into madness is equal parts unsettling and pathetic. While he was always childish dating back to Origins, he at least seemed to be partly Affably Evil even if it was condescending. Now, he's so completely detached from reality that he seems to devote every second he can in desperately trying to prove himself superior to Batman; not even caring for his hygiene or once-dapper fashion at this point. He's long since shifted from a merely self-righteous douche to a homicidal lunatic.
• The game's design of Man-Bat may be the most disturbing yet, if only for how much more human than normal he looks — his emaciated, nearly hairless body, milky-white eyes, and mouth twisted into a yawning howl all show just how agonizing Langstrom's transformation was.
  • Even his introduction is a Jump Scare; as Batman grapples onto a ledge, Man-Bat appears out of nowhere, screeching and trying to claw at his face. Worse, it's also possible for him to suddenly appear on skinny construction bars. In real life he would be easily spotted if he were hiding there, but another possibility is that he was above and dived down horrifyingly fast to screech in Batman's face.
  • It gets worse. Later, when you go to his lab, you descend into a lonely, dank place with notes everywhere, a screen showing two brief videos... and Dr. Langstrom's dead wife on the floor. If you watch the videos, first you'll see a cute loving video with the two discussing his research, and then the second one starts to document the treatment... except it goes horribly wrong. It's horrifying imagining Francine's last moments: Watching her husband writhe in pain, then (as the sounds imply) watching him transform into a half-man, half-vampire bat... then being killed by him. The final video shot is of her face, after her body falls to the floor. If you look at the floor in present time, the camera is still pointing at her. And you can see the bruises on her legs and the large bruise on her neck where her husband likely bit her... The whole scene is only made worse by the ominous yet sad music. Doubles as a massive Tear Jerker.
  • Think that's bad? Go back to Langstrom's lab later in the game. Francine's body is gone, the screen has been smashed by something, and the words "Forever My Love" have been written in what looks like blood.
  • And just when you think Kirk either escaped from or was let go by the GCPD, you find him still in his cell. The most likely explanation? Francine is still alive, but only because Kirk was contagious.
  • Setting the PS4 or XBox One clock to 10/31 shows that, even if you captured Man-Bat earlier in the game, he'll appear in the previous jump scare. Going back to GCPD, you find that his cell has been destroyed from the inside!
  • Man-Bat's screeches and howls are very unsettling. You'll know when he's around by listening for his bat-like roars up in the sky.
• Scarecrow injecting Barbara with Fear Toxin and forcing her to commit suicide right in front of Batman. That was the moment both Bats and the player realize that Scarecrow's not screwing around this time. He really wants Batman to suffer. Granted, it was a hallucination caused by Scarecrow's fear gas and she was really alive, but it's still painful to watch.
• As Scarecrow is about to let Barbara fall off the ledge of the construction site to her death, just to twist the knife in Gordon for "failing" him, she defiantly tells him, "You don't scare me." In response, he leans in and quietly whispers, using the same reassuring tone a parent might give to a child woken by a nightmare, "Shhhh... it's okay to be afraid." Just one line, yet it shows the absolute depths of his evil more clearly than any speech he ever gives to Batman.
• Throughout the game, Batman brushes off or does his best to ignore the growing presence of Joker both metaphorically and literally (given the nature of his affliction) eating away at his mind. Then you corner Scarecrow for the first time, and we see just how much frightening hold Joker has over his mind at this point, culminating in a hallucination wherein a horde of Jokers are egging him on to shoot Scarecrow, even though the gun is all in his mind. He pulls the trigger.
  Joker: Look at him...No better than the creep who killed your parents. You need to do something. You need to stop him.
  [Batman silently aims a hallucinated revolver]
  Joker: Yes, good... Good... Gooood...
  [Batman shuts his eyes. A click of the trigger is heard before he's returned to conscious reality]
  • Even the gameplay in this sequence is terrifying! Chances are you'll only be using the standard 'attack' button against your foes. but if you try to stun them? You attack. If you try to dodge? You attack. The only button that doesn't attack is counter, which lets you let them off easy with broken limbs and devastating injuries.
  • Just seeing when Joker first gets control of Batman. The complete change in his body language is just downright jarring. To say nothing of hearing Joker's voice coming out of Batman's mouth.
    Joker!Batman: Look at me! I'm amazing! And this body... I can't believe how strong it is!
  • What makes it even more nightmarish is if you take your time hurting them, the thugs make comments like 'what's wrong with him?!' This isn't just a hallucination, this is actually happening, your enemies have noticed the difference in you, and they're frightened.
    • Some soldiers, who are knocked down but not unconscious, will even start backing away from you on all fours, whimpering in terror. The same soldiers who would readily get up to keep fighting under normal circumstances are petrified of Joker!Batman's savage brutality.
    • At the end, even Scarecrow comments that something is "different" about Batman. The man who keeps dosing him with fear toxin recognizes he's done something to Batman beyond what he intended, and it gives him pause.
    Scarecrow: The violence on Stagg's airship was not your usual cold brutality; it was sadism. Your true instincts emerge, Batman, thorned weeds creeping through cracked granite.
    • Joker's demeanor, when you compare it to Asylum, City and even Origins, is still humorous for the most part...but also noticeably much darker and outright malevolent, being less Faux Affably Evil and more just flatout evil. When Joker is urging Batman to kill Scarecrow, Mark Hamill drops the energy completely for a bone-chilling, venomous hiss, scarcely heard before in earlier games. It's a testament to the fact that, among all the villains, behind the laughs, mayhem and even survival instinct, the Joker is and will remain the worst of them all...
• Batman's final Fear Toxin hallucination shows a even further mutated Killer Croc in the near future, almost akin to a Kaiju; he's become gigantic, seems unable to speak, and has grown attributes such as a tail and spiny monitor lizard frills on his shoulders. It's a rather disturbing reminder of just how worse his incurable condition can get.
  • The mutations themselves are bad enough to look at, but Alfred theorizes in Origins that Croc is in near-perpetual agony because of them. If it was already painful when he was still recognizably human, it must be pure torture for him now.
  • In Asylum, he was so powerful and relentless that Batman himself barely staved him off by exploiting the shock collar meant to force him into compliance; he had no chance of subduing Croc physically, and only managed to survive by detonating the ground underneath his feet, dropping him into a huge chasm. Croc has progressively gotten tougher and stronger since then, the collar is long gone, and it's not likely he'll fall for the same trick twice. When encountering Batman in the sewers in City, the only thing that stopped him from ripping the bars apart and killing him right then was smelling Batman's disease and deciding to wait for him to die instead. Oracle considered fighting him to be suicidal during the events in Asylum; the proper word now would probably be futile.
  • Even worse, Croc's appearance in the Season of Infamy DLC shows that it wasn't just a flight of fantasy; it's already happened to him. Yet worse, it wasn't a natural mutation either; it was engineered (detailed below).
• The moment when the last remnant of Joker, fighting for dominance in Batman's mind, has to come to terms with a terrifying reality: He will, eventually, fade into obscurity or get lost in the shuffle, his presence no longer feared by Gotham, his name no longer admired and despised by his fellow criminals. Unlike every other defeat he's faced before, he's gone for good this time, and can't ever return to bedevil Batman again; he's only a bad memory, sealed away in the brain of a dying man, isolated forever. When Batman finally arrives to lock him away for good, the once-arrogant villain who sneered "I can't stand groveling" is begging and pleading, near tears, unable to lose Bruce again.
  Joker: No! Bats, wait! NO! PLEASE! NOOOOO!
  Batman: Goodbye, Joker.
  Joker: No! Bruce! Don't leave me! PLEASE...!
  (Batman pushes the cell away, Joker reaching out for him as it leaves the room)
  Joker: I need you...
  • Additionally, the walls of Joker's cell have some... unsettling words scraped onto them, such as "NO ESCAPE", "ONLY THE DARK" and " WELCOME TO HELL". Worse still, smaller, more personal scrawled messages like "I HATE FRANKIE" and rows upon rows of "I'M NOT A JOKE" suggest this was actually all Joker's work, carved in private fits of rage and self-loathing.
  • One of the most disturbing of those scrawled messages...? "I CAN'T REMEMBER WHAT I LOOK LIKE." Hallucinatory-Joker was undone by the fear-toxin overwhelming him with his worst fear, which was having the entire world forget about him ... and in the end, that universal forgetfulness seems to have even worked on him.
    • This might also reference the fact that the Joker might not remember what he looked like before he became the Joker. The initial dunk in the acid was that damaging to his mind.
• By the game's end, Batman and Bruce Wayne are dead to the public. But something is still patrolling Gotham and preying on criminals. And whatever it is... doesn't play fair.
  • To elaborate: A family takes a shortcut through an alley and gets ambushed by two muggers, a direct parallel to Bruce's parents getting shot (the mother's even wearing a pearl necklace which one of the muggers rips off). Then they see a silhouette resembling Batman looking at them from a nearby rooftop, but something's... off. Smoke can be seen rising from his shoulders, and as the muggers taunt the figure and shout that they're not scared of Batman anymore, he rises into the air and the environment turns into a hellish inferno with the figure becoming what can only be described as a demonic, bat-like wraith with 20-foot long wings. Which zooms right at the screen like an avatar of unholy vengeance as the muggers scream in abject terror.
• The Arkham Knight's first audio log showcases Scarecrow interrogating Barbara for Batman's identity. When she refuses to talk, Scarecrow menacingly threatens to inject her with Fear Toxin, explicitly detailing the severe long-term damage the toxin can do. Thank God the Arkham Knight intervened when he did.
• A game with Scarecrow as one of the main villains is a game thick with Mind Screw. Within a few hours of playing, you'll find yourself questioning what's real every time Batman ends up alone. Some of the more unpleasant hallucinations include:
  • Flashing back to Joker crippling Barbara and taking photographs of his handiwork, complete with Barbara lying in a pool of her blood and gasping the whole time.
  • A room full of KO'd mooks stumbling to their feet and turning into giggling Joker clones while you aren't looking.
  • Jason Todd's physical and psychological torture by the Joker, who torments him with Batman "replacing" him with another Robin.
• Remember the Scarecrow nightmare sequences from Asylum? They're back as DLC, and they're as terrifying as ever. The nightmare missions have you driving the Batmobile through a hellish, twisted mockery of Gotham that looks like something straight out of Silent Hill while being pursued by a towering Scarecrow, who attacks with fireballs and Eye Beams. At the end of each one, you must fight Scarecrow himself to escape. And each Nightmare has Scarecrow being more aggressive in his attempts to kill you. It's a small mercy that the Batmobile gives you the firepower to fight back. Plus, some of his taunts are downright terrifying.
  Feed him to the crows!
  Your parents are in Hell and you're about to join them!
  Bring me his soul!
  And the darkness closes in.
• The final hallucination. Pretty much all of it, but here's an itemized receipt:
  • As Joker in a first-person shooter situation, some stone statues of Batman go full Weeping Angels on you, complete with dark musical cues at all the wrong times.
  • Before that, as FPS-Joker, gunning down the Rogues can be... disturbing. Penguin bargains vainly for his life, Riddler tries to take a hostage, and Two-Face tries to stop you. Depending on your mood, you can listen to their gibbering, or gun them down without a second thought while a hellish version of "Only You" plays over and over. While Penguin, Riddler and/or Riddler's hostage (the player has to kill either Riddler or his hostage to proceed; at least one has to die) can be spared, the player will be absolutely forced to kill Two-Face.
    • The most unsettling part about that sequence was, from the way they're talking, you can infer that, from the Rogues perspective, they're still seeing Batman. Riddler takes a hostage saying "there might still be some things you won't do," and Two-Face tries appealing to your human nature.
    • And before that, there's the hallucination where Batman takes on an army of Jokers. Seems tame to begin with, until you look more closely at the one special he can use during this fight: The "Joker Takedown". It showcases the most brutal takedown animations seen in the game, with Batman using either lethal or permanently crippling force in all of them - curb-stomping Joker's face into the ground, snapping his back over his knee, slamming his heel into the small of Joker's back and the fight itself ends with Batman neck-snapping Joker at his own insistence.
    • During Joker's rampage, a muffled transmission can be heard occasionally. Right after Joker shoots and kills the Rogues, he walks outside to see Gotham, burning down before him, relishing the sight as his finest work. The transmission plays again, in full clarity...and it turns out to be Alfred, sounding utterly terrified.
      Alfred: Please listen to me! After all the good you've done for this city, think about what you're doing!! Sir, I'm begging you! Master Bruce...Batman! You have to listen! Think about your family, Bruce. Your father—what would he say if he saw you like this?! Please, please stop this rampage!
      Joker: Oh, Alfred, sweet, loyal Alfred! Master Bruce is gone, but don't you worry! Your new master is coming home... (giggles menacingly, with a Gross-Up Close-Up of his filthy teeth)
    • And before it's revealed that it was all played inside the Joker's mind, it's implied that it's a Through the Eyes of Madness-moment, with the Joker-controlled Batman breaking free from his restraints and murdering everyone inside the Asylum, with the covering Penguin actually being a crawling, wounded Robin, the terrified Riddler actually being an equally terrified Scarecrow and the defiant Two-Face actually being Gordon trying to stop the now rampaging, murderous Batman from escaping Arkham and unleashing his wrath at Gotham. And all while his murder-spree is being broadcasted live, leading Alfred to desperately call Batman in hopes to get him to stop, only to hear Bruce speaking to him as if he's now completely someone else...
    • The Joker is already incredibly dangerous enough on his own. So what happens if you give him Batman’s intellect, wealth, and physical abilities? He becomes unstoppable.
• Time for an organic one. Try going to Founders' Island when you can't take the Batmobile, and run around at ground-level with Militia tanks swarming around you. It's nerve-wracking trying to stay away from them, whilst not being seen by footsoldiers either. And if you think you're completely safe in the air above Founder's Island, think again. There's aerial drones there as well as invulnerable^note With the exception of taking down their respectively-guarded terminal controlling them, but nothing else works to take them offline permanently. emplaced camera turrets set around skyscraper-height locations, the Serpent aerial drones give off a very uncanny vibe to the infamous HK-Aerials from the Terminator series, and they quite neatly fit said role if you're too inattentive in the skies above said island...
• This little exchange between some of the soldiers:
  Militia 1: Are you okay, man?
  Militia 2: Yeah, yeah, i'm okay.
  Militia 1: You sure?
  Militia 2: Yeah, it's just, uh, earlier, for, like an instant - like, half a second - I think I breathed in a tiny bit of Scarecrow's gas.
  Militia 1: Jesus, what happened?
  Militia 2: Nothin'. Nothin', at first. But I, uh, I keep hearin' 'em.
  Militia 1: Who?
  Militia 2: There were some prisoners. Back when I was in the army. They'd killed, like, ten of our guys. So we, uh, we gave 'em what they deserved.
  Militia 1: Good.
  Militia 2: I know, right? But since I let the gas in it's like, it's like they're right behind me, still screamin'. And...
  Militia 1: ...what, man?
  Militia 2: And... I think they wanna hurt me.
• YOU. Yes, you, the player. After four games and twelve in-universe years of brutal vigilante justice, Batman has a well-deserved reputation as someone who can and will smash your face and break your bones at his leisure. Throughout the course of the game, you vindicate that reputation with interest. Average thugs can freak out at your mere presence.
  • The Militia, however, are not as Batman-wise as the average Gotham thug, and begin their invasion with high morale. As you continue dismantling their efforts bit by bit, they begin to wise up, and deploy increasingly powerful countermeasures until they're throwing everything they've got at you. It isn't enough. Enemy chatter goes from impressed, to concerned, to fearful, and then outright panic as their army slowly crumbles to dust through the efforts of a single man. By Game's end, the stragglers are lost, alone, and stranded, in a foreign war zone with no support and no hope of rescue, while fully aware of just how vulnerable they are. You don't need to be cowardly or superstitious to fear Batman; he's enough to give you nightmares regardless.
  • The final scene drives this home. After Batman conquers the hallucination, he manages to break free with help from the Arkham Knight and turns Scarecrow's toxin on him. We then see Batman through Scarecrow's eyes: He looks like an unearthly red-eyed demon, with bats for a cape and bats coming out of his body, while the background is a hellish red sky. Scarecrow is afraid of YOU, the one person who can conquer fear, along with anything else the bad guys throw at you. And after playing through the game, it's something of a CMOA as you think of course he's afraid; he ought to be.
• One of the story logs you can find shows what happened to Solomon Grundy after City. He had been given a special cell in the city morgue that not only has four extra strength locks on it, but they're WayneTech caliber. Even then, that's not enough when the lone coroner realizes that the large body in there is very much alive!
• On the subject of Grundy, one of the riddles is based around him, and the solution is a small room under Perdition Bridge in Drescher, which contains candles, lots of rubbish on the floor, a wanted poster of Grundy...and a record player, playing a creepy, distorted version of the Solomon Grundy nursery rhyme, sang by a young boy on an endless loop. What makes this even more unnerving is the room is too small for Grundy to put together himself. He physically couldn't fit in the small space; Batman barely can. So the question remains, who put all this stuff here? It almost looks like a shrine, but who in their right mind would be worshiping Grundy of all people? Well, guess what: we never find out.
• If you die during the section where Oracle helps you defeat the drones, instead of one of the villains taunting you, you will be greeted with a cutscene. Barbara is at her chair in the GCPD, when the elevator dings, and a number of Militia thugs burst out. Among them is a Brute with a Minigun, who opens fire on the screaming, terrified cops. As the gun falls silent, the camera zooms in on the gunman's face, with only the eyes showing. The only sound we hear is his steady, deep breathing.
• As if the Joker hallucinations weren't bad enough already, there's the Fridge Horror in that we don't know how much of it is the mutation and how much is Batman's own subconscious. Bits like the Joker's extremely predatory attitude to the vulnerable Catwoman and his telling Batman to leave Nightwing to his fate because of no respect he showed by leaving and taking on his own costumed identity become even worse if you consider that Batman himself might be the origin of those thoughts, and the Joker aspect is merely giving them a face and a voice.
  • Joker being Shipper on Deck for Bats and Selina, telling him to enjoy all the happiness he can before he pulls his Grand Theft Me. Then he will kill Selina, in Bruce's body no less.
• The detonation of the Cloudburst, which uncannily resembles a volcanic eruption — as seen from street level, the gas cloud surges out like a pyroclastic flow, consuming everything and everyone in its path; in mere seconds, a dense, roiling shroud has already settled over the entire city, glowing and spitting static electricity. All mechanisms not running on Nimbus technology stall completely. All the enemy chatter goes quiet, save the frightened, overwhelmed reactions of militiamen. Gliding over it, in almost total silence with no music, feels like death itself.
  • Not to mention that all the Militia and random thugs have been each replaced by a hallucination of Joker laughing. Their echoing, nonstop laughs make the atmosphere even more dreary and hopeless as it already is. Even zapping the Jokers away won't be satisfying since they don't even make a sound as they are zapped and the unsettling laughter still continues.
  • For extra creepiness, in between Ivy's sacrifice and completion of the next objective, not a single living person can be found on street level. Normally busy places like Grand Avenue and Chinatown are suddenly quiet as a grave with easily over 250 thug corpses littering the street. Only after completing the next objective do enemies slowly re-spawn on the street.
• Just the realization that, in the end, Batman's third Scarecrow hallucination from Asylum, the one of him being wheeled into Arkham on a gurney, mentally ill himself, with the Rogues in charge of the Asylum and aware of his true identity, came true. Bonus points in that both the hallucination from the first game and the reality from the final game were both induced by Scarecrow. Scarecrow successfully made one of Batman's worst fears a reality.
  Scarecrow: Do you know what happens when a man refuses to be controlled by his fears? He must face them.
• Johnny Charisma's Game Over sequence has him pressing the detonator to blow up the whole stage, and himself. That's right, you're basically getting a close-up of someone committing a suicide bombing. If you look closely, you can even see his body break into Ludicrous Gibs.
• At one point in Batman's search for the Knight after he kidnaps Barbara, Batman uses the Batmobile as a threat to one of the militia - threatening to have it crush his HEAD. And, considering that this is well after the Joker's made his first appearance, so the player knows that Batman is in the process of becoming Jokerfied... For just a moment, you can easily believe that Batman's going to break his one rule on this mook.

• And, the most unsurprising part of this page? Everything that doesn't happen in the aforementioned missions or story! Imagine this: Just patrolling the city streets of Gotham by itself and witnessing first hand on what a capable villain like Scarecrow would do when there is no Joker to keep him (and many of the other fellow rogues) distracted and in place. You take notice of rioters parading through the streets, a private militia that steam rolls ALL the government officials and social workers and keep them in check with dread of force or death, many factions of hoods chasing down and antagonizing any officers on the streets and you have one man out there orchestrating this whole thing behind the scenes with one goal in mind... Destroy the Batman. And, no matter how many times you patrol the city. No matter how hard you ambush thugs, no matter how brutal you escalate within the night's war on crime. It is all an inevitable end.

Arkham Episodes

"How you have fallen from Heaven, O Star Of The Morning, Son of the Dawn..."

• Although it's a cameo only in the A Matter Of Family DLC, you can find in the amusement park, a freaking Starro parasite (though fortunately contained). So that means that in this Crapsack World of Gotham with mobs, supervillains, terrorists, cults and other more down-to-earth threats... there exists something capable of creating a Cosmic Horror Story. Yeah.
  • Just... look at that thing◊. It just stays there, peering at you with that big, creepy eye... in a dark, quiet room. It's freakin' eerie.
  • If that's not scary enough, it has another eye on its back, only it's enormous and bulging with veins. Add that to the blood-red color and the thin, vertical pupil, and the thing looks downright demonic. The way its angled makes it impossible to see the whole thing, which just makes it worse.
• In the "Nightwing: GCPD Lockdown" DLC, you start off at the Penguin's base in Blüdhaven. There, you'll find a giant aquarium tank that belongs to, you guessed it, Tiny. Get close to the tank and the enormous shark will appear out of nowhere and slam into the glass.
• In the "Season of Infamy" DLC, the "Shadow War" mission chain has you encounter Ra's al Ghul, who has finally been revived too many times. Not only has he withered away severely, but despite being treated with a constant flow of the Lazarus chemical, he hasn't healed the wounds from his fall in City, leaving his ribs and organs showing in the two sickly holes in his torso. And if you chose to heal him with the new Lazarus strain, he's now quite psychotic, happily cutting down Nyssa and calling her a traitor. There's nothing of the old Ra's left by now.
  • "Shadow War" in itself is considerably Bloodier and Gorier than even the main game, possibly made as such since the game already had an M rating by the time it was being developed. The Elliot Memorial Hospital has dozens of corpses strewn about the place and a considerable amount of visible blood spilt about the floor as well, and choosing to help Ra's with the new Lazarus juice that Batman found rewards you with a "lovely" scene of Ra's cutting his second daughter Nyssa down, complete with horrid flesh-cutting sounds and Nyssa's wound spilling blood.
    • This, however, is only one of two optional endings for the mission, with the other being it's own different kind of Nightmare Fuel. While the more traditional ending has Batman saving Ra's and, as said before, him murdering his own daughter. But in the other ending, Batman chooses to let Ra's finally die, basically committing a mercy killing. He destroys the life-support machinery (the only thing keeping Ra's alive anymore), and his body begins to shut down. Batman carries Ra's to police headquarters and puts him in a cell to live out the rest of his days, where Ra's imparts one last line to you... that he's proud of you for making your choice. It seems like a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' sort of choice, that either way Ra's wins, but think about this for a moment. The reason why Batman never became the leader of the League of Assassins is because he refused to make the ultimate sacrifice, killing someone... and now he has. He can claim he didn't, as Ra's was basically dying anyway, but the fact remains that, much like in Batman Begins (with Ra's al Ghul again, no less!), you had the choice of saving someone's life, and simply didn't. So what does that make you? A hero? Or a murderer?
  • Within the hospital, you'll eventually come across the morgue, where several shelves have been left open to expose the corpses they contained. Two of the bodies belong to the waitress from Pauli's Diner and the bearded man who informs Officer Owens about the "smoker."
  • After beating the mission, you can go back to the hospital and find a hidden tape. It turns out that Ra's let Batman live because Talia loved him and promised Ra's he could be a worthy successor, so he allowed Talia to bring Batman before him. If Batman failed, then Ra's would give the League to Talia, saying that she would lead without mercy. Batman was in way over his head in City, to the point that if it weren't for Talia, he would've died there.
• The climax of the Mad Hatter's side mission, "Wonderland", has Batman falling into a Hatter hallucination once again. This time around, he's shrunken down and forced to fight enemies in a giant pop-up book, all while a massive Mad Hatter peers down at him. Keep in mind, the guy was already creepy enough, so seeing him as a fifty-foot tall giant looking over you like a child with a picture book is surprisingly terrifying.
• "Beneath the Surface" is Killer Croc's side mission, and as you'd expect from having to venture into a giant crocodilian cannibal's lair, things are tense. Croc is larger than ever before, and the first area of the airship has Batman navigating a partially flooded holding area to rescue trapped guards; at one point, the level requires you to grapple up to a high ledge, just skipping off the deep, rushing water that Croc may or may not be lurking under.
  • The mission proper details just what happened to him during the capture described in his Gotham City Story; after being stalked for months in the marshlands, subdued by a team of armed soldiers (many of which didn't survive the encounter), and given a massive tranquilizer dose, he was hauled off in the enormous Iron Heights Penitentiary airship, the closest place strong enough to hold him. When he eventually threw off the effect of the sedatives, he proved strong enough to bring down the zeppelin by himself, and now lurks inside the wreckage in the bay with an army of freed prisoners.
  • The prison itself is incredibly eerie, with angel and death's-head moth motifs all over its architecture. Even more than Arkham Asylum, Iron Heights looks like a place of punishment, not rehabilitation.
  • When Batman goes deeper inside the airship, he finds out just why Croc has mutated as badly as he has, and why he's so furious: it was an adaptive response to the agony of the sadistic medical experiments Warden Ranken was putting him through, including tearing off his hand with a giant circular saw to see if it would grow back, all in an effort to reproduce and weaponize his condition in Iron Heights' other prisoners; Nightwing is so horrified at seeing this that he doesn't even try to condemn Croc's actions. Worse still, Ranken shows no signs of repentance or remorse for what he's done, only disgust with his charges and fury at their rebellion. Batman's very justified in calling him the true monster.
  • After years of either running from him, narrowly avoiding him, or facing off against his younger, less mutated self, Batman is finally forced to battle a nearly 15-foot-tall, fully mutated Croc with Nightwing by his side. Although enraged and able to viciously swipe at them, Croc's condition has progressed so far that he has trouble moving his bulk unless he lunges on all fours with a furious howl; Bruce and Dick's teamwork and the Square-Cube Law are the only things keeping them from being ripped to shreds.
  • While Croc's voice was slowly changing from raspy to a growling tone, he sounds utterly monstrous here. His voice at this point is a pure and deep snarl, sounding like it physically hurts him to try to speak anymore now; it just goes to show that Croc's lost any remaining trace of humanity he had left at this point.
    I HOPE YOU SUFFER, BATMAN... LIKE I'VE SUFFERED.
• The "In from the Cold" mission with Freeze shows several dead Militia soldiers frozen in ice. Also, the cryo-generator that Freeze was using to keep Nora safe becomes unstable and explodes. The type of the explosion they use? The Cloudburst firing. And the final battle has Batman in a no-win situation: The Batmobile is fighting in an open area against an unlimited number of drones, and the ice is on the verge of giving out under the sheer weight of the machines out there.
• Jason being the new guardian of Gotham, and he doesn't play by the same rules as Batman. At all.
  Jason: Black Mask, where is he?
  Black Mask Thug: You ain't gonna kill me. You ain't gonna kill me!
  Jason: (shoves his handgun into the mook's face) Do I look. Like Batman. To you?!
  • Imagine this: You are a criminal in Gotham City. For ten years, most punishment you'd get for any crime was a beat-down and some jail time. Now, with Batman seemingly dead, you might get motivated to commit more crimes. You do something illegal with a bunch of pals and, suddenly a hooded figure wearing the Bat Symbol comes out of nowhere, and slaughters everybody else before moving onto you… Worse yet, Jason clearly enjoys his job as he makes jokes after takedowns, so Gotham is now protected by a scary, masked Batman-like figure who makes fun of your death like the Joker would.
  • Really, the entire DLC shows that, for whatever side he's fighting on now, Jason's still one screwed-up kid that got broken by the Joker and never really got over it. Whereas Batman walks proud with shoulders broad, Jason stumbles forward, shoulders hunched like a brute. He doesn't knock out mooks silently, he snaps their neck. He interrogates enemies by shoving his gun into their face, and blows their brains out once they're of no use to him. Even Detective Mode shows defeated enemies as outright dead instead of simply unconscious. The only saving grace is that this time, he's fighting crime rather than being part of it.
  • Better yet, the same fate might fall upon supervillains, as Black Mask demonstrated. Given that Jason lacks any empathy towards criminals, even Two-Face might get killed by him eventually.
• In a similar vein, Harley Quinn's fighting style is particularly brutal compared to other playable characters, sans Red Hood. Unlike Red Hood, though, she's fully on the bad guys' side, and, this time, she's got player character privileges.
  • Harley's equivalent to the Detective Mode? A red tinted filter, with walls covered in barely decipherable scribbles (though you can make some phrases out... such as "dear god I'm alone") and giggles echoing in the background. Her DLC also changes the user interface to the same scribbled-on font as seen on the walls, with the enemy counter in Predator sections now reading "(insert number) little piggies", further driving in just how unhinged Harley is.
  • It also reveals that she hears Harleen's voice in her head all the time, trying to convince her to stop her brutality. Deep down, Harley probably knows what she's doing is wrong, but is too far gone to stop doing it.

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"Welcome to your own personal hell. Please stay a while."