Batman: Arkham Asylum

Batman can escape detection easily, but lost health stays lost. In the Arkham games, gargoyles let Batman get back into stealth almost at once, but health lost to buckshot does not regenerate until the encounter ends.

Because escape is cheap but damage persists, mistakes add up and the player can only afford a finite number of them, so hiding stays better than brawling or reloading. "Batman can only make a finite number of booboos before it's game over."

After Batman escapes, guards stay nervous instead of returning to idle. Once guards lose Batman in Arkham Asylum, they settle into a new nervous state with weapons raised rather than going back to normal patrols.

This lets players reset the encounter while keeping the fiction intact, since guards going back to idle after their friends were taken out would feel unrealistic. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain handles it similarly, keeping an area on a cautious alert for many in-game hours.

Guards grow more frightened as Batman takes out their buddies. Arkham guards react to each takedown by becoming more scared, a simple form of AI that remembers and responds to what the player has done.

Mark Brown pairs it with Shadow of Mordor's Orc captains, who remember past encounters, as ways of making players feel their actions create a personal story.

Guards quietly don't turn around, so Batman can sneak up. In predator sections, Arkham enemies don't turn around, which lets Batman reach them from behind. Players never notice the tweak but would feel its absence.

It sits alongside Uncharted giving enemies a zero percent chance to hit Drake as he pops out of cover and Far Cry letting only a few enemies shoot at once: hidden biases that make a game feel fair.

The AI is designed so nobody gets the drop on Batman. Aggressive, hunting AI like Alien: Isolation's Xenomorph would be wildly out of place in Arkham Asylum, where enemies have to be sneakable for the power fantasy to work.

The lesson is to judge AI by the experience it supports, not by how lethal it is. "AI must fit the game's intended experience."

High perches let players plan and hide above enemies. The Arkham series uses the upper areas of levels as a place to survey guards, plan moves and stay out of sight.

It echoes Tenchu, whose grappling hook and generous jump turned rooftops into a route above the guards before dropping down to silently dispatch them.

Batman snaps to distant enemies, so attack range barely matters. Arkham Asylum's combat has very high stickiness: Batman locks onto enemies from far away, making range irrelevant. Its parry window is also criticised as far too generous.

Low stickiness, as in Bloodborne, forces players to learn each attack's size, range and shape, and Mark Brown argues it is generally better to make players think about positioning, down to sweet spots like the tip of Marth's sword in Super Smash Bros.

Long subtitle blocks reveal dialogue before the moment happens. In Arkham Asylum the line 'Who called the elevator!?' appears as a subtitle seconds before Batman hears the elevator.

BBC and Netflix guidelines cap subtitles at about 37 to 42 characters per line and two lines on screen, broken at natural points, so the text stays centred and matches what is heard. Hitman and Detroit: Become Human use short stabs of dialogue instead.

Arkham Asylum's small world works because it is dense with content. Arkham Asylum is cited, alongside Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, as a compact world that succeeds because of how much meaningful content it holds rather than its size.

"Game environments should be measured by how much meaningful content is inside, rather than in square metres."

The Riddler trophies were good enough for Nintendo to borrow. Breath of the Wild's Korok puzzles echo the Arkham games' Riddler trophies, part of Nintendo selectively taking ideas from other games.

Cooking was drawn from The Witcher's alchemy and ore smashing from Minecraft in the same way.