Telltale Games—the studio behind decision-based storytelling games like Tales From The Borderlands and The Walking Dead—has whipped up an intriguing core dilemma for its upcoming game about D.C. Comics’ brooding Dark Knight: Do you solve problems as billionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne? Or as The Bat?
That’s the takeaway from the studio’s recent SXSW presentation, which laid out a skeleton for Batman—The Telltale Series, the company’s latest comic-book adaptation. (Don’t worry, Avengers obsessives: They’re working on a Marvel game, too.) The title will apparently forgo focusing on the wider “Bat family,” in order to dial in on the relationship between Batman and his playboy alter ego; for at least some parts of the game, players will get to choose which persona to adopt to resolve various scenes. The game will also alternate between days spent as Wayne and nights as Batman, with decisions made in one setting impacting the player’s options in the other.
It’s a pretty intriguing idea—not only because it evokes one of the best Batman comics ever written, 2002’s “24/7”, in which writer Devin Grayson and artist Roger Robinson show the ways Wayne’s two identities interact to keep his city safe—but because it seems like a pretty good way to make a character who spends his time kicking other people in the head make sense in a style of game where most of the biggest moments happen in dialogue trees.
The game is set for release this summer; besides the Bruce-Batman dichotomy, players can expect comic-book style art, an M-rating for content, and roster of villains that’s being kept quiet until the title’s closer to release.