"Wonderland is a weird, unsettling place at the best of times. Seen through an Arkham lens, Lewis Carroll's creation is a dark hellscape of traps, dilapidated towers, and nightmarish illusions. Somewhere deep within it lurks the Mad Hatter, who's kidnapped a young woman to be his new "Alice," and whose hypnotic devices have planted the realm in Batman's mind.
It's also the Hatter's sardonic laughter that peals out from somewhere offscreen. "Welcome to Wonderland, Batman!" the little sociopath cackles, before waxing nostalgic about his first meeting with Alice. "The forces of the queen are everywhere, conspiring to reclaim her, which is why I brought you here! Who better to protect Alice than the Batman himself?"
The Hatter's idea of protecting Alice involves running a surreal obstacle course designed to "break in" Batman's mind for servitude. After dodging a few electrified floor panels and knocking out lanterns to lower a massive, keyhole-emblazoned drawbridge, our hero shimmies around the edge of a tower and climbs into an opening while the camera tilts at a nauseating angle. He emerges from one of three doors set into a wall (as the camera watches ominously through a keyhole), above which are three paintings, one of them featuring a thug in a rabbit mask. As he slowly walks from one painting to another, the puzzle solution becomes clear: Batman needs to head through whichever door is underneath the thug.
"Well, well, you finally figured it out," sighs the Hatter. "But it taxed you, didn't it? Drained a little of that willpower of yours, hmmm? Thoughts getting heavier? Finding it harder to maintain control?"
Each question drips with sly menace. Clearly, Batman needs to get out of here, and back to what's important: restoring order in a city overrun with madmen, and finding out why he's suddenly got a price on his head."
"Madness Returns:
While were comforted by evidence that Origins' gameplay will be as intuitive as previous Arkhams', it's something Holmes says about the Mad Hatter that convinces us he knows what he's doing.
'Mad Hatter is a character we loved in Arkham City,' he explains, 'We loved his presence, and we really wanted to do more with him. When we realized we wanted to bring him back, we also realized that part of the core experience of the Arkham franchise is its abstract [encounters]. It's not just literally walking into a room with a bunch of thugs who are doing some sort of deal and knocking them out. It's also these inner journeys, where you're mixing a little bit of what Batman's mind is with a little bit of what this villain is, and how he might get inside Batman's head.
'Whereas Scarecrow in Arkham Asylum was this fear-driven experience, the Mad Hatter is more of a psychotropic experience. It's more psychedelic, it's a little more trippy,' Holmes tells us.
"Trippy" definitely describes the feeling of watching thugs storm out of a mirror to fight Batman, or of using the Batclaw to latch onto giant flatware to pull a raft slowly across a rushing river of tea (poured from massive, floating teapots). It's also an apt adjective for running across a bridge of floating cards while a menacing pendulum slashes them away behind you. Wonderland may be a hallucination, but it's a lengthy, involved one, and the Hatter taunts us all the way through. It's only when Batman reaches a clocktower that our nemesis starts to get agitated, and as Bats climbs it- by creating tightropes with the new Remote Claw and grappling up to them- our enemy's taunts turn to cries of outrage.
As Batman summits the tower and awakens, Hatter stares at him, holding a knife to "Alice's" throat. As the villain whines about his ruined party, our hero hurls a batarang, which seems to miss- only to curve around and smack the Hatter in the back of the head.
Later, Batman tries to console the kidnapped girl. "Don't worry, you're safe now," he assures her. "The police are on their way. Everything's going to be all right."
She pauses between sobs and looks up at him. "It won't be," she says. Batman walks away, back out into the night and the snow. She's not the only one who needs rescuing tonight."
