For Fans of Batman Arkham

Arkham City is the bigger game. Arkham Knight is the most ambitious. But the original Asylum, confined to a single island full of madmen, has a tightness the sequels never quite recaptured. It understood that a smaller stage makes every encounter matter more. The Joker's plan unravelling room by room, Hugo Strange lurking in the margins, Scarecrow's nightmare sequences arriving without warning: the 2009 game remains the cleanest argument for why this IP belongs in interactive form.

Every Joker performance owes something to Mark Hamill: the giggle that turns to venom in half a second, the warmth that makes him briefly convincing as a friend. He voiced the character in Batman: The Animated Series from 1992 and returned for all four Arkham games. Hearing him deliver the game-ending monologue in Arkham City is one of the great villain moments in any medium. Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger both made the character work on film; Hamill made him human.

Matt Reeves' The Batman stripped out the blockbuster spectacle and replaced it with a detective procedural shot in permanent rain. Robert Pattinson's Bruce Wayne is a genuine obsessive, not a playboy who moonlights as a hero. The film's Gotham is the closest any movie has come to the oppressive city of Arkham Knight: a place so rotten it threatens to swallow the hero whole. If the Arkham games made you want a Batman who actually solves crimes, this is the film you have been waiting for.

Dishonored gives you a different set of powers but the same fundamental choice: be a ghost or be a monster. The stealth system rewards patience and observation in a way that feels directly descended from Arkham's predator rooms. Its port city of Dunwall is every bit as architecturally detailed as Gotham, and its villain roster is almost as theatrical. If the Arkham games gave you an appetite for navigating corrupt cities and picking your targets from the shadows, Dishonored feeds it.