The folks at Telltale Games have finally announced their highly-anticipated finale for Batman: The Enemy Within, due out March 27. Episode 5, titled “Same Stitch”, will not only conclude the game’s storylines and (hopefully) tie up all of the loose ends, it will also be the largest and most complex episode of any Telltale game ever.
The description in a press release sent out today explains:
“What would you choose: a friend whose unhinged approach to justice turns your allies against you, or a sworn enemy who will stop at nothing to see you suffer as your city burns? Based on the relationship you’ve built with John Doe, you’ll see one of two very different stories play out. So what’ll it be, Bruce: friend…or foe?”
As we can see, the choices made by the player over the course of the entire game up to this point will determine which story he or she will get to experience, as well as which version of John Doe a.k.a. The Joker they’ll be dealing with. If you’ve been pushing back and butting heads with your clowny adversary all along, then you’ll encounter the familiar face of a villainous Joker who seeks to destroy you and everything you love. But, if you’ve chosen instead to cooperate and pal around with your green-haired partner, then you’ll be teaming up with a unique vigilante Joker that’s quite unlike any other version of the character seen in a DC property before.
Batman: The Enemy Within lead writer James Windeler calls Same Stitch “the most ambitious piece of content Telltale has ever produced”. While the development team had to adjust some of their processes to accommodate the immense scale of the project, they stayed true to the Telltale philosophy of letting players’ choices sculpt the story, delivering on the season’s central promise of letting players “craft their own Joker.”
According to Telltale, Same Stitch contains three and a half hours of content spread across two completely distinct storylines that share, at most, only three overlapping scenes. Within each of these storylines there are even more and more variations, based both on decisions from earlier in the game as well as decisions made within the episode, making it the “branchiest” episode of any Telltale game to date. The episode tops out at a total of over 4,500 lines of dialogue across 38 characters, yielding a script larger than the combined scripts of the entire Dark Knight film trilogy.
Episode five of Batman: The Enemy Within, “Same Stitch”, launches March 27 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, and mobile.