“Batman: Arkham Asylum”
Genre: Stealth, action-adventure
Developer: Rocksteady
Publisher: Warner Bros., DC Comics
Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
ESRB rating: “T” for Teen
Price: $59.99
Grade: B

The Caped Crusader and Gotham’s Arkham Asylum have similar qualities: Both are dark, dangerous and depressing.

So it feels right to see CC skulking around the state-sponsored can of mixed nuts. If not for a streak of morality running beneath his cape, Batman might be an inmate, not a visitor.

That’s why “Batman: Arkham Asylum” makes such a good first impression: It is the perfect mix of character and environment — a sad man in costume roaming the only place where he’s saner than everyone else, but just barely.

Up to now, Batman has been a punching bag for public opinion, viewed as a hero one moment and a menace the next. Out in the open, mixing with society, Batman has restricted himself to darting through the shadows that fill the space between the supposedly sane among us; in Arkham Asylum, nobody is sane and shadows envelop everything.

Worse, this dumping ground for the demented is a cheerless place — the bane of a prankster’s existence. Thus, once Joker enters Arkham’s custody, courtesy of the Dark Knight, he shakes off the shackles and sets upon rearranging the furniture. Batman learns too late his dispatch was part of a broader plot by Joker to lace Gotham with terror; the rest of the game, he slashes through the asylum’s shadows and residents attempting to learn what went wrong.

If this sounds anticlimactic, well, blame it on “Arkham Asylum” suffering from a foregone conclusion. Until that arrives, players ride Batman’s shoulder through the asylum’s artfully rendered despair like grade schoolers through a haunted house on Halloween.

Better then that players try to enjoy the voyage and not concern themselves with reaching a destination. Batman’s “wonderful toys,” in the Joker’s famous words, and his martial-arts skills inspire plenty of action for fight fans, and the “detective mode” of sorts that Batman drops into to parse clues pointing to the Joker’s motives may entice puzzle lovers in the audience. Together though, the fighting and puzzle-solving are disjointed — too much of one interfering with the enjoyment of the other.

Early reviews have put “Arkham Asylum” on a level with titles such as “Dead Space” and “BioShock,” but those comparisons are forced at best. The enemies in “Arkham Asylum” are persistent and cunning, just not all that dreadful or horrifying. And Batman brings far more to the game than his rivals — a high-tech, X-ray-enabled cowl and access to a Batcave annex, among other things. At no moment in “Arkham Asylum” does the player feel, as he probably did in “BioShock,” that he may have taken a wrong and irrevocable turn.

Granted, “Arkham Asylum” is where Batman should have gone long before now, but as an inmate instead of an interloper. One can only imagine how much more fun the game would be if the Dark Knight didn’t have his cowl and cape handy.