Batman: Arkham Asylum was released last week on the PS3 and Xbox 360 platforms to acclaim that varied in tone from generalized high praise (“Best superhero game ever made” — Fidgit.com) to adorable hysterics (“It will birth you anew in its magnificence” — Joystiq). The praise is totally justified, too. Batman: AA is every bit as good as its boosters declare and it’s easily the best video game released so far this year, tights-clad protagonist or not. As if that weren’t enough, it’s also the purest expression of the grumpy Man-Bat seen yet in a videogame, displaying the troubled Mr. Wayne’s no-nonsense, no-prisoners attitude in everything from his movements to the tools he uses to go about his brutal work. The one area where the game doesn’t sustain the pants-soaking hyperbole that’s been heaped upon it, though, is the writing. Batman: AA might just be the best-designed, worst-written triple-A title ever made.

Except that it isn’t the storytelling that suffers. The script, penned by comics and DC Animated Universe veteran Paul Dini, oscillates between passable comic book shlock and risible melodramatic cliché and his rendering of the Dark Knight is a little too generic and way too PG-rated to be memorable. But the game itself, through all its little anecdote-creating set pieces and thoughtfully crafted challenges, forces the player to behave like Batman, to believe they are a cranky billionaire-ninja wearing bat-themed pyjamas in a way that even Eisner Award-winning dialogue never could. Though the most complex prose that appears in these sequences is the fearful, incoherent blubbering of the game’s many henchmen, they communicate as much information about character and atmosphere as any comic book, novel or film.

For this reason, Batman: AA is a fascinating example of gaming’s adolescence as a medium, a perfect halfway point between the toys of yesteryear and the populist literature of tomorrow. It proves that facility for storytelling in one medium absolutely doesn’t translate to another — especially one with such an esoteric vocabulary as games — and demonstrates the absurdity of the current trend in gaming development of trying to borrow prestige from the more “grownup” media. As soon as developers realize that theirs should be the names their audience associates with the quality of their games’ storytelling, gaming may start to move out of its awkward, hormonal puberty and into sure-footed cultural relevance.

Also, there’s a tremendous amount of awesome face-punching. Baby steps.