On a routine trip returning The Joker to Arkham Asylum, the Batman himself must deal with traps set within its inner sanctums, purposely set by the now escaped Joker, along with the rest of his rogues' gallery that are now free within the premises.
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Take a proper look at the 'patient' photos plastered around the asylum walls and you'll notice a few familiar faces - they're actually members of the Rocksteady dev team. There's even a line of thug dialogue that name-drops art director David Hego directly, joking about his 'thing for blades.' Nice bit of self-insertion from the studio.
After you free Cash and Dr Kellerman from the laughing gas trap, look back through the glass into the room they were held in. Rocksteady snuck in a not-so-subtle nod to the much-maligned 1997 Batman & Robin film here, poking fun at one of the franchise's lowest points at the time.
Once you've got the Explosive Gel and made your way to the Arkham Mansion, there's a specific wall in Warden Sharp's office that can be blown open. Inside is a hidden room stuffed with blueprints for a walled-off section of North Gotham, complete with Sharp's official stamp - basically a sneak peek at Arkham City a full game before it existed.
There's a mannequin in the Visitor Center that looks harmless enough at first glance. Hang around and turn away for a bit, though, and its arms will have moved when you look back. It's never explained in the moment, but by the end of the game it's pretty clear who was hiding in plain sight the whole time.
In Intensive Treatment you can find the old holding area for Killer Croc, security collars and all. One of the lockers nearby has a photo of Croc's hand taped to it, along with a scrawled warning to keep your mitts off. Small detail, but it does a lot to sell how much everyone at Arkham fears the guy.
As the credits wrap up, there's a short scene of the Batwing heading back to Gotham while a crate of Titan formula bobs in the water below Arkham. An arm reaches out to grab it - but whose arm you get seems totally random. Sometimes it's Killer Croc, sometimes Scarecrow, sometimes Bane, and nobody's quite pinned down what decides it.
Die at the wrong moment and one of the Game Over screens shows Bane snapping Batman over his knee. It's a direct lift from the iconic 'broken bat' scene in the Knightfall comics, and a genuinely nasty little punishment for messing up the fight.
Down in the grim, waterlogged Underside area, there's a creepy little detail easy to miss entirely: a doll's head sitting under a loose floorboard. No explanation given, just one more unsettling prop dropped into an already unsettling place.
Keep an eye on the newspaper clippings scattered through the Medical Facility and you'll spot one with the headline 'Firefly Escapes Gotham On High Alert.' He never shows up in person, but it's a fun way of hinting that the rest of Gotham's rogues' gallery is still out there causing chaos.
Over in the Penitentiary there's a GCPD wanted poster for Prometheus, a fairly obscure DC villain who never gets a proper appearance in the game. It's the sort of reference that only die-hard comic readers were ever going to catch on a first playthrough.
