Gotham Knights Diaries Part Nine

This is my exploration of Gotham Knights where I will chronicle my playthrough like a text-based Let’s Play. I’ll point out all of the Easter Eggs that I can spot in the footnotes at the end of each part. Now let’s continue Gotham Knights…

With Harley Quinn giving away some kind of implants, and Mister Freeze working on a “machine”, I had to decide on my next steps…

Barbara had an email from Frankie Charles asking to hang out, one from Tim asking if his weekend AI class reading list was rubbish, and one to Jason Todd telling him to read The Endless series of books. Which he had already purchased…

Crafting and equipping a Cryogenic Suit, Linked Tonfa, and Linked Batarangs, I then upgraded with Elite Beatdown and decided to go on patrol. During this section, I stopped an Illegal Hack, an Organ Trafficking, a Kidnapping in Progress, and completed a Crime Scene Investigation. I also resolved a large number of crimes of opportunity, unlocked four of Batman’s secret caches, and found some Batarangs.

Heading over to Detective Montoya’s gazebo in Old Gotham, where she rewarded me with crafting materials and asked me to save more police, as well as stop eight premeditated crimes. Since Red Hood wanted us to find some pages from a book about the Court of Owls called Historia Strigidae, I set off for Bristol. In the graveyard close to Arkham Asylum, a headstone bore the mark of the Court, and upon further inspection I found a columbaria with the same mark, and around the corner, another one with the first of 42 pages from the book.

After securing the nearby Fast Travel point, I stopped some crimes, then unlocked Fast Travel in Gotham Heights. That one happened to be close to someone calling themselves Madame Palomares, who told me about The Watch, a group who wanted real change in Gotham City. They had worked with Batman, who had told them to reach out to the Gotham Knights if he ever went dark “for this long”, and they wanted to work with us.

With them contacted, I headed for the West End to unlock the Fast Travel point… and came across the mugger without a face! Upon knocking them out, I picked up a sample of clay and they melted… Since there were several other nearby red marks on my HUD, I went to them and encountered more clay muggers, though they didn’t speak, only making guttural noises. Soon enough, I had five clay samples and made a note to analyse them at Belfry.

Instead, I went to see Lucius Fox so that he could give me some materials, then glided down to Jada Thompkins. When she asked where Batman was, as he owed her a coffee, she understood from the vague reply that she was never getting it, and gave her condolences. She offered to give me crafting resources in exchange for stopping two Organ Traffickings and helping a Witness Under Attack (at normal or higher).

After beating up some Freaks in an underground hideout, I went to Tricorner Island to spoil “Dr. Q”’s laboratory, which simply involved beating up 10 Freaks in a building known as the Armory. Then, it was finally time to find out what the owl key opened, which I found at the top of the Gotham Gazette building. Part of the wall glowed green when I approached it, and the Court of Owls crest appeared as the wall split apart to allow me access.

The chamber inside was much larger than it needed to be, given that there were only a few items inside. A box with a slot, a table, some documents, a map, and some sharp implements, along with bookcases and paintings. Investigating, I found evidence that the Court was behind the death of Alexander Moreno, an unsolved case related to a judge who coincidentally had to leave a trial after her brother was killed.

A token on the map indicated that the Court was ordering a purge of an area east of Gotham River — the Chelsea Tunnel. Alfred reported that construction had been shut down when the site was declared unsafe, which was clearly a false story given what we now knew. To my surprise, I exited the chamber without incident, and rather than head for the tunnel, I went to the Saul Erdel Planetarium in Robinson Park. A deal was going down, and if I wanted to find and capture Harley Quinn I had to put a stop to it.

Upon arrival, I found the Freaks buying tech from the Regulators. Also, they had made a right mess of the exhibits which just isn’t cool. Much to my surprise, I cleared out half of the goons without being spotted, making things a little easier for myself. Once the area was cleared out, I went to the Chelsea Tunnel.

It soon became clear that construction was stopped because they hit an existing underground tunnel. The smart money said that it was a Court of Owls tunnel, but I went down to check it out only to find a nearly dead phone with the message “It’s stalking me… I don’t think it’s human.” After some platforming, I landed in a chamber with a blood trail, but before I could investigate it, I was attacked by something not quite human. It was able to avoid my normal attacks, but luckily it seemed vulnerable to ranged ones, and was soon unconscious. It was human-shaped, but with emaciated flesh on its arms and legs, its feet had two clawed toes plus a claw on the back, and it wore a mask obviously meant to evoke an owl. A scan of it labelled it as Feral Talon Veteran…

Following the tunnel I reached a large, open area with several platforms within grapple distance, though I was curious how the Talon would have navigated it, presumably going the long way around as it could evidently climb the rock walls. After some more exploring I was attacked by more Talons, though these ones weren’t Veterans, and so fell more easily. I grappled up to an old mining platform and found a wall marked for taking core samples, and there was a bunch of equipment for analysing them.

Heading into a door labelled as the extraction room, I actually had to follow some signs to reach it. The equipment was much more up-to-date than the rest of the facility had been so far, and I checked it all out. A mining log dating back to 1841 suggested that the mine had been drying up since 1904, and in 2016 had finally done so. A box of core samples had some dated to 1847, but nothing that told me what they were actually mining. Luckily, on the table next to the Core Extraction device was one core sample with notes to the effect of “use sulphuric acid” and mentioning “Project Polias”. Using the acid, I gained a sample of something called dionesium.

Making for the exit and an elevator back to the surface, the Voice of the Court appeared in a nearby control room. They claimed that the Court were the real protectors of Gotham, and that owls eat bats, then detonated some explosives to flood the mine while Talons attacked me! After fighting a bunch of them I got off of the elevator just before it crashed into the rising water, then grappled and climbed up to the control room while dodging Talons. Running through a hatch, Batgirl closed it behind her, leaving at least six pursuing Talons to drown in the rushing water — before an explosion made sure that they were dead.

Choosing not to dwell on the fact that those people were definitely dead because I closed the door instead of keeping running, I grappled up to a large pipe which gave way to some kind of generator room. High above were some stairs, so I grappled up and grabbed a chest before finally reaching the surface. Communication with Belfry was reestablished, but before I could go into too much detail the signal was hacked…

Talia al Ghul told me to find her, then hung up on me. So, since I could see some of Batman’s hidden caches on the map, I headed to North Gotham instead. Then, of course, I went to see Talia who knew about the Court of Owls and explained that it was the corruption that the League of Shadows had longed to remove from the city. It sure would have been nice of them to tell Batman about them, then…

Since the dionesium looked like fluid from a Lazarus Pit, Talia went on to explain that it was a contaminated extract. It didn’t fully bring the dead back to life, but it was perfect for creating Talons, assassins that could be fully controlled and had no will of their own. Before leaping off of the building and disappearing in a cloud of smoke, Talia warned that we should root out the Court, before the League took matters into their own hands…

Returning to Belfry, my patrol summary said that I had stopped seven crimes, completed six bonus objectives, and rescued seven cops and nine citizens. That involved defeating 95 enemies, 18 of which were silent takedowns…

FOOTNOTES

Frankie Charles was another of Barbara Gordon’s roommates.
Strigidae is the name for the high priests of Barbatos, the “Bat God”.
Palomares could, at a stretch, be a reference to Palomaris, a planet that appeared in a tie-in to the DC comics event Crisis on Infinite Earths? Or just named after the Spanish coastal town.
Gotham Gazette has been around almost as long as Batman, and to its credit the game seems to have copied the building design from its few comic appearances. It’s usually the paper itself or inside of the building that we see.
Saul Erdel (originally Mark Erdel) was the scientist who mistakenly teleported superhero Martian Manhunter from Mars to Earth, inadvertently saving his life.
Dionesium is a thing from the comics, but I don’t want to spoil the game.