At E3 this year, Telltale Games presented the first thirty minutes of it’s next game BATMAN – The Telltale Series. The demo was from the first episode in the five episode series.

NOTE: There will be minor SPOILERS ahead. If you don’t want to know about the first scenes in the game and the characters involved in those scenes, then turn back now.

The game starts off with a robbery at City Hall where a group of thugs in red masks with white skulls painted on them break into the building to steal a data drive. They trip an alarm and Batman handily dispatches them one by one. Throughout the action there are prompts on the screen to complete actions like press left, A, X, etc. These are Quick Time Events or QTEs. Once a player hits the correct buttons on screen, Batman will perform those moves.

Batman has a four tiered bar at the bottom of the screen in major fights and every time a player hits the correct set of buttons in a section of the fight, a piece of the tier fills up. Once the tier is full, players can end the fight with a finishing move. The developer said that the Batman bar is a way for players to get to satisfying finishing moves, but if they fail the QTE, the fight will either reset or the story will continue without the use of a finishing move.

Once Batman dispatches the thugs, Catwoman appears and proceeds to steal the data drive. After a lengthy fight and dialogue sequence, Batman gets the drive back from Catwoman. Though he doesn’t get out of the fight without a couple of scratches. In this first section of the game Commissioner Gordon makes an appearance, but he doesn’t seem to show any recognition of Batman as a positive influence in the city.

Back at the Mansion, Bruce Wayne gets ready for a Harvey Dent fundraiser. Bruce meets Harvey and they mingle throughout the crowd. Harvey is a little naive in this interpretation of Batman and the dialogue prompts at the political dinner were intriguing. While Bruce and Harvey make the rounds Carmine Falcone crashes the party. The mob boss wants to talk to Bruce and players will have to make the decision on how to react to Falcone’s pitch.

The first thirty minutes of Telltale’s demo showed a nice balance between both the Batman and Bruce sides of the story. The developers said that they have 75 years of comic lore to pull from and even though players may think they know where the story is headed the developer will turn it on its head.

Throughout the game Telltale said that they will try to keep a balance of playing as Batman and as Bruce Wayne. The decisions players choose as Bruce will affect the story sections of Batman and the Batman decisions will affect Bruce. The developers even said that players will be able to choose to tackle certain parts of the game as Bruce Wayne or as Batman. Of course those decisions will affect how the story plays out.

If the first thirty minutes of the game were any indication of Telltale’s take on Batman, fans of the Caped Crusader can start to get excited for the journey Telltale will take them on.

Telltale’ first episode of BATMAN – The Telltale Series launches later this summer on consoles and PC.