You would have to have been living in some sort of cave over the last few years to be unaware of the phenomenal success of Rocksteady’s Batman games. The video game developer has gone from strength to strength and now Batman fans have a packed art book to chronicle Rocksteady’s journey through the Arkham Asylum/City/Knight trilogy.

This is clearly a labour of love; most of the pages are covered with incredibly detailed spreads of concept art and finished set pieces from the games. We were particularly taken with the various pictures of Harley Quinn (not that we’re into that or anything…) and pretty much anything featuring Gotham City’s skyline. You can say what you like about the breed of person it produces, but the city always looks great. As an aside, we love that some of the notes on the concept art have retained the original spelling errors. What a way to convey the real and imperfect process of game development.

If we did have one grievance, it’s that there’s not really a lot in the way of written content. What’s there on the page is good, yes (and it must be said that author Daniel Wallace does a great job with the amount of text he had to work with), but we can’t help but feel that the scarcity of written passages (the book is about 80% images) has deprived us of a lot of stories about the trilogy’s development. There’s only so much that concept art can tell you.

But frankly, if you’re a Batman fan then you’ve probably already made up your mind. Pretty much any fan of the franchise at large is going to be salivating over this, and when we open the book to any one of the superb images within it’s hard to blame them. If Batman had this book, he’d never leave the cave.

THE ART OF ROCKSTEADY’S BATMAN / AUTHOR: DANIEL WALLACE / PUBLISHER: ABRAMS BOOKS / RELEASE DATE: JULY 7TH