Warning: This article contains potentially disturbing and graphic content.
We recently reviewed Telltale Games" Batman: The Enemy Within"s second episode, The Pact, claiming it to be a relatively uneventful episode compared to the season premiere. However, one minor detail that went unnoticed by many (including ourselves) has caused a lot of public backlash among gamers.
During one dialog-based sequence of The Pact, an image is shown on the Batcomputer, depicting the aftermath of Harley Quinn"s assault on Gotham Brokerage. The controversial image in question illustrated two guards lying dead in front of an open vault, as can be seen below:
As some eagle-eyed gamers on Twitter noticed, the "guard" prominently featured in the forefront of the image is actually from a cropped screenshot of the deceased Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, who was assassinated by an off-duty Turkish policeman at an art gallery in the city of Ankara back in 2016. The original image can be seen below (Warning: Potentially graphic image):
Following public backlash and criticism from several media outlets, Telltale Games finally provided a statement, saying that:
We regret this incident occurred, and we are taking appropriate action internally to ensure that we continue to maintain our high standards in Production and Quality Assurance.
Now it appears that the developer has pushed out a patch for the game on various platforms, which removes Karlov"s body from the scene by cropping it out. The new image can be viewed below:
Although Telltale Games" prompt response must be appreciated, it certainly raises questions regarding the QA testing of games, and as to how such a public and disturbing image made it to the final version of the game. It"s possible that an artist wasn"t aware of the context of the image and decided to use it, but Telltale understandably hasn"t provided an explanation concerning the matter.
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