If you told a comic book nerd like me that you love Batman, I might ask, "Which era?" Since his debut, nearly 90 years ago, the Dark Knight's story has had so many chapters and retellings that he's become a cultural symbol of core themes and elements, ready to be remixed into new versions for TV, film, audio drama, games and more. 

The latest of these reinterprets the Caped Crusader's adventures using the most famous building blocks in the world. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is undoubtedly a family-friendly game, with lighthearted action and slapstick gags -- but even if it doesn't have, say, the gritty violence of Frank Miller's seminal The Dark Knight Returns, I got the sense that Traveller's Tales, the game's British developer, treats the character's legacy seriously. 

I asked Jonathan Smith, strategic director and head of the development team at TT Games (the studio's parent company), what makes a Batman game. "The extraordinary story that you are connected to when you step into the shoes of the Dark Knight that is a lesson in transforming trauma into justice," he says.

It comes off a little arch for someone leading a kid-friendly Lego game, but it does reflect the tone of the newest Lego Batman game, which I got to play for a few hours at a preview in Los Angeles. There's playful joy in the colorful world of the Caped Crusader and some goofy Lego moments, true. But the game has a conventional narrative riddled (sorry) with references to Batman storylines and characters over the decades, a fidelity to the hero's motivations across his many variations. 

The reverence is no surprise for Traveller's Tales, which has been making video game versions of major media since its inception in the early 1990s. Just over 20 years ago, it carved out a niche by adapting popular properties into Lego games, starting with Lego Star Wars in 2005. It's fitting that Traveller's Tales' most recent title before Legacy of the Dark Knight was 2022's Star Wars Lego: The Skywalker Saga, an ambitious revisiting of the sci-fi series that taught the developers plenty, Smith says.

For its next take on Batman, Traveller's Tales ramped up its combat system to reflect Batman's competency in hand-to-hand fighting. As I played, I got the sense that the developers had taken serious inspiration from the Batman Arkham games from Rocksteady Studios, cousin to TT Games under the Warner Bros. Games umbrella. In Arkham games, players control an agile Dark Knight, fighting many foes at once. Smith confirmed that they're a major influence on Legacy of the Dark Knight. Despite the cutesy Lego visuals, combat is fluid and responsive, with well-timed counters to enemy attacks and takedowns.

Combat isn't the only thing that feels inspired by the Arkham games, as players will spend plenty of time free-roaming around an expansive Gotham City filled with side missions and tasks to complete.

"[We built] a Gotham City that was truly immersive, rich, dense, full of surprises, [which is] fun to traverse, a real playground," Smith says. It "was the second progression from what we'd started with Lego Star Wars," he adds.

What Lego brings to Batman, and vice versa

It wouldn't be a Lego game if you didn't build something, though in the segments I played, this was a limited and occasional event -- pauses between fights to assemble a battering ram to break down a vault door, say. The Lego influence in Legacy of the Dark Knight is more broad.

"A Lego world can't help but be fun, and the drama and the darkness is transformed when it enters that world. It still has power; it still has meaning," Smith says. "It's not a joke, a Lego world. You're still going on this journey. Bruce still loses his parents. There's still crime in Gotham City."

And there's still the physics of Lego: In the open-world segments, as you roam around the streets of Gotham, summoning the Batmobile builds it around you, brick by brick. For anyone who's put together their own sets of the iconic blocks, there's a sensory delight in seeing and hearing the pieces come together or clatter apart. And pardon the obvious metaphor, but if you're crafting a story made of many different iterations of a character, assembling it through Lego means accepting that some parts may clash in fun ways.

"It's the multitudes of Batman that gave us so much delight in the creative process -- sifting, comparing, discriminating, arguing about favorites," Smith says. "The more time we spent in that process, the more we came to perhaps rediscover some things we might have forgotten about or create new contrasts and juxtapositions ... that could now be all brought together through the binding agent of this Lego sensibility." 

Adapting Batman's decades of stories

The game adapts stories from Batman films, TV shows and comics, aligning them in a singular narrative. The introductory cinematic I saw shows a young Bruce Wayne confronting crime boss Carmine Falcone before heading abroad to train with the League of Shadows, just like in Batman Begins. Skipping ahead in the game, the first segment I played had Batman return to confront Falcone in his bar, the Iceberg Lounge, though this time he fought his way through to confront the mobster like in the hero's most recent film, The Batman.

"You'll see sections of Gotham as you unlock it. You'll see cinematic sequences as you move from chapter to chapter and mission environments that progressively reference the Tim Burton movie, Batman Returns, the Schumacher movies and beyond as well," Smith says. "Taking in comic book storylines, both relatively well-known like Nightfall, and more obscure perhaps like The Long Halloween."

Those are some of the best-known Batman stories across the character's history, and it's impossible to tell from my preview how the game will blend those moments into its own narrative. But what I saw walked a tight line between fidelity and avoiding grimness.

The second section I played featured Dick Grayson, pre-Robin, when he was tumbling through the air with his acrobat family and teaming up with Batman to foil Two-Face's bombing plan. His parents don't die tragically in this moment -- but at some point, they might, as Grayson is later seen as a proper ward of Bruce Wayne ahead of the third preview portion (a boss fight against Poison Ivy and her mutated snapdragon plant monster, which was tougher than I expected).

If the game can weave these seminal Batman beats into its own new version of the Bat-mythos rather than simply string the references together, it'll be stronger for it. But there are lots (and lots and lots) of references I spotted anyway. The game has a cavalcade of cosmetics, including outfits from different eras (such as the baffling Zur-En-Arrh) and Batmobiles across the films and TV shows. You'll earn these through missions, but you can also buy others using in-game (not microtransaction) currency from the impish Bat-Mite. 

There are deeper cuts in the game from the near-century of Batman stories, Smith told me. I don't believe pilfering the archive for nigh-forgotten elements is a guarantee of quality, but it does suggest the team did its research -- and that the developers have their favorites.

"When I first saw Tim Burton's 1989 movie, I was sort of blown away by the style, the design, the verve, the cheekiness of it," Smith says. "And the idea that now we would be able to secure Prince's Partyman soundtrack and play it over a Lego version of the Joker defacing the artwork in the Flugelheim Museum, which is truly for me an iconic sequence, is a dream come true."

That's not the last of the Batman moments reenvisioned in bricks. My preview finished with a cinematic Lego-ified version of the Batman: The Animated Series intro that nerds of a certain vintage have committed to memory. Not all of the references will land with every player, but there's probably a vintage costume, character or scene that will bring back memories.

"That's part of what we're doing, we're both reminding people of the richness of this story, but maybe we're also bringing some of it back out of the archives as well," Smith says. "There's so much there to discover."

Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, starting at $70, comes out May 22 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, PC and Nintendo Switch 2.