Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!

Earlier this month, I fitfully started Batman: Arkham Knight as part of a yearlong writing project. As the final game to the Arkham Trilogy (give or take the probably underrated Batman: Arkham Origins), you can see it as this massive culmination that takes every image, every problem, every poor trend and projects it out like a radio wave. And one of the biggest trends it kickstarted was Detective Mode. At any point in these games, you can tap a button to let Batman see the world like an airport security monitor. Enemies are just their skeletal structure, objects you can interact with glow, and there are obvious signs telling you where to go and what to do. In the first two Arkham games, it was the only way to solve several puzzles despite effectively just giving you a solution. And it spread to other games and series, most notably The Witcher.

Now, there are genuinely good things to come out of this. For one thing, the Arkham games are deliberately and enjoyably shallow, so this moves the process along to get to the rest of the game. Detective vision also gives you that kind of informational dominance you expect from Batman, and it lets you be more predatory and less passive in a stealth mode that is all about stalking bad guys. And then there’s my favorite part, which is that some guards can actually manipulate this mode, cutting that informational dominance and forcing you to pick them off first. But most of the time, it is just kind of a bland “here’s what you need to know” page. It’s common for players to spend most of the game with the mode on and ignore all those pretty graphics.

Today’s prompt is all about Detective Mode – or Witcher Sense, or Aloy’s Focus, or any other version of this. What’s your take? Because I get the sense that the trope is in an uncomfortable spot where a lot of gamers don’t like it but rely on it constantly. Myself, I don’t think it’s bad; I’m keen on having different depictions of sense and perception. My only problem is when they’re required for otherwise boring puzzles, or when they don’t have a “downside” other than making the world look dull, or when they’re used more to paper over how confusing a Triple-A level can look. At their worst, it feels like they’re smoothing out the game a bit too much.

And, whether in crummy X-ray vision or otherwise, what did you play this weekend?