Batman: The Telltale Series concludes next week (update)

The finale of Batman: The Telltale Series will arrive Dec. 13, publisher Telltale Games announced today.

Here’s the synopsis from Telltale for “City of Light,” the fifth and final episode of the series’ first season:

In Episode 5, the leader of the Children of Arkham prepares to execute the final act of a plan to destroy the Wayne family name, and the people closest to you are in their path of vengeance. Can Batman’s ultimate secret be kept — his very identity — when it is causing chaos and death in Gotham? The fate of the Wayne family and of the city itself rests on your choices. What will you do? How far will you go? Which mask will you wear?

Telltale noted that the finale will begin in “very different places” depending on the choice that players made at the end of the fourth episode.

In addition to revealing the finale’s release date, Telltale announced that “Realm of Shadows,” the first episode of Batman: The Telltale Series, is now free on Steam for Windows PC. If players want to upgrade to the full game, they can pay $24.99 for the season pass.

Last week, Telltale released a massive patch for the Steam version that was meant to expand support for different PC setups, improve performance and add configuration options. Steam users have been giving the PC version poor reviews since the first episode launched in early August, criticizing the game’s abysmal performance on the platform.

Telltale released a patch at the time in an attempt to fix that issue, but other problems exist today, four months later. In numerous comments on the Steam post announcing the Dec. 2 patch, players have been complaining about post-update issues as serious as being unable to launch the game.

“Just downloaded update for demo Episode 1 and now it won’t even launch,” wrote Steam user colinumbach yesterday. “Had no problem running game before this update.”

We’ve reached out to Telltale for more details, and will update this article with any information we receive.

Batman: The Telltale Series is available on Android, iOS, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. For more, you can read our reviews of the first four episodes.

Update: A representative for Telltale Games told Polygon that the aforementioned issue with Batman: The Telltale Series apply only to the free first episode, not the full game — the two products are listed separately on Steam. The spokesperson added that Telltale is patching the free episode today to fix the problem with the game not booting up properly.