Mechanics

There are 70 riddles in Arkham City, spread across eight districts, and they are 70 of the Riddler's 440 total challenges. You need 400 of those 440 to free the last hostage and finish the Enigma Conundrum, which means you do not need every riddle specifically. You need enough of everything.

This page sorts them by what is stopping you rather than by district, because you already know which district you are in. What the map never tells you is why the riddle you are staring at will not solve. There are four answers to that, and they come in the order you can clear them: nothing at all, a vantage point, a gadget, or a story beat you have not hit yet.

How riddles actually work

A riddle is not a trophy. Trophies are objects you pick up and they live in our collectibles guide. A riddle is an environmental scan: the answer is something already in the world, and solving it means pointing Detective Mode at the right object. It can be a landmark, a photograph, an item on the floor, or a question mark you have to assemble out of fragments by standing in exactly one place.

Riddles appear in your menu the moment you enter a district, even if you are only gliding over it. Their locations come from interrogating the highlighted Riddler informants scattered through each area, so a district's list will look impossible until you start beating answers out of people.

The whole thing starts after the Penguin mission at the GCPD. A green question mark banner appears around the Church, and going inside triggers your first video call with the Riddler, who has taken a medical team hostage. That call opens the Enigma Conundrum, and our Riddler Challenges guide walks the Enigma Conundrum from that call onwards.

Every district's riddle load

Park Row alone is more than a fifth of the total, and the Subway is five riddles you can finish in one visit. If you want early progress, start at the bottom of that table and work up.

Tier 1: the free scans

The clear majority of the 70 need nothing but the right object in frame, and the reason people struggle with them is that they are looking for something hidden. They are not hidden. They are set dressing.

What a free scan riddle looks like

The answer is almost always signage. A Catwoman Must Die sign, the Baudelaire flower shop, Harvey Dent's campaign office, a film poster for The Terror starring Basil Karlo, a graffiti wall calling Solomon Grundy the man who cheats death, a Visit SANTA PRISCA travel poster, the Krank Co. Toys frontage. If you retrain yourself to read the environment as advertising rather than as scenery, most of the list opens up.

The oddities, where the answer is a person or an object

A minority break that pattern, and they are the ones players hunt longest, because they keep scanning walls looking for a sign. In Park Row alone, one riddle wants a prisoner down in the courthouse cellars, one wants a display case of gavels and guns, one wants a photograph of Aaron Cash and his family in a cubby inside the Church Medical Center, and one wants the pipe organ at the very back of that same building. Wonder City has a globe and an old drawing of Gotham.

None of those glow, none of them are behind anything, and all of them are easy to walk past twice.

Tier 2: the eight question marks

One clue appears verbatim in every single district: "This question can only be answered from an unusual perspective. Can you get yourself there?" There are eight of them, one per district, and they are all the same puzzle wearing eight different sets of scenery.

The mechanic is always identical. A green question mark is painted across a surface in pieces, visible only in Detective Mode, and there is exactly one position from which the fragments line up into a complete symbol with the dot underneath. Your job is to find that position. Once you know that, these stop being eight separate problems.

The Bowery's is the one that catches people, because the door on the way to it needs a hacked password. It is INTERROGATION.

Tier 3: the gadget gates

Five districts have riddles that simply cannot be attempted without a specific piece of kit. Sorted by gadget rather than by map, so you can plan one sweep instead of eight visits.

The practical read is that Freeze Blast, Explosive Gel and the Line Launcher each unlock exactly one riddle, so none of them is worth a special trip on its own. The Remote Electrical Charge is the exception, because it opens riddles in two districts and is also the only tool that destroys the Harley Heads.

Tier 4: the story gates

The last tier is not about kit at all. Some riddles do not exist yet.

Park Row is the worst offender and produces the most common complaint about this game's collection tracking, which is a list stuck at 14 of 15. One riddle's answer is an Alice In Wonderland book on a table in the Mad Hatter's hideout, a bar south of the Solomon Courthouse, and the book may not be there until you have finished the Tea Party side quest. Another does not appear in your menu at all until the Riddler speaks to you in the Medical Center. If a district is one short and you have swept it twice, that is almost always why.

Elsewhere, the Industrial District is story-gated as a district before any of its nine riddles matter, and one of them only becomes findable after you have told Mr. Freeze where Nora is. Wonder City's six all sit inside Wonder Tower, split between the Foundations and the Observation Deck, so they arrive very late. Our walkthrough covers the missions themselves.

The three that break their own rules

Wonder City #4 asks about demonic twins, and the answer is two statues guarding a door rather than one object. Scanning one of them does nothing.

Subway #2 is solved backwards. The question mark is on a side window of a train, and the alignment dot is on a mirror at the opposite end of the carriage, so you solve it by looking into the mirror rather than at the mark itself.

And Subway #5 is not visible from anywhere, because it is under the floor. The Killer Croc room behind it is an easter egg, which is why nothing in the district hints that a scannable object exists down there.

What the 70 riddles are worth

Six hostages, and the numbers are the thing worth knowing before you decide how deep to go.

Those 440 challenges break down as 282 trophies, these 70 riddles, 150 breakable objects and the physical challenges. Since only 400 are needed and the final 40 come from DLC, a base-game player who wants the story finished does not have to be a completionist at all. Every trophy also unlocks character trophies and concept art along the way.

The physical challenges are the category people forget, and they are the easiest to make progress on, because they are conditions rather than locations: glide a certain distance, land a certain combo, use a certain gadget a certain way. They can be done anywhere, at any point, as long as you meet the condition.

The rest of the game's systems, same question

Skill gates

Freeflow combat is the other half of this game and it is graded on things you either can or cannot do yet. Our combat guide lists every Batsuit move, combat move and predator move by name, which is also the reference the boss fights depend on. Beyond that, Perfect Freeflow asks you to chain the full combo and Flawless Freeflow asks you to do it without being touched, which are two very different requests despite the similar names.

Mode gates

Challenge maps are a separate, repeatable mode, and the confusion worth clearing up is that they are not the same thing as the Riddler Challenges above. Our challenges overview explains the split, and the three categories have their own pages: combat, predator and physical.

Outside the rules

Three things are not earned by play in the ordinary sense. The Catwoman choice is a story decision rather than a skill check. The Storyteller achievement asks for something most players never think to do. And our cheats page covers the codes, including the skins.