LEGO DC 76300 Arkham Asylum suffers from being squished into the modular building format, but it’s difficult to overstate just how much adding an extra floor solves its problems…
DC’s first-ever modular building commits the same cardinal sin as 76294 X-Men: The X-Mansion: here’s a location that in-universe sits on its own rather than butted up against other buildings, but in your LEGO city will happily adjoin a British pub, Avengers Tower and a NINJAGO mech workshop. That’s the beauty of the common design language shared between LEGO themes right now… but also the downfall of Arkham Asylum.
While it packs roughly 3,000 pieces into the box, 76300 Arkham Asylum still manages to feel cramped, squat and squished within the confines of the modular building format. If you care at all for interiors, that’s where you’ll find the most damage done here: there are details aplenty but barely any room to swing a cat(woman) around its corridors.
From the outside, things are a little more interesting, especially thanks to the asylum’s inverted corner footprint. But even where that approach offers something new for modular buildings as a whole, it eats into the available space for Arkham, and with only two real floors to speak of (plus the roof) the finished product feels all-around too diminutive for the money.
Yet if you have a little additional budget to play with, it’s surprising just how much adding an extra floor to the building can alleviate those concerns and take 76300 Arkham Asylum from good to great. And it’s a very easy project, too: duplicating the middle floor with a few small tweaks is simple enough, and if you want to take the sting out of even that step there are instructions and parts lists readily available on Rebrickable.
Among those are options for a floor that extends the guard tower or sits above it, and for this project I went with the latter (the guard tower being built into the wall is already one of my least favourite parts of the set, so I wasn’t bothered about increasing its height and presence any further) courtesy of Brick Artisan. Almost all the pieces required were available on Pick a Brick when I ordered them in late 2025, save for the translucent-blue window panes for the additional cells.
As a rough guide, you can expect to pay around £70 for the pieces for an additional floor for 76300 Arkham Asylum if you’re ordering from Pick a Brick. I already had a bunch of the necessary parts loose in my collection and raided built sets for others, bringing my all-in cost down to approximately £45. I also went a little off-piste to not only add another floor to Arkham, but also find a way to incorporate its biggest missing character: Two-Face.
While Harvey Dent isn’t among the 16-strong minifigure line-up in 76300 Arkham Asylum, we’ve had enough versions of him at this point that you can pick one up on the secondary market without breaking the bank. I plucked this one from 2019’s 76122 Batcave Clayface Invasion, which goes for around £15 on BrickLink at the time of writing, and which I reckon best fits the aesthetic of Arkham’s other characters (compared to, for example, the latest version from The Dark Knight).
76300 Arkham Asylum features a spread of basic cells along with a couple of custom cells for specific characters, such as Poison Ivy (whose cell is decorated with plants galore). To better integrate Two-Face into the set, I swapped out one of the basic cells in the additional floor for a design that takes inspiration from his chambers in the Arkham Asylum video games.
I initially considered splitting it with colour – one half black, the other white – but leaning into the build to convey Harvey’s split personality felt more appropriate among the rest of the set. While one half of the cell is as you’d expect, the other is cracked and crumbling away. The floor is damaged and even his bed is split in two, with the sheets askew through the use of rounded corner tiles.
I also popped a little décor on the walls of the cell: a mirror (so Harvey can inspect his nightmarish features) and a domino tile with two pips, which I picked up to bulk out my BrickLink order for the missing trans-blue window panes. The results are obviously only visible when lifting away the roof or peering round the back of the building, but that’s very much by design.
And that’s really only a small bit of tinkering around the edges of 76300 Arkham Asylum, because the headline addition here is obviously that extra floor itself – and what a difference it makes to the silhouette, composition and grandeur of this Gotham City icon. It’s genuinely puzzling that the LEGO Group didn’t include it in the first place, which would also have been cheaper (for us) than buying the additional parts separately. You can imagine that extra floor adding only £40 or so to the RRP.
As is, you’re looking at an initial buy-in of £269.99 for 76300 Arkham Asylum and then another £70 (or thereabouts) at Pick a Brick and/or BrickLink for the necessary pieces. Is it worth a combined total of £340? That much money would also buy you 21323 Grand Piano, 10356 USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D, 42215 Volvo EC500 Hybrid Excavator or 76457 Hogsmeade Village Collectors' Edition… and on balance, this does feel comparable to all of those (or much better value than the poorly-priced excavator).
It’s also really your only option for an off-the-shelf Arkham Asylum with as much detail as this, and while the minifigure selection plays out like a greatest hits of the Rogues Gallery – where are our deep cuts? – it’s a perfect line-up for anyone who’s only gotten into this theme in the past five years or so. To flip the quote on its head… it may not be the Arkham we deserve, but it’s the one we need, or at least have, right now. And that extra floor genuinely does make a world of difference.
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