For much of the hero’s career, one of the tougher elements of being Spider-Man is balancing fighting crime with successfully completing high school.
In “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” Peter Parker (Tom Holland) struggles to keep his school life and his personal life going, while also zipping around New York as Spider-Man, and even stopping a supervillain. He keeps his Spider-Man gear in his backpack in case he needs it during school hours, and in the movie, we see him use his web shooters to stick his backpacks to walls and objects, to keep them safe while he’s off super-hero’ing.
The new video game “Marvel’s Spider-Man” isn’t set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe or related to either “Homecoming” or its sequel, “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” but it does have a lot of ties to the MCU and is recent turn with Spider-Man. One of the best links is a joking reference to those lost backpacks of Peter’s — it turns out, there are a whole lot of them.
“Marvel’s Spider-Man” is an original story set eight years into Peter’s superhero career, so he’s graduated both high school and college by this point. As players take on the role of Spidey (voiced by Yuri Lowenthal) to deal with the likes of villains such as the “Kingpin” Wilson Fisk, Shocker, Vulture and more, they’ll swing all around Manhattan. And they can find reminders of Peter’s past work in the form of backpacks Spider-Man has misplaced along the way. As it turns out, there were quite a few of them.
The fact that Peter has accidentally left backpacks webbed up all over New York is a pretty funny one if you consider how the gag is portrayed in “Homecoming.” In the movie, Peter leaves a backpack webbed to a dumpster, only to come back to find it missing. He later tells Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) that he needs a new one — and she remarks that it’ll be his fifth replacement.
“Marvel’s Spider-Man” implies that all those backpacks might have gone missing not because they were stolen, but because of Peter’s absent-mindedness. And since players can find more than 50 of them, he must have lost track of his stuff pretty often over the years.
The backpacks in “Marvel’s Spider-Man” have one last interesting element. Each includes an object from Peter’s past, and once they’re discovered, players can listen to Peter give a brief description of what he found in the backpack and how it mattered to him. Some call back Spider-Man lore and his relationships to other characters, like the menu from his first date with Mary Jane, while others reference villains or key events in Spider-Man’s story from the comics and films. It’s worth tracking all of them down for a few fun insights into Peter Parker’s life — and the smart tie-in with “Spider-Man: Homecoming” doesn’t hurt either.