BioShock’s Ken Levine reveals more details on his ‘narrative Lego’ game Judas

26.03.2024 - 17:07 / videogameschronicle.com / Ken Levine / Chris Scullion

New information on Judas, the next game from BioShock creator Ken Levine, has emerged.

Levine’s studio Ghost Story Games invited select media, including IGN andGeoff Keighley, to play the game for 5-6 hours, and both have now shared their thoughts on what they played.

IGN’s report calls the game “a first-person narrative-driven shooter that, from a moment-to-moment gameplay perspective, will feel familiar to BioShock fans”.

The protagonist is the titular Judas, a formerly dead but now ‘reprinted’ woman aboard a “city-sized spaceship” called the Mayflower. The ship is transporting the last survivors of the human race from Earth to a new planet called Promia Centauri.

Judas has interactions with the ship’s three leaders – Tom, Nefertiti and Hope – and the player has to decide which ones to help, because making one leader happy may upset another one, in a structure Levine calls “narrative Lego”.

Keighley posted his first impressions on a video on X,  saying the game still feels like a BioShock game to some extent. “All the things you’d expect in a BioShock game are there,” he says. “There are hand powers, there’s hacking, there’s incredible cinematic moments, great characters, rich storyline.

“But there’s something more going on behind the scenes, and this is something that’s really hard to describe or showcase in a trailer.”

Keighley also notes that the game is “not done by any means”, suggesting it may still be some time before it’s released.

It was reported back in October 2020 that Levine’s next game was entering the “later stages” of production.

A job listing for Ghost Story Games’ then-announced “immersive sci-fi game with RPG elements” claimed that the title was being created by a team of less than 35 people, which was said to be operating under a flat structure so that “every opinion counts.”

Levine closed Irrational Games – the studio behind BioShock and its sequel Infinite – in 2014 to form a smaller studio, which eventually became Ghost Story Games.

At the time, he said the Take-Two owned company – initially made up of 15 staff – would be dedicated to “narrative-driven” digital games that were “highly replayable”.