After his work on the legendary BioShock series, Ken Levine began Ghost Story Games, a rebranding of Irrational Games under Take-Two Interactive. Following years of silence from the studio, things changed during the 2022 Game Awards, when Levine announced Judas, a narrative single-player first-person shooter in space.
Not much more was seen until Sony’s recent State of Play, when a new trailer for the game was revealed. In a new interview with IGN, however, Levine is finally giving some more details about the bizarre—and slightly BioShock-adjacent—title. Thankfully, he’s also explaining what he meant by wanting to make a “Narrative LEGO” game, something he uttered in a talk during the 2014 GDC.
“Taking the LEGO metaphor, we started thinking, well, could we use handcrafted elements that are not huge entire levels, but sub-elements like lines of speech, pieces of art, texture, maps, encounters, loot, even the layout of the whole experience and make those out of modular chunks and then teach the game,” Levine explained.
“We call it pseudo-procedural because it’s not like Minecraft where everything’s being generated off a set of pure mathematical heuristics. You build all these smaller piece elements in the game and then you teach the game how to make good levels essentially, and good story, and most importantly, reactive to what you do.”
In Judas, players will step into the shoes of a young woman aboard a city-sized spaceship called the Mayflower. Each time you die, you’ll be able to ‘reprint’ yourself, with the decisions you make altering the story in drastic ways.
A brief synopsis posted on the official Ghost Story Games website reads:
“A disintegrating starship. A desperate escape plan.
You are the mysterious and troubled Judas. Your only hope for survival is to make or break alliances with your worst enemies. Will you work together to fix what you broke – or will you leave it to burn?”
