Judas First Details: How Ken Levine Is Building on BioShock With 'Narrative LEGOs'

ign.com:

By sheer coincidence, today marks exactly 11 years since BioShock Infinite was released. It was by all accounts a masterpiece – a worthy follow-up to 2007's landmark narrative-driven first-person shooter BioShock. But after two excellent DLC episodes were released, creative director Ken Levine resigned and parent company Take-Two closed Irrational Games. Levine started a new, smaller studio for Take-Two called Campfire Games, later renamed to Ghost Story Games. And then everything went quiet, with Levine rarely speaking publicly outside of a GDC talk about "narrative LEGOs" in 2014.

That all changed at the 2022 Game Awards, where Levine and Ghost Story's first project, Judas, was officially announced. Its only other public appearance since then was at Sony's most recent State of Play, where we got a new trailer.

Until now. Levine invited me and The Game Awards creator Geoff Keighley to Ghost Story Games in Boston, where we spent six hours playing a recent build of Judas, followed by a lengthy conversation with the renowned game designer to discuss the long wait since BioShock Infinite, bringing the "narrative LEGOs" concept to life in Judas, what the game is all about, and much more. You can watch the entire interview in the video at the top of this page.

But speaking of what the game is all about, I figured you might want to know a little bit about that before watching the interview. So let me tell you the basics, without spoiling anything: Judas is a first-person narrative-driven shooter that, from a moment-to-moment gameplay perspective, will feel familiar to BioShock fans. You have a gun in your right hand and various organic powers on your left hand.

Story-wise, you play as Judas, a young woman aboard the Mayflower, a city-sized spaceship on a multi-generational mission to save humanity by transporting what's left of it from Earth to a new planet, called Proxima Centauri. You start the game having been reprinted (yes, meaning you were dead), where you'll wake up