Judas (video game)

Judas is an upcoming first-person shooter game developed and published by Ghost Story Games. It is Ken Levine's first video game since BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea in 2014. The game is scheduled to be released for the PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S.

Plot
Judas takes place on Mayflower, a generation ship traveling through space carrying the last remnants of humanity to Proxima Centauri. The ship is run by three individuals: Tom, who wishes to preserve humanity in its original form; Nefertiti, his Nobel Prize-winning wife who wishes to transform humanity into a race of robots, free of flaw; and their adopted daughter, Hope, who wishes to "delete" herself from existence. Computers control the entire society, including grooming the human residents to be model citizens and report on those that deviate from expected behavior. The game's main character, Judas, has been able to break free of that direction, her actions leading to revolution aboard the Mayflower.

Development
Judas is the debut title for Ghost Story Games, a studio founded by Ken Levine following the shutdown of Irrational Games, the developer of the BioShock series. The game's concept started in 2014 when Levine talked and explained ideas that they would want to work on during Game Developers Conference with "narrative Legos", where they can alter story elements, which they can use to make a very re-playable game, with multiple outcomes. Levine described the inspiration of these narrative Legos extending from his past experiences in writing key non-playable characters, including SHODAN in System Shock 2 and Andrew Ryan in BioShock. He had desired to include these ideas with Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite, having her more reactive to the player's actions, but the narrative structure of the game prevented him from exploring this idea too much. Instead, he had come up with the narrative Lego concept to consider building a game without a fixed narrative, one that could be built from pre-built sections of narrative, level design, art assets, and other aspects that could be assembled on the fly in response to the player's actions.

In 2015, Levine stated that this game would be a first-person science fiction game, similar to the System Shock series. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, in particular its Nemesis system, was cited as one of the game's inspirations. Levine added that the game would be a more challenging experience than BioShock and BioShock Infinite. At the start of 2022, Bloomberg News reported that the game had fallen into development hell, with Levine's style of workplace leading to employee burnout.

At the end of the same year, at The Game Awards 2022, the game was revealed with an announcement trailer to positive reception. Judas will be released on Microsoft Windows via Steam and Epic Games platform. Take-Two Interactive, Ghost Story's owner, expects the game to release by March 2025 at the latest.