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

Renowned designer Ken Levine invited IGN's Ryan McCaffrey and The Game Awards creator Geoff Keighley to Ghost Story Games in Boston, where we spent six hours playing a recent build of his new narrative-driven single-player first-person shooter Judas, followed by a lengthy conversation with the award-winning 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 above, but before you do, we figured you might want to know a little bit about Judas first. So we'll share 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 and begin interacting with the holographic projections of the three leaders who run the ship: Tom, the ship's head of security who wants to protect all of humanity by ensuring that the Mayflower's original mission stays on course; Nefertiti, the ship's Nobel Prize-winning doctor who wants to create a civilization of full robots with no human flaws; and Hope, who wants your help deleting herself because the existential crisis of her existence leads her to the conclusion that deletion is the only way to end her suffering. Further complicating matters is that the three of them are a family: Tom and Nefertiti were married, and Hope was their adopted daughter. It's up to you to side with whomever you feel like, but whatever choice you make has consequences. Doing a favor for Tom might piss off Hope and/or Nefertiti, and vice versa. 

This constant push and pull is at the heart of Judas's player-driven narrative, and it means that no two playthroughs are ever likely to be the same. That's the "narrative LEGOs" in action, and what we talk a lot about in the course of the interview. Enjoy!