Judas lets you "truly inhabit a character" in a way BioShock didn't, and Ken Levine says the game "spent 5 years in just R&D" to make sure NPCs respond to every choice

We've been waiting a long, long time to see what's next from Ken Levine – best known as the lead dev on BioShock and BioShock Infinite – and it seems the wait for Judas was driven in part by a lengthy R&D phase. The goal? Making sure the game's characters will respond to every action you take, no matter how trivial.

"It's our first game where you truly inhabit a character in a way you didn't in… say BioShock," Levine says in an interview with Game Informer. "When we began, we didn't want to just make a first-person shooter. We wanted to make a Judas simulator where you not only get to decide how she proceeds through the story, but also who you should trust and how you should deal with the consequences of your choices."

While BioShock offered plenty of freedom within the confines of its open-ended levels, its actual narrative is pretty straightforward, and these days, its moral choices seem more like an example of just how limited free will in a video game can be. Of course, BioShock's big twist throws a lampshade on that whole idea fairly effectively, but Judas is still pursuing a much more ambitious idea.

"The most important thing is really placing the player inside the character and letting them feel a little bit of what it's like to be on that ship as the sun is setting on the human race," Levine continues. "In addition, what sets it apart from other games is the way we're building it (and the reason we spent five years in just R&D). We wanted the characters to not only respond to major choices, but to also recognize and respond to your sequence of actions, down to the smallest details."

We've only gotten fleeting glimpses at what this idea might look like in practice, but clearly Levine believes in it. He presented the idea of "narrative Lego" over a decade ago – the notion of story pieces in a game that can be broken apart and rearranged in ways that still make sense. More recently (as in 2024), he described Judas as a "psuedo-procedural" take on single-player narrative games.

Judas doesn't have a release date yet, but Levine points fans eager to learn more toward the dev blogs on the official site. "We've got two of them up so far, with more from us to share coming soon. Then, as we approach launch," (whenever that might be), "you can expect trailers among other announcements."

Bioshock creator Ken Levine's new narrative FPS Judas was shaped by a "stream of consciousness" where an anti-social character prefers vending machines to people: "Conversation is a prelude to failure."