Bioshock Creator Reveals New Game Details
- Ken Levine shares first dev log for Judas, an immersive sim on a collapsing spaceship.
- New “Villany” system lets allies or enemies shift based on player choices.
- No release date yet, but more frequent updates promised.
Ken Levine, the Creative Director of Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite, and co-founder of Irrational Games, has released the first dev log for his upcoming game, Judas. It’s an immersive sim that shares a lot of DNA with Levine’s previous games, but this time takes place on a disintegrating spaceship and requires teaming up with potential enemies.
Judas was first announced at The Game Awards in 2022. The next update, a story trailer, didn’t appear until January 2024. This was followed by a playtest limited to select gaming press in March that year. Levine posted more game details in the first official dev log on the official site on Aug. 27, 2025.
“We know, we know…we’ve been silent for a while,” Levine said. “It takes a lot of time and energy to make marketing materials like trailers, and we’re trying to focus all our efforts on finishing Judas. But we also miss the days of having a more direct relationship with you, the gamer, so we thought, ‘Why not start releasing some dev logs?’”
“Through these, we hope to communicate more frequently to update you with new details of what we are working on, without spoiling too much of what Judas has in store.”
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A Fresh Start With Old Ideas
Judas is being developed by Ghost Story Games, which is technically a rebrand of Irrational Games (it features a lot of the same staff, and is still under Take-Two Interactive). However, Levine considers Ghost Story Games a fresh start, as he detailed in an announcement back in February 2017, and on the studio’s FAQ page.
“The Irrational Games studio was closed by Take-Two Interactive in 2014. We are a new team, working on a new game and we’d like our studio name to reflect that.”
“Ghost stories are immersive, exciting, and steeped in community. The name reminds us of our mission,” he added.
However, fans of the Bioshock series needn’t worry about Levine and his team straying too far from the beaten path, as Judas contains a lot of the hallmarks from that award-winning series. Chief among these is a first-person view, that sees the player wield abilities in the left hand and weapons in the right; examples include fire and electricity, with pistols and shotguns in the latter.
Levine also drew comparisons with his previous games in the recent dev log, but to highlight differences: “When you play BioShock or BioShock Infinite, the villain is always going to be the villain. Fontaine, Comstock – they’re always going to be the bad guys.”
“In Judas, your actions will attract members of the Big 3 to you as friends. But ignore one of them enough, and they become the villain. From there, they will get access to a new suite of powers to subvert your actions and goals.”
The Big 3
These are the rulers of Mayflower, the spaceship you’re trapped on. There’s Tom, a sheriff in charge of security; Dr. Okeke, the ship’s medical officer; and Hope, the ship’s counselor. The player is the titular Judas, a hacker who caused everything on the Mayflower to go belly up. She managed to do this by revealing to the Big 3 that they were actually robots, which in turn led to a catastrophic uprising.
Levine details a few inspirations in the dev log, including Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis System. Whereas this involved the possibility of any random orc becoming the player’s main enemy, the Villany mechanic in Judas is more ambitious.
“In Judas, you’re going to get to know these characters intimately. We want losing one of them to feel like losing a friend. We want to play with that dynamic, and we want that choice to be super hard. The Big 3 are all going to be competing for your favor and attention. They can bribe you, save you in battle, talk shit about the other characters, and share with you their darkest secrets. But eventually, you’ve got to decide who you trust and who you don’t.”
“In BioShock Infinite, there was a lot of energy invested into developing your relationship with Elizabeth. By the end of the game, you knew everything about her, her abilities, her hopes and dreams,” Levine added. “But the truth is she knew almost nothing about you, the gamer playing Booker. In Judas, the Big 3 observe you as you play, and they have feelings not only about how you approach combat, hacking, and crafting, but most importantly your interactions with the other two characters.”
Release Date And Secret Details
Villany is the main focus of the first dev log, but Levine also touched on the game’s release schedule. A Bloomberg report in 2022 drew attention to the then-untitled project’s descent into development hell, with staff at the time commenting on Levine’s idiosyncratic management.
“The ideas and ambitions were great,” Giovanni Pasteris, an early employee, said. “But the scope just grew and grew without concern for the team’s ability to get it done by our fall 2017 deadline. Ken wanted to make a triple-A game with a ‘budget’ team size. It was never going to happen.”
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that the latest update still doesn’t come with anything remotely resembling a possible release window.
“While we wish we could give you an exact date today, we’re not quite ready to finalize that,” Levine said. “As you know, release dates have a way of slipping by, and we’d like to avoid having to change the date after we announce it. But we know Judas is not really a game until the players get their hands on it, and that’s a day everyone on the team is working toward.”
However, whether he meant it as a way to try and appease gamers or not, Levine used the first dev log to hint at further game details and hidden secrets by referencing the new art, shown at the top of this article.
“If you look closely, there’s probably some details you might be curious about. Let’s just say there’s some stuff in this game that we’re not going to talk about right now, but everything here is relevant.”
As for future Judas news, Levine said: “The goal is to keep this pretty lo-fi, meaning more frequent updates than before, but not necessarily always with fancy trailers and super polished final imagery (though there will be more of those as well!).”
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