Summary
Ken Levine and Ghost Story Games' upcoming first-person shooterJudashas evolved into quite the head-turner the more it has shown its true colors. While it started out looking like little more than aBioShockclone, it has since revealed itself to be a multi-layered, player-driven adventure with innovative narrative and Roguelike elements to boot. UsingLevine’s “narrative LEGO” design,Judasallows players to shape almost every major and minor story beat in their relationships with the three leaders of the game’s setting, the Mayflower. Each leader has their own goal aboard the Mayflower, and they’ll spend most of the game trying to recruit Judas to their cause.
The story ofJudasfollows the Mayflower, a spacefaring city sent on a colonization expedition to the Proxima Centauri system after Earth becomes inhabitable. However, by the timeJudasbegins, all the humans on board the Mayflower have been enslaved by the machines. The three leaders at the helm of Mayflower operations — Tom, Nefertiti, and Hope — now do everything they can to convince Judas to side with one of them and not the others. Each leader has their own story and goal, but Hope’s may be the biggest wild card of the three, as helping her could potentially have less impact on the world than the others.
Helping Hope in Judas Needs to Have the Same Impact as Helping the Other Leaders
Tom and Nefertiti Both Have Large-Scale Goals
Before players awaken as Judas at the beginning of the game, she had informedthe three leaders of the Mayflowerthat they are all machines, sending each of them into an existential crisis. Since the “Big Three” are the ship’s leaders and are now experiencing an identity crisis, the Mayflower begins to collapse. From there, the leaders begin a tug-of-war game with Judas, attempting to persuade her to assist them in accomplishing their goals while leaving the others in the dust.
Tom and Nefertiti have goals that impact the game’s world on a much larger scale than Hope. Tom is the Mayflower’s head of security and Nefertiti is a Nobel Prize-winning doctor, responsible for keeping everyone on board the ship alive. As the head of security, Tom’s mission is to ensure the Mayflower eventually reaches its destination and completes its mission. Nefertiti, although her original mission was to keep all the humans on board alive, no longer cares whether they survive the trip, as she wants a society entirely made up of machines unencumbered by the flaws of human nature. Undoubtedly, these polarizing goals will play into the “morals” ofplayers' decision-making inJudas, likely leading to either a “good” or “bad” ending. Hope’s goal, on the other hand, is much different.
Hope’s Goal Is More Personal But Helping Her Needs to Have as Much Impact as Helping the Others
Unlike Tom and Nefertiti, who are extreme opposites in their goals for humanity, Hope’s crisis creates a different ethical dilemma inJudasthan simply saving or destroying the human race. When Hope learns she isn’t human, she decides she would much rather be deleted than continue to live as a machine. She then requests that Judas help grant her this wish, but the story is likely to go much deeper than that. It is a moving and thought-provoking premise, but it comes with its issues. Specifically, the game must ensure siding with Hope has as big of an impact onJudas' overall storyas siding with Tom or Nefertiti.
Since Hope’s goal is strictly personal and Tom and Nefertiti’s goals involve what’s left of the human race, simply siding with Hope to fulfill her desires could feel like an insignificant decision in agame with such a compelling narrative. As such,Judasneeds to make siding with Hope something that will ultimately lead to a much bigger ending, though not so big that it overshadows the other two paths.
Judas
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Judas is a sci-fi first-person shooter game made by BioShock creator Ken Levine that’s set on a massive spaceship called the Mayflower.
