You know when you’re friends with three people, then one of them suddenly pulls a Robbie Rotten and morphs into a real villain who terrorises your existence? No? Just me then, and also the protagonist of Ken Levine’s Judas, whose main foe you’ll get to dictate the identity of through your actions in the game.
It happens via a villainy system, which Levine and the crew at Ghost Story Games discuss in the first ever Judas dev log they’ve just put out. We’ve only seen this non-corridory BioShock-like with evil dentist chairs and an evil Brum in spits and spurts since the announcement in 2022. This looks to the first sign of more regular updates in the offing.
We’d already heard a bit about the ‘big three’, a trio of key characters who’ll be key to your adventures aboard the city-sized spaceship Mayflower. In this dev log, Levine and co reveal that they’ve got some Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor nemesis system-inspired stuff going on.
Basically, rather than having a traditional baddie who’s nailed on as being your foil from the get go – à la BioShock’s Frank Fontaine – you’ll start off as mates with the big three. How you play the game and the choices you make’ll influence how much they like you, leading to one eventually deciding they’re no longer your mate and becoming the game’s villain. Or, as Levine puts it:
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.
He also adds that the trio will judge you as you play, including “how you approach combat, hacking, and crafting”. No, please, don’t hate me just because I’m shite at resource management and keep running away from fights like a coward, Judasers! Whichever of them ends up being en-baddieised gets “a new suite of powers to subvert your actions and goals”, with the example given being a character called Tom turning previously recruitable sheriff bots against you.
It sounds like it could be cool, but I worry players who’ve tried their best to keep all three happy will find it incongruent when one of them turns bad, because the game’s reached the point when it’s decided it needs a baddie in place. Or, conversely, be railroaded into setting off a villain arc in a manner that might feel forced. There’s also the matter of whether a baddie whose very baddieness relies on responding to player actions will be able to muster motivations and personality traits as in-depth as a character who’s built to be a baddie from the ground up. To me, there’s potentially a danger of blunting the story a bit in favour of making it more reactive, something that can be to a game’s detriment.
I’m interested to see how Judas tackles all of that. As of this dev log, it’s still got no release date, with Levine explaining the team don’t want to reveal one just to have to change it later. There’s at least some key art by American movie poster artist Drew Struzan to stare at while we wait.
