Ken Levine's Judas has a little sister, and her name is Void Bastards

GamesFPSKen Levine’s Judas has a little sister, and her name is Void BastardsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Blue Manchu)

A Spook in Void Bastards

It’s almost exactly a decade since Ken Levine effectively announced theend of Irrational Games, less than a year after the launch of BioShock: Infinite. In the fallout, only a handful of staff were left, quietly working away until the studio’s eventual rebranding a few years later.

“While I’m deeply proud of what we’ve accomplished together, my passion has turned to making a different kind of game than we’ve done before,” he wrote in 2014. “To meet the challenge ahead, I need to refocus my energy on a smaller team with a flatter structure and a more direct relationship with gamers. In many ways, it will be a return to how we started: a small team making games for the core gaming audience.”

(Image credit: Ghost Story Games)

A smitten man plays the piano to an animatronic woman in Judas

Whatever the case, Levine stuck to his word, bunkering down with a cherry-picked squad of Irrational veterans to work on “narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable”. In the month after the layoffs, he delivered a GDC talk about ‘narrative Legos’, in which he explored possibilities for breaking up stories into tiny pieces and delivering them in different combinations depending on a player’s choices. For the most part, though, he and the other survivors on Irrational’s lifeboat—now dubbed Ghost Story Games—have remained shtum. Right up until the reveal of their secret project,Judas, at the 2022 Game Awards.

(Image credit: Ghost Story Games)

A singed woman from the Judas trailer

Yet I can’t help thinking he’s been beaten to the punch. Since that GDC talk, roguelikes have become dominant, and it’s now commonplace for developers to chop up chunks of story and shuffle them into different arrangements across multiple playthroughs. In fact, one such game to do that is Blue Manchu’sVoid Bastards—in many ways the conceptual twin of Judas.

I can’t help thinking he’s been beaten to the punch.

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Like Levine, Chey ultimately chafed against the scale of development at Irrational, resolving to work on smaller projects instead. Unlike Levine, he left Take-Two to start his own indie company, Blue Manchu. Nevertheless, both wound up harking back to the setting of System Shock 2.

(Image credit: Blue Manchu)

Fighting robots in Void Bastards

In Void Bastards, as in Judas, you’re tasked with improving your situation on a dying space station. It’s an excuse to revisit the same problem-solving loop that Irrational first developed in 1999. Where Thief taught avoidance through stealth, System Shock 2 leaned into survival horror. Eventually, you knew you’d have to confront the lanky mutants and toxic hazards preventing your progress. With a limited ammo supply and weapons liable to snap in two, it took planning and efficiency to make it beyond the MedSci Deck to freedom.

Added to these quandaries are a set of higher level strategic considerations. As you jet from ship to ship, you’re navigating longer-term threats—like starvation, fuel shortages, or the void whales which might eat your craft whole unless you stock up on torpedoes. It’s survival horror writ large—a game of resource management played with life-or-death stakes.

(Image credit: Blue Manchu)

Void Bastards map

(Image credit: Blue Manchu)

A large explosion in Void Bastards

Where Judas goes high budget, Void Bastards went low.

The wedge lives on in the lockable doors of Void Bastards. There’s a tense and satisfying delay between hitting the lock button and the ship’s authorisation catching up—a few seconds of audio blips and blinking lights in which you can dart through the portal yourself, or simply pray that a pursuing enemy doesn’t catch up. It’s a crucial method for trapping the aforementioned Screws. Or better still, for sealing them in with a Clusterflack grenade, before peering through the window like a sicko, as the bombs bounce monstrously off every surface.

My hope is that Ghost Story Games is pilfering from Irrational’s past with the same enthusiasm as Void Bastards—evoking not only BioShock, but the quirkier, lesser-known games that came before it. Where Judas goes high budget, Void Bastards went low—and showed us an alternate vision that accomplished many of the same goals. With any luck, there’s still plenty of Lego left in the bucket for Levine to play with.

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