Sony’s latest State of Play featured a story trailer for Judas, the long-in-development first-person shooter from Ghost Story Games. Seriously, this thing has been in the works since 2017, when Take-Two shut down Irrational, with Ken Levine and a handful of other developers sticking together to form Ghost Story Games.
The trailer opens on a spaceship called Mayflower. The odds of Ken Levine throwing in some unsubtle satire of the USA and manifest destiny were always high, and one of the main locations we see being a Wild West theme park backs that up. Looks like the main enemies are animatronic mascots, including steam train drones, cowboy horsebots, and a mechanical chef with a saw for an arm.
The protagonist defeats them with a mix of guns and definitely-not-plasmids, which look pretty fun. One’s an energy lasso, one summons buzzsaws, and another throws electricity while also giving you a convenient hand X-ray. Seems like she gets her arms reconstituted at one point, so maybe there’s an equivalent of the Vita-Chamber in Judas as well.
The fine details of the plot are difficult to divine from such a short glimpse, but it seems like there’s some kind of Orwellian surveillance society run by a “Big Three”, and we’ve somehow betrayed and busted their system—the ordinary citizens have slogans on their t-shirts like “I shamed Judas” and at one point an angry woman holds the protagonist down and spraypaints a J on her top. The spaceship doesn’t look like it’s in good shape either, but apparently the only way off it is to form an alliance with at least one of the Big Three.
The odds of there being Big Moral Choices and audiologs are as high as the odds of there being multiple scenes where old-timey music is juxtaposed with a scene where you wouldn’t expect to hear it. Judas looks more and more Shock-like the more we see of it.
This trailer notes that Judas is “Being developed for PS5” but since it has a Steam page we know it’s coming to PC at some point.
