Judas is a hotly anticipated, enigmatic project from Ken Levine, the developer best known for the creation of the BioShock franchise. Worth noting is that, as one of the most influential games of its era, BioShock certainly leaves behind some big shoes for Judas to fill. With any luck, Judas will live up to these high expectations.
Judas was initially expected to release in March 2025. With that window officially closing, many are hoping that it will be released at some other time this year.
But it's not just BioShock that Judas is going up against: 2025 is an especially packed year for games, and there seems to be an oddly high concentration of science-fiction-laden horror experiences in the mix. Bloober Team, the studio behind last year's well-regarded Silent Hill 2 remake, is launching the intriguing Cronos: The New Dawn at some point in 2025, and Supermassive Games is hard at work on the paranoia-fueled Directive 8020. These are two of 2025's most notable sci-fi-horror projects, but even games like Death Stranding 2 and Hell Is Us could be reasonably slotted into the subgenre, presenting Judas with some stiff competition indeed.
How GTA 6 May End Up Determining Judas' Launch Window
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Judas Will Be an Interesting Choice Amidst So Many Other Sci-Fi-Horror Games in 2025
Judas Slots Nicely Into the Sci-Fi-Horror Space
Judas' premise may sound vaguely familiar to those already acquainted with Levine's previous work. Taking place aboard the Mayflower, a massive space hauler carrying the final remnants of human civilization, Judas follows the titular heroine as she attempts to break free from the ship's robot-driven, tyrannical social conditioning. During her journey, Judas will need to navigate her relationships with the Mayflower's three leaders, all of whom have radically different visions for humanity's future:
- Tom: a traditionalist, hoping to preserve humanity's most fundamental characteristics
- Nefertiti: Tom's wife, a radical futurist with the goal of evolving humankind from organic beings to advanced, immortal machines
- Hope: Tom and Nefertiti's daughter, who embraces nihilism and wants to end sentience
Through these philosophically distinct characters, and the Mayflower's uncanny valley, retro-future, deadly automatons, Judas could very well evoke some of its own sci-fi-fueled scares, putting it in conversation with the aforementioned horror games coming out this year. Though he pivoted away from such genre tendencies with BioShock Infinite, Levine himself has exhibited a penchant for horror themes in BioShock and System Shock, making their prominence in Judas seem even more likely.
How Judas Can Stand Out Against Other Sci-Fi Horror Games In 2025
Judas might not have the same fear factor as capital-H Horror games like Cronos: The New Dawn, but it could very well excel in a particular niche: existential horror. The three ideologically opposed characters at the heart of Judas' narrative certainly have the potential to provide powerful philosophical fodder, and if handled correctly, this high-concept narrative content could be quite unsettling indeed. Tom, Nefertiti, and Hope all propose incompatible visions for humanity, and while Nefertiti's radical transhumanism and Hope's extreme nihilism are the most obviously disturbing, Tom's worldview might not be sunshine-and-rainbows either; his ostensible desire to maintain tradition could illuminate humanity's folly, exposing how the species longs to uphold a past that may never have existed.
In his previous projects, Levine has explored such heady topics as religion, free will, communism, and objectivism, so there's little reason to believe that Judas will be much different. Delving into these concepts has the potential to result in stuffy, overly academic storytelling, but Levine has managed to avoid these pitfalls, tying analysis of such subjects to emotional narrative beats and evocative world design. Assuming he does the same with his next project, Judas has the possibility to be uniquely unnerving, thought-provoking, and terrifying.
- ESRB
- t
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 4
WHERE TO PLAY
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.
- Genre(s)
- First-Person Shooter
- Platform(s)
- PC, PS5, Xbox Series X
