Ken Levine is best known as the creator of BioShock, but his credits run deep into Irrational Games and Looking Glass Studios games like System Shock 2 and Thief: The Dark Project. Under Levine, Irrational reformed as Ghost Story Games over two years ago, and it probably shouldn’t come as a shock that the studio’s new game will follow in the immersive sim genre.
The first title from Ghost Store will be a “creatively ambitious project in the immersive sim genre,” according to a recent job listing for a cinematic narrative designer (via OnlySP). The listing also mentions Unreal 4 experience and “both systemic and scripted narrative events.” Ghost Story says its mission is “to create immersive, story-driven video games for people who love games that ask something of them.”
It’s not the first time a job listing has described this as an immersive sim – in fact, that’s been happening since 2017, just a few months after the studio started. This story is mostly here to remind you that yes, Ghost Story is still out there and yes, the studio’s still working to make a game.
We, however, still don’t have a meaningful clue about what this new game will look like. The immersive sim genre is broad enough to encompass a whole lot of potential gameplay ideas, and the ideas Levine has kicked around over the past few years have been pretty expansive.
The game – at least as it existed in 2017 – includes a sort of expanded version of the Shadow of Mordor nemesis system, and Levine had been talking about an idea of “narrative Lego” years beforehand. That would, in theory, lead to a story-driven game that could go in near-infinite directions based on a limited amount of building blocks.
Stay tuned for more upcoming PC games, because it’s likely to still be a long, long while before we truly know what Levine and the gang are up to.