In Ithaca, Penelope’s road trip begins with a stop at a gas station, a call to a friend, and the discovery of a dude hog-tied and blindfolded in the trunk of her car. She seems surprised by the situation, but she closes the trunk, gets in the front seat and drives.
Ithaca is a road-trip RPG from The Pixel Hunt, the French studio behind the heartbreaking narrative game Bury Me, My Love, and it’s about more than just feeling the breeze through the open window and singing along to your favorite jams. The game’s protagonist, Penelope, is a 30-something environmental lawyer who’s fed up with a system that protects corporate polluters, and she’s joined the Earth Protection Association in an attempt to fight back in a new way. She’s on her way to a place called Ithaca to meet other members of the EPA when she discovers the boss of a huge petroleum company in her trunk. Apparently, she didn’t put him there.
The game plays out from the driver’s seat, where Penelope can look for clues about what’s she’s really doing, and also call and text her friends and family. Penelope has to pretend she isn’t getting swept up in a large-scale eco-terrorism plot while also navigating chats with the EPA organizers, building up interpersonal and deductive skills. There are more than 30 NPCs for Penelope to talk to, with a full cast of voice actors.
The landscapes that fill the windshield are procedurally generated scenes of wind farms, sprawling bridges, mountain passes and clean blue waterways, and the game ends in one of seven final destinations. Players are able to dictate Penelope’s path with their narrative choices, and ultimately decide whether she completes the EPA’s plans or backs out at the last minute.
The Pixel Hunt
“We’re not making Ithaca to give answers,” Pixel Hunt founder Florent Maurin said in the game’s Day of the Devs reveal video. “We’re making it because we’re living through questions that feel increasingly hard to avoid about power, about violence, about the world we live in and how far we’re ready to go to defend it. About what still feels possible when nothing seems to work anymore. And we hope Ithaca will be one way to sit with those questions for a while, carefully and comfortably from inside a car that keeps moving forward.”
Ithaca is tentatively scheduled to come out in 2027, and there’s a Kickstarter for the game live today, along with a Steam page.
