In IthacaPenelope’s road trip begins with a stop at a gas station, a call to a friend, and the discovery of a guy tied up and blindfolded in the trunk of her car. She seems surprised by the situation, but she closes the trunk, sits in the front seat and drives off.
Ithaca is a road-trip RPG from The Pixel Hunt, the French studio behind the harrowing narrative game Bury me, my loveand it’s not just about feeling the breeze through the open window and singing along to your favorite tunes. The game’s protagonist, Penelope, is a thirty-something environmental lawyer who is fed up with a system that protects polluting companies. She joined the Earth Protection Association to try to fight back in a new way. She is on her way to a place called Ithaca to meet other members of the EPA when she discovers the boss of a huge oil company in her trunk. Apparently she didn’t put it there.
The game takes place from the driver’s seat, where Penelope can look for clues about what she’s really doing, and also call and text friends and family. Penelope must pretend not to be drawn into a large-scale eco-terrorist plot while talking with EPA organizers, developing her interpersonal and deductive skills. There are over 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 crystal blue waterways, and the game ends in one of seven final destinations. Players can dictate Penelope’s path with their narrative choices and ultimately decide whether she completes the EPA’s plans or withdraws at the last minute.
The hunt for pixels
“We don’t do Ithaca “We succeed because we experience questions that seem increasingly difficult to avoid about power, about violence, about the world we live in and how far we are willing to go to defend it. About what still seems possible when nothing seems to work anymore. And we hope that Ithaca will be a way to answer these questions for a while, carefully and comfortably, from the inside of a car that keeps moving.”
Ithaca is tentatively scheduled for 2027, and there’s a Kickstarter for the game live today, as well as a Steam page.
