Ithaca is a road trip RPG about climate activism, skill checks, and a hostage in your trunk

Ithaca is a narrative road trip RPG from The Pixel Hunt where you play Penelope, an environmental rights lawyer driving to a place called Ithaca — with a hostage in the back of her car.

Penelope has spent a decade trying to sue major polluters in court without much to show for it. The hostage situation comes courtesy of an activist group she's tangled up with, and the game puts you in charge of how she handles it. RPG mechanics play out through phone calls, text conversations, and roadside encounters, with skill checks tied to stats like empathy and manipulation. Your choices shape who Penelope is as a person. The roads are procedurally generated, so routes, encounters, and conversations shift between playthroughs — the game features over 30 characters to meet, meaning no two runs will look identical.

Ithaca sits in a pretty sparse genre. Road trip games are rare, and narrative-driven ones built around climate themes are rarer still. The setup — one person, one car, a morally complicated situation, and a lot of open road — draws obvious comparisons to the 2013 film Locke, which confined Tom Hardy to a car for its entire runtime and wrung real tension out of phone conversations alone. If Ithaca can pull off something similar with player agency layered on top, it could be a genuinely interesting entry in the narrative RPG space.

The Kickstarter has already hit its funding goal. A playtest is available to sign up for on Steam if you want to get a feel for it before committing.