In Ithaca, Penelope’s highway journey begins with a cease at a gasoline station, a name to a buddy, and the invention of a dude hog-tied and blindfolded within the trunk of her automotive. She appears shocked by the scenario, however she closes the trunk, will get within the entrance seat and drives.
Ithaca is a road-trip RPG from The Pixel Hunt, the French studio behind the heartbreaking narrative recreation Bury Me, My Love, and it is about extra than simply feeling the breeze by way of the open window and singing alongside to your favourite jams. The sport’s protagonist, Penelope, is a 30-something environmental lawyer who’s fed up with a system that protects company polluters, and he or she’s joined the Earth Safety Affiliation in an try and struggle again in a brand new means. She’s on her strategy to a spot referred to as Ithaca to satisfy different members of the EPA when she discovers the boss of an enormous petroleum firm in her trunk. Apparently, she did not put him there.
The sport performs out from the driving force’s seat, the place Penelope can search for clues about what’s she’s actually doing, and in addition name and textual content her family and friends. Penelope has to fake she is not getting swept up in a large-scale eco-terrorism plot whereas additionally navigating chats with the EPA organizers, build up interpersonal and deductive expertise. There are greater than 30 NPCs for Penelope to speak to, with a full forged of voice actors.
The landscapes that fill the windshield are procedurally generated scenes of wind farms, sprawling bridges, mountain passes and clear blue waterways, and the sport ends in one in all seven ultimate locations. Gamers are in a position to dictate Penelope’s path with their narrative decisions, and in the end resolve whether or not she completes the EPA’s plans or backs out on the final minute.
“We’re not making Ithaca to offer solutions,” Pixel Hunt founder Florent Maurin stated within the recreation’s Day of the Devs reveal video. “We’re making it as a result of we’re residing by way of questions that really feel more and more onerous to keep away from about energy, about violence, in regards to the world we dwell in and the way far we’re able to go to defend it. About what nonetheless feels doable when nothing appears to work anymore. And we hope Ithaca might be one strategy to sit with these questions for some time, fastidiously and comfortably from inside a automotive that retains transferring ahead.”
Ithaca is tentatively scheduled to come back out in 2027, and there is a Kickstarter for the sport dwell in the present day, together with a Steam page.

