Road-trip RPG Ithaca announced with Kickstarter and Steam playtest now live
During the Day of the Devs: Summer Game Fest Edition 2026, The Pixel Hunt revealed Ithaca , a narrative road-trip with RPG elements, about environmental resistance.
Ithaca has you playing as Penelope, a young environmental rights lawyer, trying to save the planet with a hostage in your trunk. Ithaca is in development for a Q4 2027 release. You can find Ithaca's Kickstarter page here and Steam playtest here following its reveal in the Day of the Devs: Summer Game Fest Edition 2026 showcase. New screenshots and more from The Pixel Hunt can be found below:
Ithaca is a narrative road-trip RPG about climate resistance.
You play as Penelope, an environmental rights lawyer.
You're driving to Ithaca.
And there's a hostage in your trunk.Can you keep the secret and finish what you started, or will the road change everything?
What kind of game is Ithaca?
Ithaca is a narrative RPG about role-playing a person under pressure. As you travel across a fractured country increasingly shaped by climate collapse, you’ll navigate difficult conversations, political tensions, moral compromises, and the consequences of your own actions.
The road changes with you
Talk to friends and strangers through calls, texts and face-to-face encounters
To maintain some semblance of normalcy during the most important journey of your life, you keep talking to the people you care about as if everything were fine. Will you try to help your niece as she faces teenage angst? Convince your mum that boat cruises suck? Ask your best friend why she no longer speaks to her family? And will you open up about what you're doing?
Explore procedurally generated roads and locations
The road to Ithaca is long. Hours blur together as landscapes slowly shift around you. We want the journey itself to feel hypnotic: the strange suspended state of long road trips, where conversations linger, thoughts spiral, and time starts behaving differently.
Investigate clues hidden in your car and the places you visit
As you'll discover early in the game, you're actually part of an operation run by a small group of radical environmental activists. They organized the operation. They gave you the car. And they clearly haven’t told you everything. Investigating the vehicle for phone numbers scribbled on receipts, objects hidden under seats, unexplained documents, or stuff that clearly don’t belong to you will help you better understand the plot you're part of.
Develop Penelope’s personality through RPG stats and skill checks
The core idea behind Ithaca is role-playing. You don’t control every decision Penelope makes - she’s already involved in the operation, whether you approve of it or not - but you get to choose who she is, what her personality is like, which skills she has developed and how that all influences the way she deals with things. The game features 10 personality traits, 12 skills and around 20 perks which will all influence your ability to react to conversation and unlock new narrative routes.
Uncover new narrative paths through deduction, relationships and role-play
Ithaca combines authored narrative content with procedural road-trip generation. Routes, encounters, stops and discoveries will vary between playthroughs, creating different rhythms, conversations and chains of events. Some characters may appear early, others much later. Some clues may radically change your understanding of previous events. The destination may stay the same, but the road there rarely will.
Play Ithaca early
You can already play an early version of Ithaca on Steam. The playtest includes the beginning of the road trip and several core systems, including conversations, investigations, exploration and RPG progression.
The game is still very much in development, but we wanted players to be able to experience its atmosphere, pacing and structure firsthand before deciding whether to support the project.
There's a limited number of slots available for playtesting, so if you're interested, don't hesitate to sign up!
