The ethical quandaries around car usage aside, we can all agree there’s nothing like a road trip, right? When better a time is there to think about every single decision you’ve ever made in life than on an open stretch of road with only other cars to stop you? It feels like a great setting for a video game, despite there not being very many road trip games. But another one is entering the fray and it’s called Ithaca, a “narrative road-trip with RPG elements about environmental resistance.”

In Ithaca, you take on the role of Penelope, an environmental rights lawyer with the usual M.O.: saving the world. She is driving to the titular locale, having spent the last decade of her life trying to sue companies responsible for huge amounts of pollution and not finding much success. She also has a hostage in the back of her car.

This is what’s at the core of Ithaca. The role-playing comes into the game in the form of phone and text conversations, as well as through meeting folks along the road. Like in other RPGs, there are skill checks you have to meet, with the ability to improve certain skills like empathy or manipulation. All of this builds towards you constructing who Penelope is, what her personality is like. You’re stuck with the hostage situation (a situation she is in through being a member of an activist group who seem a bit fishy), but you’re the one that’s responsible for figuring out how she deals with it.

The roads themselves are procedurally generated, with routes you take, encounters you come across, and conversations you have all taking different structures upon various playthroughs. There are apparently more than 30 characters to meet and interact with, so it sounds like one person’s road trip may differ from another’s. It’s a fun setting for such a narrative, reminding me of the intimacy of the film Locke. At the time of writing, there’s also a Kickstarter (a successful one, I might add) that you can support, and a playtest you can sign up to on Steam if you need more convincing.