Ithaca has one hell of an opening: Penelope, a disillusioned environmental lawyer, stops her car at a petrol station. But upon returning, she discovers something shocking: the unconscious body of an oil company CEO in her boot, his hands hog-tied together, dangling limply towards the vehicle’s number plate.

This tantalising eco-thriller setup is a long way off the typical knights-and-castles fantasy fare of most role-playing games, more How To Blow Up a Pipeline than Dragon Quest. But road-trip RPG Ithaca arrives via refreshingly original developer the Pixel Hunt, a French outfit that specialises in what it calls “reality-inspired” games. The studio has made a number of arresting works in recent years. One was about a Syrian refugee couple making a perilous migrant journey across Europe; another tackled the life-shattering effects of child sexual abuse. The climate crisis was always in the back of Pixel Hunt founder and Ithaca writer Florent Maurin’s mind. After all, he says, it is the uber problem of our day, the problem that touches all others. It was just a case of when, and, more importantly: “What do we say about it?”

Then, one summer afternoon a few years ago, while out for lunch in the French medieval town of Cluny, Maurin was posed a question by his wife: “How, considering all we know scientifically about the climate crisis, do we explain to our daughters that we didn’t spend every weekend marching, protesting and demanding the powers that be to take meaningful action?” Maurin was silenced. “I had no fucking clue,” he says. “I had no answer to that question.”

Raising prickly, ethical questions … Ithaca. Illustration: The Pixel Hunt

Maurin’s eventual response was to tackle the subject the way he knew best – by making a video game. In Ithaca, you drive along a procedurally generated road, soaking up vistas of huge windfarms, mountains passes and gorges filled with clean blue water. You talk to family and friends, with the decisions you make affecting the direction you take on the asphalt highway and the branching storyline. Slowly, you uncover what the radical climate group Penelope is now part of, the Earth Protection Association, is really planning to do with the oil exec in her car’s trunk, this nefarious avatar of petro-capitalism. Does he walk free or pay for his Earth-heating sins? Or does something else happen entirely?

The prickly, ethical questions that Ithaca raises are influenced by the real world’s growing upheaval. Maurin has been struck by what he sees as a sea change in attitudes towards political violence. He cites the reactions to Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the assassination of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. “You might have expected people to say this is not something that they, or anybody, should do, but actually, a sizable part of the population in the US cheered and was like: ‘This is right. It’s deserved.’”

The road Penelope ventures down is something of a metaphor for “where we are all heading”, says Maurin. As the mythic home of Odysseus, Ithaca, Penelope’s ultimate destination, was chosen for its allegorical meaning: Maurin says it offers an opportunity to think through ideas of home in a broader, almost planetary sense. He sees the current moment as one in which “we’re trying to discover where we want to go collectively as a species”.

It is an urgent question, dovetailing with Ithaca’s high-octane story and what Maurin sees around him on a daily basis in Burgundy, central France. When he arrived, 10 years ago, it was verdant, an almost staggeringly green place. “You felt as if water was everywhere in the landscape,” he says. Now, drought arrives every summer, killing any trees ill-suited to such high temperatures and a lack of water. Hillsides are littered with their grey and yellow arboreal remains. “Every time, I look out of the window and I think, ‘We have to talk about this very fast,’” says Maurin. “Because things are changing way too quickly for nature to be able to adapt.”