A single-player racing RPG
The Italian Riviera, late 1990s. Duel rivals on mountain passes and the night highway. Win their parts to build your car, and spend one summer chasing the ghosts of a road race that was killed decades ago.
The Duels
Challenge a street racer for a head-to-head duel: both drivers have a health bar, and whoever falls behind starts losing health; the bigger the gap, the faster it drains. Keep their headlights in your mirror, corner after corner, until their bar runs dry.
Winning is a door. Nobody tells you the room behind it is empty.
The Garage
Choose one of three starter cars, each with distinct handling. Win parts from the rivals you defeat, then mix and match components from different vehicles to build a car you can truly call your own: every part you fit changes how the car behaves on the road. The roster is entirely fictional, inspired by the cars of the 1980s and 1990s.
The espresso here is bitter and small and gone in a second. So is everything we come here for.
The Driving
Vehicles run on a full tire-physics simulation: each wheel uses a Pacejka-style slip curve to compute grip from lateral and longitudinal slip, combined through a friction circle, updated at 120 Hz. Weight transfer, slides, wheel lock-up and lift-off oversteer all emerge from that math in real time. On top sits a layer of driver-assist electronics modeled after real systems, like traction control, ABS/EBD, stability control and a countersteer assist, all switchable off to expose the raw simulation underneath.
...We all run the same coast road... Different cars, different reasons... the same white line pulling us east and west...
The Roads
Hairpin passes above the sea, Tuscan clay hills, Ligurian terraces, and the tangenziale around the port for the nights when the mountain is not enough.
Guardrails on the Azzurrino Pass are bent into shapes that tell you exactly how fast someone was going and exactly how sorry they were.
One Summer
Decades ago, a crash brought the coast's Race to an end. The town kept the festival and lost the racing; the drivers kept the racing and lost the daylight. Spend one summer among the local drivers, earn your place, and learn why nobody talks about how it ended.
Up here, the stars over the Apennines are close enough to be reflections. Maybe they are. Maybe somewhere up there a kid is looking down at our headlights and making a wish on one.
Screenshots
Coverage
Your kind of summer?
Ghosts of the Mountain Pass is a solo-developed passion project from Italy. Adding the game to your wishlist is the thing that helps more than anything else.
