I had my doubts that Norco would be all that enjoyable. The debut game from indie developer Geography of Robots, it’s a dystopian tale about the dismal, falling future of a place. A somewhat somber one as well, with its stuffy paragraphs and formal point-and-click landscapes. Of course, serious is OK. Norco’s first act’s seriousness is exactly the kind of stuff that gets you featured in the New Yorker and earns you the inaugural Tribeca awards. Just sometimes, this kind of solemnity might cross over into something a little conceited, a little gloomy. But behind the first po-faced exterior layer of Norco, there’s something strange and daring. irritable. Funny at times, too. A lighthearted mood that bounces off its politically charged straight edge.
Even so, it need time to fully develop it. For the first six or so hours of the game, you are tasked with telling your own past or, if you choose not to, uncovering it and choosing conversation options to fill in the gaps. I was wondering how much this would affect this beginning after seeing a short, witty late-game reference to one of my careless decisions. I hope and suspect not much, if only because I’m naturally eager to have Hoovered up every last detail of Norco’s narrative.
A world of industrial, environmental, and social ruin is the basis here. Situated on a portion of the Mississippi delta, Norco, Louisiana is a genuine town that is home to a sizable Shell oil refinery. The video game Norco, which is a sort of non-town named after the New Orleans Refining Company that was founded there in 1911, is heavily influenced by the real thing (just swap out “Shell petroleum” for “Shield chemical”). Time is advanced an unspecified number of years to a point where the global warming crisis has started to tear the world apart. As a defiant and anonymous adolescent girl, you have come home to discover that your problematic brother has vanished and your mother, a volatile and inquisitive former professor, has passed away from cancer. What comes next is a mystery, of course, but one that is incredibly engrossing, a sinking plughole that drags you down into the poisoned village of Norco.
Going any more would be giving anything away, but this story has wonderful richness even outside of the narrative. The strength of Norco, which is ostensibly a point-and-click game but is actually a jumble of mechanics and genres (text-adventure, turn-based party battler, boat-navigating, poem, puzzler? ), is its ability to change in front of your eyes, elude you, and slip between fingers after morphing in your hands. Fighting those who don’t deserve it, tricking the disillusioned boys of the internet who do, uncovering conspiracies, following leads, scrawling numbers on scraps of paper, tying up loose ends with deftly omitted references, missing others, and most importantly, slogging through the muck as you battle the system as a whole are all part of the job.
It’s always presented with the type of genuineness that comes from working from deeply felt experiences and recollections.
Norco is a little overwritten at times. As it shifts formats, it frequently returns to the security of a powerful picture concealed under rambling, flowery, lyrical writing. This is always the risk associated with the type of noiry, magical realism-leaning genre in which astute authors sometimes err on the side of being too astute. However, Norco’s genre relatives have experienced the same problem (see: Kentucky Route Zero, Disco Elysium), and these games are mostly simply a transitory phase that needs to be let go of. Most of Norco’s more decadent moments are remembered for the amusing discussion it sets up early on, in which an obnoxious and stupid out-of-town director asks you for advice on local slang terms to use in his gritty, deep-south detective thriller. I had a good time choosing responses like “crawfish devil” for a killer and “slathering with oyster flavored peanut butter” for murder, for example, which the director gladly approves of. The game rightfully makes fun of how the area is portrayed in Hollywood media. Later on, though, it’s nice to go full word-gumbo when you’re reading poetry told by alligators about “fisherfools” who “hang hooks from the trees with chicken thighs,” or when you’re swimming across space and time in the swamp.
This is still all texture, though, and even in those rare instances where it could come off as overdone, it’s still presented with the type of sincerity that comes from creating something based on difficult connections and recollections about one’s own neighborhood or culture. Its characters are full of fear, despair, cynicism, and hope; their faces are rendered in all their extraordinary, leathery detail, in that kind of sickly, putrid, Hotline Miami-style; the dialogue is rich, earthy, and human, and it seems to be voiced by dial-up modems, whirring generators, trumpets and horns, and other various electronic or industrial thrums.
Furthermore, Norco succeeds much more often than it fails in its metaphorical flourishes. The game alludes to stars, sky, and eyes—so many eyes, so many eyes—arousing fears of being watched and monitored. Through a sort of mind map of characters that serves as your journal, it transforms marshes into brains, explains the plot (and gave me some much-needed reminders of what’s happening). It combines the fundamental human desires to fit in, feel strong, or feel alive with neural networks, religions, companies, and cults. Though it might start with the local problems caused by the global environmental crisis, it quickly spreads far beyond that, encompassing issues with artificial intelligence and data, privacy, poverty, and disillusionment. It also highlights how the internet of today can radicalize anyone who breaks away from a community by trapping them in its web. And the hopelessness and despair of those who wish to flee society’s flaws and run away from it.
It is incredibly captivating to play through. Given the story’s symbolic mystery boxes and its cliffhanger endings, as well as the actual ones on the shelf, some of that may come out as dishonest. However, it’s also totally merited. It’s remarkable, unexpected, and unique. It is obscenely suspicious of a future perched precariously, contemptuous of cynics, and priestly to the fearful. It’s breathtakingly lovely, nothing less. It’s captivating, much like the growing number of games that aim to confront these issues head-on rather than just divert our attention.