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A must-play for anyone interested in narrative-driven games.
A must-play for anyone interested in narrative-driven games.
What is it? Point-and-click narrative adventure.
Expect to pay $15/£11.39; act 1 demo is free on Steam
Release date March 24, 2022
Developer Geography of Robots
Publisher Raw Fury
Multiplayer? No
Link Official site
You might have heard of Norco, the new point-and-click adventure praised for its gorgeous pixel art, sublime writing, and poetic exploration of class, identity, faith, and materialism. You might have heard about its white-hot social commentary on capitalism and environmental destruction in the real-life town of the same name—Norco, Louisiana—home to a powerful oil refinery that both feeds and bleeds the people around it. When people talk about Norco, they often talk about its discerning use of science fiction, its hyperlocal focus on a particular part of the Deep South, and how much it resonates as a universal story about place and personhood (if you’re looking for an easy Kentucky Route Zero comparison, I’ve written about that lazy shorthand, as well as the game’s punk roots here).
My favorite part of Norco is far less noble. It happens in an abandoned mall in Act 2, where the player sows discord among a cult of insecure boys who call themselves the Garretts. Armed with a voice memo app on my in-game phone, I gleefully tick off boxes for Unethical Modern Behavior—secretly recording the shit people say, pruning away context and using it to turn them against each other. Finally, a game that understands the weakest, pettiest, most chaotic parts of humankind. Finally, I feel seen.
In the finest tradition of old-school point-and-click adventures, there aren’t really any mechanics beyond a few mini-games and small QTEs. The puzzles are simple enough by point-and-click veteran standards—if you’ve played enough of them, it’s really about how and what the dev is hiding on the screen – without diminishing the sense of satisfaction you get from solving them. Playing Norco is a full-throated commitment to the story. To this end, each character in its ensemble cast has a well-formed persona—at least to the best extent that their allotted screen time allows. Every laid-back security guard, prickly neighborhood drug dealer, blasé partygoer, and insufferable Airbnb guest are small but scathing caricatures of the modern social scene, brought to life by Yuts’ gift for dialogue and humor.
Private investigator Brett LeBlanc is a particular treasure, as well as Catherine’s high school friend Keith—LeBlanc especially is a neat character study into the value of unexpected community ties and found family as Kay is forced to re-examine her relationship with her home. There’s a comfortable sense of siblingry in Catherine’s chapters when she encounters these old buddies, something that resonated deeply with me as an only child who’s all too familiar with the idea of projecting family bonds onto friendships (or understanding but never wanting to acknowledge these ties at all).
It forces us to re-examine our relationship with video games as a medium for escapist pleasure.
This isn’t to say that most point-and-click adventures are mindless—I’m a huge fan of what Wadjet Eye has done to elevate storytelling and characterization in Primordia and Unavowed. But perhaps because of Norco’s roots in a real hyperlocal setting, drawing on the devs’ lived experiences, as well as issues like class divide, gentrification, and alienation, it forces us to re-examine our relationship with video games as a medium for escapist pleasure. I’ve never been to Louisiana, but probing Kay’s mindmap conjures uncomfortable echoes of my own relationship with my family and hometown. This is where Norco offers a refreshing challenge within its chosen genre, in the myriad ways it forces the player to pay attention to the problems of their own world without turning away.
On a good day, Norco is a bastion of beautifully evocative storytelling that invites any player to take refuge in its world. On a bad day, it cuts deep as a sobering, but loving portrait of a modern dystopia—a community on the edge of great change. But on a personal level, it’s a game that understands who we are and what the internet has made us—how this digital constellation of fragmented subcultures has shaped the way we see the world and our place in it. There are few games in the world like Norco, and it belongs unequivocally in the highest tier of narrative experiences in the medium today.
A must-play for anyone interested in narrative-driven games.
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