Norco illustrates the tenuous relationships we have with our phones

This is the start of your point-and click adventure NorcoKay is the main character and she throws her phone in the Rio Grande. Moments before, we witness conversations with her brother Blake, who calls Kay with desperate updates regarding their mother’s cancer symptoms. We learn more about the calls as the faces of Kay and Blake, who are both drawn in a crude frown, glow above the silhouettes of Kay on video chat. By throwing her phone away, Kay distances herself from a childhood spent between “devastating rituals” in a town exploited by the local oil industry. Norco’s characters have a complicated relationship with the past, and it’s encapsulated perfectly through their parasitic relationships with their phones.

Norco switches between Kay’s perspective and that of her mom Catherine. Catherine’s timeline covers the weeks leading up to her death, and her misadventures using a gig worker app called “QuackJob” that she downloads in order to pay an increasingly large pile of medical bills. The app allows Catherine to work for a company called Superduck and pick up various tasks (basically fetch quests) to earn a fake digital currency called “$QCK.” When Catherine arrives at a warehouse for one of her Superduck tasks, she meets the figure behind the company. It’s not a Chad in Patagonia but a giant monstrous bird with a network of writhing flesh beneath its wings. It’s here where we learn that Superduck is a sort of virus that traverses technology and plants alike.

Image: Geometry of Robots

Although Catherine’s involvement with this gig work is ultimately what brings her down a dark path, her phone is also the main tool that empowers her to move through the world. On a $40 per day account, she rides with rideshare. Her phone allows her to find hidden statues in augmented reality, and opens up new areas. One section describes how she uses her phone to capture and expose the hypocrisy of a cult. But in the end, it’s all in service of Superduck.

The town of Norco is filled with struggling families. At one point, if you speak to a lanky silhouette hunched over a car, the character tells you they started driving for a rideshare company, but it’s not going so well because they’re worried about their grandpa’s car breaking down. Catherine’s friend Dallas describes how he moved from Craigslist to Superduck to make cash, but in reality, he just wants to spend more time with his family rather than working on gigs throughout the night.

The phone is often viewed as the ideal tool for keeping in touch with those we care about. Norco It paints an even more real picture of how we interact with our devices today. When Catherine texts Kay, she doesn’t hear back from her daughter. Instead we get a constant stream of messages from the collections agency regarding her medical bills. While phones are useful in strengthening relationships, their use can also be used as tools to extract more value from users. Norco’s depiction of that dichotomy is a harsh one, but an honest one; it illustrates how phones can be an useful tool for exploiting marginalized and impoverished people. After all this, I believe I’d throw my phone in the Rio Grande as well.