Norco Review – Soul Food

Point-and-click games cemented the vast potential of interactive narrative at the turn of the century, employing innovative environmental/dialogue puzzles with evocative pixel art and chiptune music. We are now entangled in endless sandboxes filled with vastly different plotlines. It’s fitting, then, that Norco feels like a precious relic from the Sierra-led Golden Age of digital adventures. Geography of Robots’ debut title ponders unchecked capitalism and classism at the heart of America’s oft-neglected Deep South. Moreover, Norco’s retrofuturistic and net.art aesthetic is propped up by some of the best surrealist storytelling I’ve witnessed since Kentucky Route Zero.

Norco imagines the bayou like a collection of interconnected nodes in a map. As I moved around many venues, I read historical manuscripts at abandoned shops and bought dog food from the convenience store. Also, I retrieved hallucinogens from the grimy bathrooms stalls. And finally, I spoke with citizens. Each vignette pops with psychedelic hues – rivers sparkle beneath the tree line, half-light casts long shadows across grassy knolls, watercolor-clouds form above the empty freeway. Norco’s writing might indicate that the city is distorted and diseased, but it’s gorgeous to behold, nonetheless.

Kay, the protagonist of Kay’s story, returns as Louisiana’s titular community nears extinction. Kay’s younger brother Blake is nowhere to be found, and her estranged mother, Catherine, recently succumbed to cancer. Catherine spent the last months of her life researching a floating anomaly in a lake. This led to the suspicions of Shield, an evil oil conglomerate. As Kay, I wandered through a weird, modernized Norco, hoping to find Blake and complete Catherine’s lifework. Norco was full of terrifying revelations and delightful twists. It also has a lot to offer. There’s a lot of dialogue and world-building, but the prose’s dreamlike and philosophical quality makes every block of text a joy to read.   

On the rare occasion that I had trouble keeping up with the lines, I accessed Kay’s “MindMap,” a smart subversion of the conventional quest log where important objects, NPCs, and locations are linked. This allowed me to reminisce and recall important events, relationships, as well as progressing the plot. Norco primarily touts puzzle-based gameplay, but don’t be fooled; the loop is chock-full of its fair share of nuance. One time, I was required to hover above backdrops using a smartphone camera in order to find invisible solutions. This gave revisited locations an extra level of wonder and depth. There are even peripheral puzzles that I could’ve missed if I hadn’t meticulously explored environments with my cursor, masterfully paralleling the enigmatic and illusory nature of the story.  

One thing I dislike about Norco is its overly complicated combat system. From time to time, Kay and her ever-growing band of party members – e.g., a stuffed monkey, a fugitive security droid, etc. – cross paths with aggressors. Attacks are minigames where you can replicate on-screen patterns or click enemy weak spots at timed intervals. These repetitive encounters made me tired quickly. In a game packed with unique design choices, fighting paled in comparison, and I’m relieved there are only a handful of these sequences.

I’ve never played a game like Norco, which elegantly celebrates and admonishes its cultural roots while simultaneously chronicling a strange doomsday scenario. Kay and Catherine’s shattered America is not so dissimilar from our own – burgeoning industrial complexes threaten to displace low-income families, automated systems supersede human workers, and the filthy rich work around the clock to deter upward mobility. The game isn’t always gloomy. On one cool night I stood atop City Hall to gaze at the constellations along with a stranger. An hour earlier, I had flipped through precious memories on my flatscreen TV. Norco is an unforgettable reminder that there’s an inherent beauty behind the madness.