SLOW BURN IN THE SOUTH
‘NORCO’ IS CLEVER AND THE YEAR’S BEST GAME SO FAR
THE FIRST timewe see Norco, La., in all its pixelated glory, it’s in an image that frames smokestacks and refinery equipment like a mechanical city. We’re told there’s a hum — an “endless sigh” — and we see a soft glow that cancels out the sun and the moon so residents see only a translucent sky. That horizon is all projected flames, implying the land and the people below are living out their lives as a slow burn.
Welcome to a part of America known as “Cancer Alley.” And then “Norco” gets weird.
The game is at once familiar and outlandish, a text-and-artdriven interactive adventure with a sci-fi bent. But this is not so much the future as it is an alternate reality. “Norco” paints the picture of a dying America, where the rich dream of privatized space flight and apps turn the talent-lite into niche celebrities. Sound familiar? Don’t despair. “Norco’s” world is enticing — one that is, yes, full of web-driven conspiracies and nut jobs, but is also the sort of crash we can’t look away from.
That’s because “Norco” makes us smile with wonder. “Norco” is our world, just slightly altered. It’s also the best game released thus far in 2022.
The game gets underway with us controlling an adult woman named Kay, who has returned to her childhood bedroom after a family tragedy. A stuffed monkey sits next to a laptop, where Kay’s brother is hanging out on internet message boards that he should probably leave unexplored. The inanimate monkey challenges us to a staring contest, and after we distract ourselves with a simple mini game of trying to match the placement of a pair of circles, we accept the dare and lose the bout to the plushie.
“Norco” then takes us on a journey into a melancholic world full of imaginative amazement. We meet a giant bird with headsized teeth. We interact with a crocodile who goes on a revenge mission, via a puppet show, against a man who tried to take him as a pet. And we witness a world rattled by climate change, where the robots will outlive us, but they, too, are straddled with ennui, spending hours in stasis “like any discarded thing.”
“Norco’s” magical realism is at once patient and relentless. Each scene is a pixelated canvas filled with mysteries to uncover. We want to linger with them as badly as we want to scour them for clues that will send this narrative into hyperdrive.
But our mission is constantly detoured by curiosities, narrative twists or clever writing. A traveling companion listens only to Christmas music. A bar filled with white kids culturally appropriating Black dances sits in a “subcultural estuary, only one change of ownership from becoming an upscale wine bar.” A book details how New Orleans can be reimagined as a liveaction role-playing game for those who love disasters.
“Norco” is dark but not foreboding — “Blade Runner’s” yearning for hope feels like an influence, as does the cryptic and at times spectral trappings of fellow game “Kentucky Route Zero.” Both are meditations on American class and kookiness, and making sense of a world that aims to confuse. We spend our time in “Norco” with those on society’s outskirts, only in this vision, there is no longer any center worth clamoring toward.
Here, the town detective has juicy tales to tell, but he also can’t be bothered to investigate if nature calls. There may be aliens, but those mysterious flying structures could also just be gases taking flight from the poisoned Mississippi River. Hard to say, but political and religious extremists will become darlings of social media by creating a conspiracy around them. Who, after all, wants to deal with reality’s complexities and paperwork when the upper class sees an increasingly uninhabitable Earth as a playground?
Our surrogate, Kay, ran away from her Louisiana home to live as a vagabond. She’s already been in the Midwest, Southwest and West when we meet her, finding a world where war exists for meme-making and the internet, and the lies and schemes it props up have become such a nuisance to society that there’s a growing movement to rip up cell towers and destroy databanks. Kay tosses her phone into the Rio Grande before returning to Louisiana to care for her lost soul of a younger brother after her mother has died of cancer.
Only he’s missing. “Norco” toys with players as to what kind of game it will become. A detective adventure to track down our sibling? Maybe, but we soon learn our mother was caught up in questionable plots before she died. Her home, for instance, was ransacked by Shield Oil, a not-so-subtle Shell Oil stand-in, after her death, and we want to know what the firm is after. It’s implied it’s something rotten — or mystical — in the river, and suddenly “Norco” becomes something of a heist game.
But we also encounter cults; one is led by kids who look like they’re playing a game of “Stranger Things.” Their leader, it’s implied, is a social media star, but we know he’s little more than a suburban brat who has read a few philosophy books. He and his followers inhabit a deserted suburban mall, where towering statues to oil become visions of escape to other planets. Recruitment is completed via an in-game augmented reality app. Apps rule society in “Norco” and are the key to getting in almost anywhere, including a city hall after hours where even the politicians are smitten with the conspiracy theorists.
Throughout, we go back and forth in time, playing as Kay or her mother, Catherine. Yet for all the game throws at us, we are never lost. “Norco” has smartly created a “mindmap” of key people and places. We can visit Kay’s mindmap and devour her past and plot her future as if we are flipping through pages of an irresistible book. There’s lots of text here, combined with some light inventory-based puzzles — fans of “The Secret of Monkey Island” or “Kentucky Route Zero” will feel at home — but “Norco” also presents us with interactive twists.
For instance, to penetrate the Shield Oil compound, we must complete a series of mini games. Sometimes we fight robots via matching tiles; sometimes we must rearrange security drones by finding a computer that has hacked into the oil company, which rests on a former plantation site. We’re given a limited number of “moves” to rearrange the drones on a digital map before we’re discovered by Shield security. But “Norco,” developed for home computers by the collective Geography of Robots — the lead designer goes only by Yuts and is an accomplished pixel artist — should be approachable to all skill levels.
Throughout, we see glimpses of gratuitous parties, learn of racial and class divides, and see the desperate get swindled by tech companies who promise the ability to upload memories. Suburban New Orleans, as written by the game, is painted as a series of “drive-thru chicken, car audio, mattresses direct to you, water towers and powerlines and crumbling concrete and traffic signs, abortive landscaping attempts.”
In this familiar setting, “Norco” finds mystery, giving us a lead character in Kay who wanted to escape her hometown. She couldn’t, and “Norco” turns the place into a modern enigma, one we as players don’t want to leave. We ourselves become “disaster tourists” in a vision of America that’s downtrodden, allegorical and just the right amount of unearthly.