![]() ![]() This is still all texture though, and regardless of the odd moment where it can get a bit much it's always delivered with the kind of authenticity that can only be found when something's made from hard touchpoints and personal memories, about a creator's own hometown or culture. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. But then later on it's happy to go full word-gumbo when you're diving through space and time in the swamp, or reading alligator-narrated poems about "fisherfools" who "hang hooks from the trees with chicken thighs." The game makes a rightful point of mocking the region's portrayal in Hollywood media (I had fun opting for replies like "crawfish devil" for a killer and "slathering with oyster flavored peanut butter" for murder, for instance, which the director laps up readily). Norco's more indulgent moments mostly stick out in the memory because of a funny early exchange it sets up, where an ignorant and snobbish out-of-town director asks your help with local phrases to use in his gritty deep-south detective thriller. Norco's genre cousins have struggled with the same thing, though - see: Disco Elysium, Kentucky Route Zero - and it's mostly just a passing moment that these games need to get out of their system. This is always the risk with the kind of noiry, magical realism-adjacent genre, where clever writers can just occasionally wander into too-clever-for-their-own good territory. As it switches forms it can often settle back into the safety of a striking image layered behind waffly, verbose, poetic prose. ![]() It's always delivered with the kind of authenticity that can only be found when something's made from hard touchpoints and personal memories.Īt times, Norco is a little overwritten. You'll fight down-and-outs who don't deserve it, play tricks on the disenchanted boys of the internet who do, dig up conspiracies, chase leads, scribble numbers on pieces of paper, tie up some loose threads with cleverly hinted references and miss others - and above all toil in the mud as you wrestle with the system at large. puzzler? - designed to fit where they're needed, Norco's strength is its ability to transform before your eyes, to evade you, to slip between fingers after morphing in your hands. Ostensibly a point-and-click but really a scattering of mechanics and genres - text-adventure, turn-based party battler, boat-navigating. To go much further than that would be to spoil things, but there's great texture here beyond plot. Naturally what follows is a mystery, but it's a deeply captivating one, a draining plughole dragging you down into the toxic muck of Norco's poisoned community. You, a rebellious, faceless teenage girl, have returned home to the news that your mother, a mercurial and dangerously curious former professor, has died of cancer, and your troubled brother disappeared. A kind of non-town named after the New Orleans Refining Company established there in 1911, video game Norco is closely inspired by the real thing (replace "Shell petroleum" with "Shield chemical"), with time skipped forward an unknown number of years to a point where the climate crisis has begun to pull the world apart. Norco, Louisiana is a real place, settled on a part of the Mississippi delta surrounding a major Shell petroleum refinery. The premise here is a world of industrial, environmental, and societal decay. Here's a Norco trailer highlighting its free demo of Act One. A brief, clever little late-game reference to one of my off-hand choices in this opening had me wondering how much this impacts - I suspect not much, and hope not much either, if only because I'm unnaturally keen to have Hoovered up every little drop of Norco's story. Norco begins with you telling your own backstory, or if not telling then unearthing it, sorting through dialogue options to fill in blanks, as you will for much of Norco's six-ish hours of narrative. Still, it takes some time to draw that out. A playful spirit bouncing off its sharply political straight-edge. But beyond Norco's initial, slightly po-faced outer layer is something odd and adventurous. It's just this type of seriousness can occasionally slip into something a bit self-regarding, a bit dour. ![]() The seriousness of Norco's first act is exactly the type of thing that wins you features in the New Yorker and inaugural awards at Tribeca. And on the surface a serious one, too, with all its staid point-and-click vistas and dense blocks of prose. The first from independent studio Geography of Robots, it's a dark game, a story about a region's bleak, collapsing future. I was a little worried Norco wouldn't be very much fun. Norco is a beautiful, surprising, human, and utterly magnetic debut. ![]()
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