Norco is a very personal and unusual work of art that takes you to the eponymous (and real) industrial oil town set in an imagined future Louisiana. That is the core characteristic of this point-and-click adventure title from 2022 – its premise is about exploring place and people, and is Norco’s most striking and successful feat. Even though it is a text-heavy game, what it provides could not be replicated as a novel: the experience of being there, how it looks and feels to be in the town of Norco, through its gorgeous environmental pixel art and the way it incorporates mundane things like using a phone. The game trips up in a few areas, such as the fineries of the prose, or some serviceable if awkward gameplay systems, but the crux of Norco is simply about getting to visit this interesting and rather special little world for a while.
(From this point on, while there are no precise spoilers in the review, I discuss the story (the central focus of Norco) and make a few vague mentions of things that appear. Readers who prefer to play totally blind may wish to stop here.)
One of the most important parts of any built-up environment is who can be found there. Out of everything, this is the thing that Norco grasps most strongly: what plain normal people are like. People live, people die, and people can live on as memories (or strange abomination copies of themselves, apparently). They can care too little, or far too much. They tend to be silly. The game never features any sweeping melodrama or deep exploration of the human condition; instead everyone here is less ‘character’ and more ‘inhabitant’. They are extensions of the place, features of the landscape, and ambassadors of a locality’s soul.
Fractured but whole?
This feeling of the game’s people representing something greater is even more strongly felt in the members of the cult, but Norco takes this grand theme down to Earth. It provides fragmented perspectives of an organisation that is typically seen as a monolith; it shatters the stained-glass window to show how each shard can catch the light differently. What unites these cult members is having a place to belong, as well as the influence of a leader who they only really like because they see him as one of them, and not because he is particularly good at anything. As social commentary, this, as well as the cult being a bunch of young lost men, is quite topical (though history is calling me to say that these are actually timeless themes).
Religious themes in general abound in Norco. One of the most curious and unique things it does as a piece of literature is how it portrays technology through the eyes of religion. There is a multitude of approaches to the question of how a science fiction story can bring advanced future tech to its audience, ranging from making the science a focus of the experience (Outer Wilds, Andy Weir or Stanisław Lem), to ignoring the matter and focusing on its effects (most sci-fi themed stories). What Norco instead does is place emphasis on technology, but treat it as unknowable and divine, fitting smoothly into the genre’s famous adage that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ – what greater magic than that of the Almighty?
People in the story try to rationalise the unexplainable in various ways, as people have always done, but the game refuses to indulge you with the answers. Not in an unsatisfying ‘make your own interpretation!’ way, but in a way that is making an artistic statement. Not everything can necessarily be explained or understood, Norco seems to say, and it portrays people’s reactions to this. It prefers to simply show than try to explicitly say anything; a curator rather than a teacher.
In this same vein, the plot is strange and meandering, with you alternating between playing as a returning vagabond in the present, and her dying mother in the past. There is some mystery, but it is muddied by the very lack of clarity that makes this game such a trip – in my mind, that is a worthy trade-off, and fitting for a weird ride through a weird land. The story’s mystique and allure thrives in the confusion, and though janky-feeling, with the plot mostly just dragging you places, those places always have something to show you. As with seemingly all point-and-clicks, there are indeed a few requisite leaps of logic in its puzzles, but nothing a bit of trial and error – or a handy spoiler-free guide – won’t fix. The combat is the most oft-mentioned criticism of the game, amounting to a handful of very simple repetitive minigames that mostly just feel like they are out of place than actively hindering the experience. There are a lot of things that might make Norco somewhat ‘worse’, but at the very least, it sure as heck is unique.
