Norco (2022)

NORCO had its teeth in me from the moment I first saw it in the steam shop. The pixel emoticon faces stared at me through the cover art. I opened up the game after the sun set on the first day of Spring.

NORCO is a game, and a real place in the suburbs New Orleans. What began as a multimedia doccumentary project about the post-Katrina Louisiana landscape became, over the course of seven years, a dialogue-driven point-and-click narrative adventure game. After seven years of development, the factual doccumentation is all-but gone from the game, leaving behind a profound, reverent feeling of familiarity which touches even the strangest parts of the story.

The story shies away from neither strangeness nor spirituality. The game is ambiguous in its theism, focusing on christian ideology from the mundane to the outlandish. Each element of strangeness, however, is harboured in some point of reality; you drive your bizarre errands for a new aberrant intelligence using a rideshare app. The game makes a point of interweaving its magical realism into ordinary places - with ordinary people - forcing the player's eye to things they might otherwise prefer to ignore.

NORCO's characterisation is the most reverant thing about it. The people we encounter are often absurd and frequently unpleasant, just as people tend to be. They are also desperately lovable, as people tend to be. I found a unique fondness for the detective LeBlanc, who develops from a callous asshole to a warm, comedic figure as the narrative progresses. The writing of this game has a gift for detailing the complicated edges of a character, preventing them from being reduced into a simple, digestible shape by the person playing the game.

So, there it is. NORCO is a game full of uncomfortable truths and unforgivable faith. It is a beautiful tapestry of a difficult, unsightly place to call home. I left my own, just like Kay did, 4 years ago without looking back. When I tell people about it, I say that it was bad. I file the edges down; a bad family and a bad neighbourhood. But in NORCO, I saw pixel sunlight wash over the grass just like it does in my own memories of home. Maybe someday, I will find a way to tell people I miss it.

I just finished the game. I'm going to keep this in an update, rather than my review, because I want to keep the review spoiler-light. I am sure there is another ending, perhaps more. Quite possibly the ending i got was not the 'best' ending. But fuck. It meant the world to me.

We get onto the spaceship, and Kay is chosen by the alien/angel in the same way her mother was. I get through the fights. LeBlanc is down and looking rough. I leave him on the balcony to continue ahead, hoping to find my brother. It is the first time in a long time I've been the only member of my party. I go through the rooms, the religious ramblings of the ceo's daughter's ghost - who seemed to be pawpaw - confirming that we are the last descendents of jesus. I reach the room, where my screaming brother is tied to a chair. When I try to save him, I am intercepted and told to sit down.

The progression up until now has been fairly linear, but I am a roleplayer first and foremost. My Kay wouldn't just sit as she is told. I backtrack to the balcony where Leblanc is, and find him gone. I hover over the scene. A small diving icon appears over the water.

As Kay hoists herself over the balcony, the blast-off sirens start blaring. Pawpaw emerges to scream in horror as I dive into the water. I hold myself down to stay clear of the explosion that kills my last surviving family member and the insane man who kept him hostage. Leblanc comes to pick me up in his boat. And I am not sorry. I am not sorry for leaving, for surviving and for surviving once again. Kay is the same age as me, and estranged for the same length of time that I have been. It doesn't matter if what they say is true, about you being the chosen one. It just doesn't matter.

Safe to say, I'm not going to try to get other endings myself. I'll look them up though, and process it all before I do my review. NORCO may just be my favourite game of all time, now.

Almost finished with NORCO and I don't want it to end because it's so obscenely perfect. But i also have utter faith it isn't going to overstay its welcome. Also it is a testament to the storytelling that i have continued playing because i have physically jumped 3 times in the past 2 hours. Hang on I'm just gonna talk bullshit for a second don't mind me.

I KNEW IT WAS YOU SINCE THE MASOLEUM NOTE PAWPAW. stop putting your scary face on my cult phone app okay? it's always the true believers. and DAMNIT million i loved you. you were such a liar though girl!! Leblanc however is my favourite. That man and his stupid toilet.

A friend was kind enough to gift me a spare code to Norco. I almost didn't take it: I'd recently given up on Disco Elysium, a game with near-universal acclaim, and I worried the similarly text-heavy but comparatively niche Norco would suffer the same fate.

Thankfully I took the code, because Norco really burrowed its way into my brain.

Right off the bat, this is a very thoughtfully designed point-and-click adventure. Solutions aren't spelled out for you, but hints are plentiful should you want them. The pace is brisk, yet there are plenty of alternative choices and uncommon events to discover. Light minigames add variety to sections of combat or traversal. I never felt pressured to pixel-hunt, save-scum or consult a walkthrough.

That solid design drew me deep into Norco's narrative. The uniqueness of the near-future dystopian Louisiana setting is impressively matched by a cast of complex, specific characters and a story that engages with a surprising mix of themes. The naturalistic dialog and pervasive sense of humor kept me engaged through far more dark and upsetting story beats than I thought I'd have the stomach for.

I don't necessarily like everything about Norco. I find certain moments and characters truly repellent. But those elements feel purposeful, 100% in service of the overall experience… an experience that doesn't overstay its welcome, and continues to occupy my thoughts days after completing my playthrough.

No Steam cloud saves? That sucks, I wanted to jump into my existing game on my TV, but my game was started on Steam Deck. Apparently it's due to a problem that Raw Fury, the publisher, has with cloud saves and they are the ones handling it for Norco. I wonder if that means Sable also doesn't have cloud saves.

Update: it doesn’t. Raw Fury games don't support Steam Cloud. Damn, that really sucks.

NORCO is a point and click adventure that honestly surprised me by its end - not just for being gorgeous but for having a challenging narrative under the guise of very approachable gameplay.

The game takes place in an alternate (assumed to be futuristic or near-future based on the tech involved) version of Norco, Louisiana, where you play a woman returning to town after her mother's death. What seems to be a gloomy portrait of nature and community ravaged by capitalism and climate change gives way to a much stranger and more intriguing turn of events as viral consciousness and religious fascism collide into one crazy (and short) adventure.

The game has a standard point and click interface, but is also comfortable enough to play with on a controller thanks to buttons that can speed cursor movement and mappings to each piece of the UI. Inventory, party, and locations are all very accessible. Challenges involve dragging and dropping items, talking to the right people to progress, doing quick minigames for turn-based battles, and incorporating a "voice memo" system to get the right lines to the right people. It's very easy and while there's a mode to remove hints the player will rarely ever be stuck. That said, there are plenty of secrets (and a hidden ending!) that rewards people who pay attention while the rest of us are breezing by with the story.

And what a story it is! Traversing across two generations (Kay and her deceased mother) the player gets in touch with their decrepit but nostalgic home, breaks into high tech industrial facilities, dives for strange findings in the ghost bayou, doing seemingly meaningless tasks for a peculiar entity, and dealing with a fascist cult that hits way too close to home. Magical realism and the intersection of colonial scars and environmental transformation run so heavily in this work that it'd be a shame not to chew on it and discuss with your friends.

The music and art are icing on the cake. Featuring legitimately the most gorgeous and simultaneously grungy pixel art I've ever seen in my life, the ambient electronic tracks help settle in a quiet and odd atmosphere that fits right in with the game. Honestly, I could take screenshots of every area in this game and put it in an art gallery.

NORCO is a game that might be brushed off as too easy, and admittedly adventure fans looking for a challenge simply won't find much there. That said, the narrative is tightly made but open-ended by design, creating a much more honest and poetic understanding of a town rocked by disaster than similar games could muster. There is beauty in this decay.

I had heard absolute wonders about this game, but my own experience was a bit different. Not that I disliked NORCO, but I didn’t think it was as incredible or deep as some have made it out to be. This is a narrative adventure if the vein of old-school point & click adventures, featuring no voice dialogue, a very retro art style, an unexpected party system, a couple of interesting mechanics, and a somewhat original take on turn-based combat which sometimes feels more like a gimmick than an important aspect of the game.

On paper, however, NORCO’s highlight is its story, weaving an intricate, sometimes almost senseless narrative set in an alternative version of Norco, Louisiana. Although it just seems trippy at first, it eventually gets to the point of silliness with how far fetched it becomes, and its humour often seems at odds with what it’s trying to say. Every now and then this feels like a wasted opportunity, simply because the real-life dystopia within NORCO - which is after all the anchor of its emotional pull - seems to take too much of a backseat when that happens. Nevertheless the story is told well, making solid use of text-based dialogue and an appealing fantasy-like imagery to give it a distinct feel. The interesting thing is that there is almost a gestalt quality to NORCO: there is nothing individually that makes it truly stand out, but most everything if offers - visuals, music, storytelling and characters - blends in surprisingly well to make this an engaging experience for the most part.

I’m certain this is the type of game that will hit much harder if you are familiar with the region it focuses on, or at least if you can relate to it on some level. But even if you’re not, if its style seems appealing to you, I’d say NORCO is well worth a go. Worst case scenario, you will have spent a handful of hours unravelling a really weird tale filled with religious, anarchic and sci-fi undertones. Best case, you will love it as so many seem to. 7/10

As someone who's not born in America and especially not in Louisiana, I think NORCO is a game that is pretty hard to analyze efficiently. Regardless, it's a game that looks and sounds great, with some psychedelic visuals made out of the best pixel art I've seen in a good bit. The writing is also top notch, both in how the local dialects are portrayed (I think ?) and how every character in the cast is portrayed. The narrative is also quite out there, tackling a wide array of socio-economical themes and playing with religious imagery a fair amount.

My only gripe is probably the gameplay elements. Despite being fairly rare, as the game is a sort of adventure point and click experience, the fight minigames drove me insane, and even at the end of the game, I felt like it was pure luck whether or not I actually hit them right. Just made me groan in frustration anytime a fight would start, though it fortunately didn't happen often.

NORCO is overall a pretty great experience on the narrative and visual front, but I felt it became dull and frustrating when minigame segments started appearing. Definitely a worthwhile experience still.

NORCO is a mechanically simple but engrossing adventure game carried by its unique style and strong storytelling. It depicts elements of the culture and socioeconomic issues in Louisiana with interesting layers of magical realism and science fiction over top. The art is fantastic, characters are strange and memorable, and there are lots of little surprises and oddities to discover that make it an enjoyable time, even though it gets pretty dark at times.

I would suggest this to fans of Disco Elysium, maybe Night in the Woods, maybe Kentucky Route Zero. Just don't expect this to be quite the same style as any of those, it's its own thing that just operates in a similar space. I myself have very different opinions of all those games, but I just generally feel like they could share an audience and a few parts of their overall picture and scope.

This is a text-heavy game, and that writing can be pretty dense and flowery in a way that I expect would put many people off of it. Maybe it's not fair to say they were trying too hard, but that thought definitely crossed my mind early on. As it went on though, and the game got more dialogue-heavy rather than description-heavy, it became more digestible. There is definitely a flavor and character to this writing, great at creating a feeling of mystery and building out this world. I'd say if you're fed up with it after an hour, you can stop and get your Steam refund or whatever, but if you're a bit bewildered and intrigued, definitely keep going.

Outside clicking through text and dialogue options, the game is basically a simple point-and-click adventure, where you'll fast-travel between locations, examine and interact with objects, and do very light puzzle-solving. Sometimes gameplay takes the form of little minigames/diversions that change up how you interact with the world, including a very rarely-used combat system. Those little changes from the main loop usually felt not terrible, a decent change of pace, but maybe not entirely necessary and fun.

The real fun at the end of the day comes in the story anyway, reading every little bit of text you can find to learn about the world and characters, making dialogue choices and other decisions that may impact the ending. Overall, this is one of the most consistently enjoyable new games I've played from the first third of this year, with what little complaints I have easily falling to the wayside in the face of how neat its story and overall vibe is. Pretty short game, so if it looks interesting, give it a shot.