Norco is a small backwater town located in the heart of the Louisiana swamps. This is a story of confrontation between small people, runaways and vagabonds, a large confusing predatory world of industrial giants and a technological singularity. This game is a southern Gothic story about American wanderings, the complexities of family relationships, acceptance of oneself and one’s homeland. And then there are androids, the organic Internet of dead birds, the digitalization of consciousness and other weird fiction cyberpunk stuff.
Runaways and vagabonds
We’ve all run away from home at least once. They wanted to explore the vast world, hitchhike along the roads of a huge country, escape from provincial dullness. So did Kay, the main character of the game. She wasn’t stopped, or maybe even pushed to this step by the fact that her mother was dying of cancer, especially since cancer in a rundown town occurs in every second resident over the age of fifty and is caused by the activities of an oil refinery, which of course no one can do anything about. Kay’s journey ends when she receives extremely unpleasant news from her brother.
Alluring, endlessly romantic road trips are told to us in a stunningly beautiful opening cutscene. We start our journey at our parents’ house with a sense of guilt, which is reflected on Kay’s face – a neon sad smiley face. The house is almost empty, because my brother has disappeared, and my mother is no longer alive. So the gloomy journey will be accompanied by a Million family android with a million iridescent galaxies on a mirror mask, and, if you’re lucky, your favorite stuffed monkey.
And who's waiting for you in the backyard
Eternity smells of oil
We are waiting for a story about the past of Kay’s mother, for whom, still quite alive, we will need to play in the second act. In many ways, this is a story of confrontation between big business and a small person, without obvious excesses towards the struggle for all the good things. The authors of the game understand perfectly well and make it clear to the player that everything is much more complicated than the black and white palette. Moreover, a significant part of the plot is filled with the surreal psychoactive hallucination of the Beatnik poet. Like Super Duck, for example. I still haven’t figured out what it is, but roughly… This is a virus that creates a network of biocomputers from birds and other organic matter, derived from a digital copy of the consciousness of a dying but still alive old man who can… give you a job through an application on your smartphone! You can also use your smartphone to find religious prophecies in the form of holograms and join the cult of teenagers who occupy an abandoned shopping mall, where they all wear the same shirt with the name “Garrett” on the badges. They seem to want to fly into space, like ghouls from New Vegas.
And the whole story is made in such tragicomic tones, reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s prose. Most of the supporting characters are disarmingly ridiculous, like your best bad friends. What is worth only a private detective, a drunken beggar with digestive problems! Or a lone conspiracy theorist, tearing off the covers with “his website, where they tell the truth”! There’s also a seller of rotten hot dogs, whose quest I strongly recommend completing. All this is, without exaggeration, wildly funny.
The influence of the Beatniks and the new weird literature is very clearly visible here
In general, there is enough absurd and frankly sordid humor, which looks very organic and makes the story more vivid.
Thus, we get a multi-layered work with a central theme worthy of great literature, especially modern American literature. The huge influence of the Beatniks and the “new weird”. This center is heavily influenced by genre literature, such as the standard cyberpunk tropes, and pop-cultural references, in the direction, it seems to me, of the X-files. This is more than enough to become someone’s favorite work of art. At least it is simply impossible to remain indifferent.
Like a real detective
Gameplay-wise, this is a traditional point-and-click of a healthy person, with adequate and quite logical puzzles. There is no hunting for dots as such, in any case, I did not stumble upon it. But you still need to click on screen objects! Through objects and objects, their descriptions and associations, history and the world are revealed.
Prophecies of Apocrypha, the leader of the Garrett cult
There is also a map of the character’s thoughts – a complex, beautiful, and very appropriate thing, because once again a real detective story is being played in the south. However, it carries more of a narrative element. Although it is used literally a couple of times per game to solve some puzzles.
The puzzles required to complete this beautiful story are very simple and reminiscent of Resident Evil with the emphasis on key elements in the text. It’s exciting enough to be a game, not a visual novel, and simple enough to avoid the pain of everyone familiar with Russian quests of the noughties and nineties.
As part of the mini-game, there are arcade boat rides through the marshes. It occurs just a couple of times. But the combat system is much more common, but it is also decorative. Norco refers to the collective unconscious RPG from Nintendo consoles, which the developers probably grew up following: there is a party of heroes, a turn-based battle, but with arcade rhythm elements.
The best cartridge ever
Graphically, Norco is stunningly executed. It resembles classic Lucas Arts quests, such as Full Throttle. Pixel art reveals itself to the fullest when it comes to cutscenes: you want to capture many images as a poster or desktop wallpaper. There’s also a delightful CRT filter, which I strongly recommend turning on right away.
And what a sound there is! Most of all, it resembles a symphony of analog synthesizers. And not real, but exaggeratedly fantastic. It’s like a music author and a sound designer have fused with their music machines, becoming one of the many strange characters in this universe.
Continuing retro console analogies, Norco looks like the best cartridge in the world, which you accidentally found at a flea market and run it on a potbellied kinescope TV in the early morning of the weekend.
Landscapes, industrial and urban
The yellow color constructor
Of all the narrative games, Norco is the most similar to literature. Moreover, the literature is quite specific. It’s like this book under the orange cover of the Alternative series from the noughties. Yes, the one with Chuck Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh. Rather, it is a sub-series of “Alternative fiction”, like the cardiology of “Provision” by Rudy Rucker, the collection of short stories “Ribofunk” by Paul Di Philippe. Absolutely any novel by Manchester recluse Jeff Noon is even better suited, because Norco is a real city in Louisiana, the birthplace of one of the developers. The fantastic element of Norco is also surreal, strange and allegorical. Against his background, the mundanity of the environment and a certain ordinariness of the characters stand out in contrast. Everything here is alive, real. For all the craziness, the story of the fugitive and her mother, who is living her last days, seems almost documentary. It was as if the authors had taken real people they knew and placed them in unprecedented fantasy settings, thereby coloring the ordinariness of their own lives.
At the same time, as in the case of the yellow books, a significant number of ordinary normal players find it “boring”, “incomprehensible” and “suitable for a special way of thinking”. God be their judge, the dreary Normies.
A month or two after passing Norco, the cancerous stench of factories, the rot of swamp marshes, the humid stuffiness of smoky bars and uncleaned apartments, and road dust come to mind. All this is painfully familiar and so familiar, although I, like most of those reading this text, have never been to the shores of the Mississippi.
