Norco

Norco is a point-and-click adventure that moves in a frantic place, structured like a fever dream, depicting a land immersed in chaos, where the people are confused, lost, and dangerous. It’s a game that is not afraid to double down on the bizarre, providing a strange and memorable experience.

It opens with a series of descriptions that set the pace and tone of the story, leaving you bewildered as they move quickly from one subject to the next. The first ones show an industrialized society where pollution is a part of life – it harkens back to the shot in Blade Runner that introduces the setting with refineries and plumes of fire. You click and the scene changes, you are now inside a truck, sleeping. Click again, and there’s talk of war, click and you’re letting Blake down one more time, click and there’s a strange, menacing man uttering your name: Kay. When she wakes up from the nightmare, the bedroom provides a welcoming change in tone: it appears to be a warm and cozy environment, featuring even a cute stuffed monkey by the window.

Initial impressions can be deceiving, however. The world you wake up in Norco is just a slightly more cohesive version of that initial dream. The protagonist’s home is a battered place, dirty and chaotic, with microwaves filled with cockroaches, painkillers spilled across the counter, and even the monkey looks menacing on close inspection.

Kay’s house is a place haunted by the past. You turn on the television to tune in to her dead mother’s memories – images of refineries, skulls, and the night traffic appear on the screen instead of the news. This already spells out how the narrative in Norco runs away from realism, using metaphors, symbols, and the absurd to develop its themes, characters, and setting.

The poor state of the protagonist’s house mirrors that of her town, Norco, which is soon described as an “old abandoned refinery town on a ghost of a river.” It’s a frightening place, marked by death and loneliness – Kay returns to Norco after her mother passes away, and discovers that her brother, Blake, is nowhere to be found. The whole region of Louisiana is called a “muck”, a “dump”, a “pit” and even “the lowest world” by its people. It’s a place filmmakers go to add “color” to their pictures, looking for exotic locales with eccentric people; not a place to build a home for yourself.

You can meet a movie director who asks Kay to give him specific slangs to help make his film more colorful, and you can trick him, spouting gibberish that he buys because he doesn’t know any better – there’s a line where he dreams about this picture winning him his first… Golden Globe, so we know he’s full of it.

The setting of Norco is the beating heart of the narrative. It’s a horrible town, flooded with debt and decay, where the people have to take up odd jobs, beg for money, or work for an app, receiving small change just to survive. It’s a place where street vendors sell hot dogs a decade old and where everyone looks shady and cruel. It’s a place where Santa Claus looks like this:

But it’s also a region full of secrets and mystery. The swamps and bayous of Louisiana are framed as mystical locales, where ghosts, memories, and sentient alligators lurk in the shadows. Do you trust the alligator that asks you to murder a hunter or the man that asks you to hunt the beast? Either way, the game transforms itself briefly into the horror game Sunless Sea, as you navigate dark waters in search of answers in a staged play. Norco’s situations are all this bizarre.

There are elements not only of the supernatural at play here, but also of sci-fi. One of Kay’s companions is a robot, Million, who has a blank stare and an unnerving design – technology both helps and endangers people in Norco. Million represents perfectly this ambivalence, as he is trying to assist in her quest to find her brother, but some characters keep asking if he belongs to the company that runs the town – and which has eyes everywhere – leading us to distrust his motives.

The plot is convoluted by design, made to shock and confuse. It revolves around this company, some alien technology, a monstrous duck, the descendant of Jesus Christ, and a cult of boys named Garret, who hide in a mall. There are some flashbacks where you control Kay’s mother, Catherine, who once found a mysterious glowing object in a lake while trying to save some money for her family. Catherine had terminal cancer, which pushed her to download an app that pays for running some strange errands for a mysterious employer.

The characters Kay and her mother meet – Kay herself has no discernible face, being represented by a creepy smiley face – are all broken individuals, melancholic and hopeless. Exploited by big companies that dispose of them without a second thought, the people of Norco are poor and lost. Catherine meets a man who laments having to stay late at night working instead of being with his family: providing for them means staying away from them most of the time, and all so that some people with expensive suits can amass a ridiculous amount of wealth – and a monstrous duck can accomplish his nefarious goal.

Inequality and misery make the people of Norco ripe for manipulation, and religion is always there, offering answers and a direction in life, plucking them easily. The Garrets are the grotesque manifestation of this reality. People call them “mall Nazis” but they actually don’t believe in anything. As one of the Garrets explains to Kay, “It’s like a cult but cooler. It’s like, you join, and you immediately have friends and a dad who wants to hang out with you.” They are lost kids – no job, no caring families, no prospect of a brighter future – that will gladly follow whoever gives them a purpose. They’ll gladly become Nazis, racists, or religious fanatics if they can just belong.

The refineries that mark the landscape of Norco harm and deform nature and exploit its people, creating desolation and misery at the same time, which in turn breeds hatred, violence, and fanaticism. The antagonists in the story could never have amassed so much power without inequality: religion in Norco thrives precisely because of it.

Meanwhile, when Kay crashes into a party organized by a major company, the scene looks like something out of Eyes Wide Shut: the rich hiding beneath masks, ashamed of their actions and desires. The ones without a mask still appear with their backs to us, covered in shadows, distant and hostile: these people explore the earth, the town, and its citizens, they consume and observe curiously the effects of their decisions, assured of their power, but are still afraid of looking their victims on the eye.

Norco’s story flirts with horror, being a gothic tale at heart, with the past often assuming a phantasmagorical form. The oppressive atmosphere is everywhere: even Kay’s mind palace, which you can access at any time, is a dark place populated by gnarly trees and a scary man. The bizarre elements are also there for a purpose. The characters in the game are lost, frightened, and confused, so the almost nonsensical nature of the events pushes us to share the same feelings. Even the game’s prose, which often digresses in convoluted symbolisms, serves a similar purpose, depicting a strange world in a strange way, perfectly matching the powerful images on the screen.

The game also plays with its form: it’s presented as a point-and-click adventure but progresses more like a visual novel, containing very few puzzles, which are very simple in nature. Sometimes, it turns itself into a text-based adventure, sometimes there’s is turn-based combat with surprising party members, sometimes there are minigames, and sometimes it turns into Sunless Sea, giving us control of a tiny ship in a top-down perspective. The gameplay in Norco is as unpredictable as its story: both are full of possibilities, able to go anywhere at any time, bound by nothing but theme.

Norco has an unforgettable setting, presenting Louisiana as a mystical but tragic place, full of ghosts and broken people. It’s a strange and creative point-and-click adventure that uses its bizarre situations to great effect.

April 30, 2022.