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The RPS Advent Calendar 2022, December 16thSwamp people
Swamp people
Day 16 of the RPS Advent Calendar and you can hear the roar of the oil refineries at night as you sleep. You walk the streets of your home town and consider how much and how little has changed. Should you have even come back?
Well, you sort of had to come back to the surreal swamps ofNorco
NORCO Accolades | Coming Soon to Xbox and PlayStationNorc presents a fabulous futuristic Southern Gothic dystopiaWatch on YouTube
NORCO Accolades | Coming Soon to Xbox and PlayStation
Alice Bee:It’s quite hard to sum up Norco in a pithy, once sentence pitch. Okay, so it’s a story-heavy point and click adventure set in an alternate near-future version of Louisiana. You play Kay, recently returned to the small home town you left years before, because you mother has recently died. Only pretty much as soon as you arrive, you find your brother Blake is missing and nobody knows where he’s gone. Not any of the locals. Not your semi-illegal live-in robot with a face full of stars. No one.
Things escalate quickly. Almost immediately you discover that you mum was probably involved in some kind of industrial espionage. Your point of view switches between Kay and her mumCatherine, and you discover weird cult-like religions, a shady app, a company that copies people’s memories (and you get to select which ones are importat). You take diversions into weird folk tales that sound semi-mythological. It’s heightened and weird and increasingly surreal.
The writing is fantastic, managing to bring you both intimacy as well as vast strangeness. I’ve never been to Norco, much less Louisiana, but Kay’s familiarity with the place in the game became my familiarity, and the ways Norco had changed since she left became jarring to me, too. At the same time, the family drama is woven into a tapestry of huge issues: religion, indentity, self, and a corporation ravaging a community.
Katharine:Cor, Norco sure does go places, huh? Its initial mysteries of your missing brother and what really happened to your mum were already pretty strong hooks as point and click games go, but man alive, I was not expecting to be transported into the avian hivemind of maybe a semi-conscious AI, nor pulled into a strange cult that’s seemingly formed around it. Its stunning vistas still linger in my memory long after finishing the game, and its wistful dialogue easily stands out as some of this year’s best games writing. A very special thing indeed.
Alice0:I’ve not yet finished Norco but I have enjoyed it so far. I should remedy that over the break. It isn’t even that long. Shame on me.
