Kay returns reluctantly to Norco (a real place in Louisiana, here semi-fictionalised) after learning of her mother’s death. She fled this dead-end town, built to serve an oil refinery, years earlier, and arrives to find her childhood home in a rundown state, like Norco itself. Sifting through the physical and psychic debris to set things straight, Kay is drawn back into the place, and the family she once spurned, touring the town on a motorbike in a game that plays like a dour, magical realist offshoot of the classic LucasArts adventure games of the 90s.
Norco is set in a version of the future where bipedal robots provide security and support around the home. But this is no gleaming sci-fi landscape; it’s humid and buzzing, a place of poverty, its people braced for the next economic or natural disaster. (The game is based on the childhood experiences of developer Yuts, who grew up in Norco.) It’s a town on the brink of bankruptcy, living in the shadow of the remnant of the company that sucked it dry – the American equivalent of Britain’s impoverished mining towns. You explore the world through a series of vistas, all rusty pipelines and arrhythmically glinting lights, where objects and people of interest can be clicked on to excavate information and fresh clues, opening new scenes and stories. To help you keep a handle on the colourful cast, Kay has a mind map that illustrates the relationships between herself and other characters – an effective trick.
Like Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium, the writing here occasionally sacrifices clarity for floridity, although its ornate descriptions do add detail and texture to the rudimentary pixel art. Awarded the inaugural Games award at last year’s Tribeca film festival, Norco’s arrival on consoles later this month (the game launched on Steam earlier this year) will bring its wistful but compelling mysteries and tableaux of working-class despair to a new audience.
Released on 20 October
