The musty and willow-bound swamps of South Louisiana are metastasized in all directions. For millions of years, these soulless puddles have been watching the sun rise in the East, and they will inevitably see it dive below the horizon for the last time. Then the swamps will boil, the creatures swarming in them will turn to ashes, and darkness will descend on the world — viscous and undisturbed — in which there is no place for despair or regret. The once bustling Earth will be enveloped in serenity.
No one knows when it's time to pay for the millennia of others' sins, so life is still in full swing. Factories are haunting the skies in every corner of the United States, churning out plastic knickknacks, crappy furniture, and conscious robots. Rebels travel across the Great Plains, eager to overthrow an objectionable government with terror.
The Luddites are looking for the veins of the Internet and cutting them into a shapeless mass in order to condemn humanity to information isolation. And the Big Apple, along with the entire Eastern Seaside, has fallen into ruins, dormant under a blanket of radioactive ash. This world is sinking into timelessness. His past has lost all significance, his present promises nothing but bitterness, and his future lies in the shadow of an imminent apocalypse.
Kay has been wandering around the United States for the past few years. She hitchhiked from one dying backwoods to another, slept under the open sky and rummaged through the garbage dumps in search of food that had not completely rotted. Despite some inconveniences, Kay was free all these years—from her own memories, the outdated American dream, and the hopes of others.
But every bliss has a price, so by the start of the adventure “Norco” Kay leaves his free life and returns to his father's house. If his father's sad ghost used to roam his rooms, now he has been joined by his mother, who pretended to the last that cancer couldn't break her. But metastases bound this troubled woman's heart before she met her prodigal daughter.
Essentially, Kay is returning to what she was desperate to flee from — to the ruins of a family that never knew happiness. And these cold guns are dozing in Norco, an industrial suburb of New Orleans. A place with a couple of hundred houses that have survived more than one flood and are now smashing with dampness has lost all hope. It's only alive because of the plant, which is sprawled across the area with a stinking wound. A little more and Norco will breathe his last.
“Norco” has a familiar point-and-click adventure structure. The locations contain characters of varying degrees of madness and optional points of interest that Kay can express melancholic thoughts about. Although the game's mechanics are not revolutionary, they ingeniously complement and distort the conservative genre.
“Norco” does not have the usual puzzles, and the ones that do exist are inextricably linked to the narrative and understandable logic, albeit mutilated by external circumstances. Therefore, the main goal of the game is to tell the story of a vast and outlandish world through a dying industrial town and a handful of its inhabitants who have never known love.
Situations regularly alternate, almost turning events inside out. Developers are juggling interfaces, presenting visual and textual images, and regularly introducing new mechanics. As paradoxical as it may sound, despite the weight of the moldy air, the journey through the Louisiana swamps to the very end remains fresh and unpredictable.
Among other things, “Norco” takes the idea of “High Tech, Low Life” to a new level. In the game universe, technology is as close as possible to the usual cyberpunk: corporations are producing intelligent robots, digitizing consciousness and preparing to conquer space. Humanity only needs to take a step to enter a new era in which, for example, the heroes of the adventure game “The Red Strings Club” exist (read our text).
The beauty is that the beautiful world of the future is always on the periphery. The New Orleans neighborhood, where the action takes place, represents the reverse side of cyberpunk, that “lowland”. This is a godforsaken backwater that is drowning in a huge swamp under the weight of its own regrets, and it does not need either high technology or faith in the future. The only thing that is appreciated in these parts is people who have been maimed by life.
To match William Faulkner's novels, “Norco” explores human destinies, using the environment solely as a picturesque backdrop. It is not visual images that rule the show, but the irrepressible imagination that permeates the local text. This is where all the longing for the American South lies, which will not have even a hundred millennia to come to terms with defeat in the Civil War and its own decline.
In fact, the game takes place in two planes. One is represented by Kay, the other by her deceased mother. Events are constantly switching from one heroine to another, confronting them with new friends and eager to take them to the mysterious corners of the night. What is happening is happening so quickly that impermanence is perhaps the only thing that is unshakable at Norco.
But Kay, like any decent Revachol detective, conducts political debates with his own tie (read our text), woven from memories. They resemble a blackboard in a police station filled with details of an unsolved case, and allow you to refresh the essence of what is happening at any time. And by the end, it surprisingly turns out that almost every minor detail is an integral piece of an impressive puzzle.
“Norco” is the obstinate child of “Kentucky Route Zero” and “Disco Elysium”, who enjoys phantasmagoric imagery and despairing lyrics. It looks vaguely like a book in which illustrations are only needed for the entourage, and the key ideas are hidden between words that peer into the echoes of a cyberpunk surrounded by maimed fates and the Louisiana swamps. And this child has neither past nor future—only a painful illusion of the present.
