Norco often gets compared to Kentucky Route Zero, another game about localized poverty and near-future dystopia. Kentucky Route Zero took up a lot of space in critical discourse surrounding narrative games over the last decade, I think partially thanks to the fact that it told a story which mirrored the social circumstances of the moment in the genre of magical realism, which is still pretty novel in gaming. I love Kentucky Route Zero, but it tells its story at a remove from its characters; so much of it occurs in the abstract. Try to find Kentucky in Kentucky Route Zero; it’s surprisingly difficult to do.

This is what makes Norco so magical: it’s not only specific, but it’s hyper-specific. I see people I’ve known in many of its characters; there’s this guy named Keith you encounter in a dive bar in this game, who’s like three inches of tech-literacy removed from discovering Infowars, that feels like so many dudes I knew from my shitty little hometown. You also encounter a club full of white kids who’ve paid to attend an event called “bounce night,” an inexplicable cultural phenomenon which nevertheless proves profitable for the club owner. There’s the guy who’s out of a job at the 7-11 because he got replaced by a robot, who’s stuck in an awful situation and is enduring it by being awful in turn. There’s the Garretts, an alt-right cult of dudes who got radicalized on the internet and spend their time mowing NPCs down in Grand Theft Auto. Kay, the main character, is estranged from her only parent for reasons that go undefined, but that nevertheless feel completely real – sometimes these things just happen, and they happen too late to be undone.

There’s also this character in Norco named Leblanc. Leblanc is a private investigator who ends up joining your party towards the last act, and he’s incredible. Every single line delivered by Leblanc is the best line of dialogue ever delivered by anyone, anywhere. He’s smarter than he lets on, is consistently correct in spite of how whacky he initially appears to be, and is unapologetically a human being. He also poops in a room which has a hole in the wall, facing his neighbor’s house. He’s like a smelly Columbo. I love him.

I gather that Norco is read as pessimistic because it refuses to supply its protagonists with solutions to assuage the social and political problems which affect them. I see this take about Norco a lot, actually, and I don’t understand it. Much of Norco’s content is just abstracted, near-future dystopian visions of our contemporary dystopian problems. If that feels bad, it’s supposed to. Things feel bad right now! We live in an era in which tragedy is easy to anticipate and hope is hard to come by. None of our current problems have easy solutions, and every story which explores those problems does not owe its audience the satisfaction of an ‘all will be well’ ending.

More than anything, Norco is a profoundly honest game, and any game which is honest about contemporary American poverty is going to feel pessimistic if you believe media owes you escapism. Norco lets you connect with a community that’s ravaged by a system defined by profoundly anti-social motives and policies. But it still lets you find those connections, even when they’re fleeting. Despite the profound misery experienced by its characters, this is not a game about giving up: it’s a game about engaging with the world as clearly and vividly as you can muster. It's a game about going back to your hometown and being honest with yourself about what’s happened to it, confronting desolation head on. And that pursuit of closure, while cathartic, can hurt.