This review contains spoilers
A great premise and stellar art design act as solid foundation to prop up an absolutely rickety mess of narrative and gameplay execution.
In Norco I saw something I rarely see in games: an exploration of places like home. Hailing from one of the poorest states in the American South (although Oklahoma's inclusion on that list is sometimes contentious), I've seen firsthand how economic evolution has slowly eroded the communities, homes, and spirits that once defined the great American Heartland.
Hell, as someone from these parts who's got an interest in art...these types of narratives have always fascinated me: the Southern Gothic of O'Connor or Faulkner, the Modernist treatments by Steinbeck and Ellison, etc. These stories take symbols familiar to us--family, faith, perseverance, community, fear, redemption, isolation, etc. and allow us to see alien groups (poor southern blacks, "Okies," American Indians, etc.) through understandable and sympathetic eyes. It allows us to see beyond the thick accents and rudimentary lifestyles and recognize the real human lives, struggles, and emotions behind it all.
So here we have Norco, which first appeared to me via a Tribeca Games Spotlight in 2021 next to other greats like 12 Minutes. The premise was perfect: Norco was one of those places many couldn't believe was real--one of those 'on the nose' symbols that you'd probably think came out of a bad book. But, like with much of the industrial south (as well as the northern Rust Belt), Norco is a sad fact of reality--one begging for artistic exploration. That might sound harsh, a sort of 'culture vulture' thing, but I mean it without a shred of irony. Just as Steinbeck had used the amalgam plight of real Okies escaping to California for The Grapes of Wrath, I think plenty of towns like Norco deserve to have stories told that push awareness to the greater public.
What's in an Opening?
But alas, within literal seconds of pressing start, Norco has already blown it. It's opening montage is perhaps the worst opening I have ever seen to a game--at least in terms of establishing mood, tone, and setting.
First, the game forces players to make narrative choices involving characters we have no understanding of. I don't know or care how well Kay slept based on their proximity to oil fields--I don't even know who the hell Kay is yet. I understand Kay is supposed to be a proxy for me, but I've just goddamn showed up here. I haven't absorbed the mood or tone of the game. I've got no attachment to anything yet and no headspace with which I can make a decision I give two shits about. In fact, I would say that even asking these of the player so quickly serves as a lazy cheat for the writers to avoid writing an actual mood setting hook. They instead rely on a basic player choice to invest you when you've got no reason or incentive to actually make choices yet.
Second, the game's godawful prose attempts to lure you in with some Mccarthy-esque delivery but bats your attention away with the same overwritten, over-precious exposition and framing that plague all beginner 'art' writers. Lines like
The war was a meme that set Albuquerque on fire.
Should make anyone roll their eyes (or laugh their ass off) as hard as the newest YA books should. Especially when literally moments later you're being forced to answer if you tried to fucking pray, sleep, or "forget" while hiding in a freightliner escaping the 'foot soldiers of a pop up junta.'
Remember: we're 35 seconds into this game.
To Point? Or Click?
Keeping in line with the laughably sophomoric opening, Norco decides to take so much influence from the most obvious sources that it destroys what little impact the game could have had left. Its point and click nature means that LucasArts (primarily Ron Gilbert's trademark blend of off-kilter black comedy) is front and center the entire journey. Combine this with Norco's bleak premise and you have a cocktail mix as good as Toothpaste and OJ.
Moments that are meant to highlight the impoverished lifestyles of NPCs are always undercut by the stupidest Glibertian shit. People starving, living life under the freeway? How about a funny puppet show that also happens there? Abandoned malls and burnt out youth with nowhere to go? How about a teenage cult that uses a fucking iPhone app to convert teens so they enter a dead mall and build a fucking rocket ship? So much stupid shit happens in this game that I can say a statement like
"Sorry your mom died of cancer, if only she didn't need QuackCoin and didn't go see the SuperDuck then it would have all been okay!"
Without lying about a single goddamn thing that happens in Norco.
The game's willingness to undercut and serious plot beats with unrelatable goofy content indicates a lack of clear and consistent narrative direction. If it's trying to be surreal, it's not doing much beyond some cheap sight gags. If it's trying to be serious, then the whole damn thing's a clown show.
This isn't to say that narratives need to have one consistent tone to be effective--look at my favorite game for Christ sake. But what a great narrative needs is effective use of tone. If you're going to be wacky, do something interesting with it. If you're just going to make some basic and derivative Ron Gilbert gags, then I could have just spent my time playing Monkey Island. The greatest of games, will use moments of comedy and levity to disarm the player and endear them to the characters of the world in realistic ways. Think your Disco Elysium or Mother 2 types of games. Norco, by contrast, fails to do either. Instead I'm usually left scratching my head wondering just how funny do they think the 10 week old hot dog gag is. It understands Southern Gothic as much as any fourteen year old who just read A Good Man Is Hard To Find for the first time does.
Cyberpunk Hell
On the other end of that spectrum is the rest of Norco's tired influences, the cyberpunk dystopias of Blade Runner and Final Fantasy VII's Midgar. At this point, discussion of Blade Runner is itself so banal that I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader. But several visual motifs are directly ripped from the film, so it shouldn't take you long to see the comparisons line up. Norco, in its desperate attempts to strip everything from the kitchen cabinets, even shoves some half-baked Replicant theming into the game during its final moments.
As for Midgar...well I'm starting to feel the same as I do about Blade Runner. It seems creatives and fans point at Midgar as a cheap shorthand for dystopian influence far too often these days. Not to say that Midgar is a shoddily crafted locale--the place is great! But as with most great works, the devil is really in the details as to why its great. The PS1 original stunned the world with some of the best atmosphere, direction, and writing gaming had seen up to that point. Moreover, Midgar left players wanting more, as the short time spent there left a lot to the imagination. But with Norco, as with Final Fantasy VII: Remake, the finer details are all sacrificed in the name of some basic stylization and theming.
Which is a shame, Norco's art direction could have set the game up for serious success in the hands of the right writer/director. When the game isn't busy ripping motifs from Blade Runner it concocts some genuinely great atmospheres and visuals that do emphasize the setting well. It's just unfortunate that the settings also have to involve puppet shows and mall cults. It's unfortunately just another reminder that Norco was creatively reaching towards the bottom of the ideas barrel when building its world and narrative.
Is There Life In Norco?
Which brings me back to Norco's most important failing: relatability and authenticity. The world and characters of Norco are as foreign to me as those in Maniac Mansion or Beneath a Steel Sky. They're just too damn quirky and flat for their own good. Any time I genuinely try to get wrapped up in what's happening to Kay or her mom I have to deal with characters who end every sentence with bruh or have names like ditch man. I have to deal with characters who are hunting after crypto coins or are all named fucking Garrett for comedy purposes. I have to attend parties where characters dress like they're in Eyes Wide Shut or scale rocket ships designed like Byzantine fortresses because...that would be cool.
The real tragedy is the fact that any real point that could be made about Norco--you know the real city is left totally dead in the water. Any sort of authenticity to the real people of Louisiana or the American South as a whole gets washed away under a mountain of the brain-dead metaphors, bad ideas, and unfunny jokes that plague nearly all quirky indie games. It's doubly sad considering that the guy who made the game is himself from Norco. It's a reminder that simply being from a place doesn't mean you're always the best equipped to tell its story. I don't feel like I've learned fuck all about Louisiana, and I live just a couple of hours away from Norco.
I spent more time chasing cryptocurrency and cults than experiencing the true effects of life in the town. I spent more time driving a motorcycle with my (admittedly sick) robot companion than I did getting to really understand the people who lived there. I spent more time figuring out that I'm the fucking descendant of Christ himself than letting anything actually meaningful about Norco soak in. Virtually every environment, puzzle, and interaction was in service of either a dumb gag or a trite narrative twist that served no point beyond elevating a tired narrative that had nowhere to go.
And so, Norco leaves Norco to rot.
More than anything else, Norco feels like it uses the aesthetics of poverty for cheap indie game gravitas. It feels like the writers and fans are more into Canadian Post-Rock bands with run-on sentence names (that are actually cool references to 50s Japanese films you don't know) than they are into Dixieland or Swamp Rock. It feels like the last place on earth they'd actually want to be is Norco, LA. And in this sense, I truly hate this game. In trying to create something that gave players a taste of the modern southern condition, Norco utterly failed. Instead it gave them an amalgam of hyper-derivative influences and half-baked 'art' literature with cheap Christ symbology.
What really digs me is how many players will feel 'enlightened' after this when they might as well have been playing Red Alert 3 for their cold war history. I guess I'll still be looking for the game that Norco was supposed to be.
In Norco I saw something I rarely see in games: an exploration of places like home. Hailing from one of the poorest states in the American South (although Oklahoma's inclusion on that list is sometimes contentious), I've seen firsthand how economic evolution has slowly eroded the communities, homes, and spirits that once defined the great American Heartland.
Hell, as someone from these parts who's got an interest in art...these types of narratives have always fascinated me: the Southern Gothic of O'Connor or Faulkner, the Modernist treatments by Steinbeck and Ellison, etc. These stories take symbols familiar to us--family, faith, perseverance, community, fear, redemption, isolation, etc. and allow us to see alien groups (poor southern blacks, "Okies," American Indians, etc.) through understandable and sympathetic eyes. It allows us to see beyond the thick accents and rudimentary lifestyles and recognize the real human lives, struggles, and emotions behind it all.
So here we have Norco, which first appeared to me via a Tribeca Games Spotlight in 2021 next to other greats like 12 Minutes. The premise was perfect: Norco was one of those places many couldn't believe was real--one of those 'on the nose' symbols that you'd probably think came out of a bad book. But, like with much of the industrial south (as well as the northern Rust Belt), Norco is a sad fact of reality--one begging for artistic exploration. That might sound harsh, a sort of 'culture vulture' thing, but I mean it without a shred of irony. Just as Steinbeck had used the amalgam plight of real Okies escaping to California for The Grapes of Wrath, I think plenty of towns like Norco deserve to have stories told that push awareness to the greater public.
What's in an Opening?
But alas, within literal seconds of pressing start, Norco has already blown it. It's opening montage is perhaps the worst opening I have ever seen to a game--at least in terms of establishing mood, tone, and setting.
First, the game forces players to make narrative choices involving characters we have no understanding of. I don't know or care how well Kay slept based on their proximity to oil fields--I don't even know who the hell Kay is yet. I understand Kay is supposed to be a proxy for me, but I've just goddamn showed up here. I haven't absorbed the mood or tone of the game. I've got no attachment to anything yet and no headspace with which I can make a decision I give two shits about. In fact, I would say that even asking these of the player so quickly serves as a lazy cheat for the writers to avoid writing an actual mood setting hook. They instead rely on a basic player choice to invest you when you've got no reason or incentive to actually make choices yet.
Second, the game's godawful prose attempts to lure you in with some Mccarthy-esque delivery but bats your attention away with the same overwritten, over-precious exposition and framing that plague all beginner 'art' writers. Lines like
The war was a meme that set Albuquerque on fire.
Should make anyone roll their eyes (or laugh their ass off) as hard as the newest YA books should. Especially when literally moments later you're being forced to answer if you tried to fucking pray, sleep, or "forget" while hiding in a freightliner escaping the 'foot soldiers of a pop up junta.'
Remember: we're 35 seconds into this game.
To Point? Or Click?
Keeping in line with the laughably sophomoric opening, Norco decides to take so much influence from the most obvious sources that it destroys what little impact the game could have had left. Its point and click nature means that LucasArts (primarily Ron Gilbert's trademark blend of off-kilter black comedy) is front and center the entire journey. Combine this with Norco's bleak premise and you have a cocktail mix as good as Toothpaste and OJ.
Moments that are meant to highlight the impoverished lifestyles of NPCs are always undercut by the stupidest Glibertian shit. People starving, living life under the freeway? How about a funny puppet show that also happens there? Abandoned malls and burnt out youth with nowhere to go? How about a teenage cult that uses a fucking iPhone app to convert teens so they enter a dead mall and build a fucking rocket ship? So much stupid shit happens in this game that I can say a statement like
"Sorry your mom died of cancer, if only she didn't need QuackCoin and didn't go see the SuperDuck then it would have all been okay!"
Without lying about a single goddamn thing that happens in Norco.
The game's willingness to undercut and serious plot beats with unrelatable goofy content indicates a lack of clear and consistent narrative direction. If it's trying to be surreal, it's not doing much beyond some cheap sight gags. If it's trying to be serious, then the whole damn thing's a clown show.
This isn't to say that narratives need to have one consistent tone to be effective--look at my favorite game for Christ sake. But what a great narrative needs is effective use of tone. If you're going to be wacky, do something interesting with it. If you're just going to make some basic and derivative Ron Gilbert gags, then I could have just spent my time playing Monkey Island. The greatest of games, will use moments of comedy and levity to disarm the player and endear them to the characters of the world in realistic ways. Think your Disco Elysium or Mother 2 types of games. Norco, by contrast, fails to do either. Instead I'm usually left scratching my head wondering just how funny do they think the 10 week old hot dog gag is. It understands Southern Gothic as much as any fourteen year old who just read A Good Man Is Hard To Find for the first time does.
Cyberpunk Hell
On the other end of that spectrum is the rest of Norco's tired influences, the cyberpunk dystopias of Blade Runner and Final Fantasy VII's Midgar. At this point, discussion of Blade Runner is itself so banal that I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader. But several visual motifs are directly ripped from the film, so it shouldn't take you long to see the comparisons line up. Norco, in its desperate attempts to strip everything from the kitchen cabinets, even shoves some half-baked Replicant theming into the game during its final moments.
As for Midgar...well I'm starting to feel the same as I do about Blade Runner. It seems creatives and fans point at Midgar as a cheap shorthand for dystopian influence far too often these days. Not to say that Midgar is a shoddily crafted locale--the place is great! But as with most great works, the devil is really in the details as to why its great. The PS1 original stunned the world with some of the best atmosphere, direction, and writing gaming had seen up to that point. Moreover, Midgar left players wanting more, as the short time spent there left a lot to the imagination. But with Norco, as with Final Fantasy VII: Remake, the finer details are all sacrificed in the name of some basic stylization and theming.
Which is a shame, Norco's art direction could have set the game up for serious success in the hands of the right writer/director. When the game isn't busy ripping motifs from Blade Runner it concocts some genuinely great atmospheres and visuals that do emphasize the setting well. It's just unfortunate that the settings also have to involve puppet shows and mall cults. It's unfortunately just another reminder that Norco was creatively reaching towards the bottom of the ideas barrel when building its world and narrative.
Is There Life In Norco?
Which brings me back to Norco's most important failing: relatability and authenticity. The world and characters of Norco are as foreign to me as those in Maniac Mansion or Beneath a Steel Sky. They're just too damn quirky and flat for their own good. Any time I genuinely try to get wrapped up in what's happening to Kay or her mom I have to deal with characters who end every sentence with bruh or have names like ditch man. I have to deal with characters who are hunting after crypto coins or are all named fucking Garrett for comedy purposes. I have to attend parties where characters dress like they're in Eyes Wide Shut or scale rocket ships designed like Byzantine fortresses because...that would be cool.
The real tragedy is the fact that any real point that could be made about Norco--you know the real city is left totally dead in the water. Any sort of authenticity to the real people of Louisiana or the American South as a whole gets washed away under a mountain of the brain-dead metaphors, bad ideas, and unfunny jokes that plague nearly all quirky indie games. It's doubly sad considering that the guy who made the game is himself from Norco. It's a reminder that simply being from a place doesn't mean you're always the best equipped to tell its story. I don't feel like I've learned fuck all about Louisiana, and I live just a couple of hours away from Norco.
I spent more time chasing cryptocurrency and cults than experiencing the true effects of life in the town. I spent more time driving a motorcycle with my (admittedly sick) robot companion than I did getting to really understand the people who lived there. I spent more time figuring out that I'm the fucking descendant of Christ himself than letting anything actually meaningful about Norco soak in. Virtually every environment, puzzle, and interaction was in service of either a dumb gag or a trite narrative twist that served no point beyond elevating a tired narrative that had nowhere to go.
And so, Norco leaves Norco to rot.
More than anything else, Norco feels like it uses the aesthetics of poverty for cheap indie game gravitas. It feels like the writers and fans are more into Canadian Post-Rock bands with run-on sentence names (that are actually cool references to 50s Japanese films you don't know) than they are into Dixieland or Swamp Rock. It feels like the last place on earth they'd actually want to be is Norco, LA. And in this sense, I truly hate this game. In trying to create something that gave players a taste of the modern southern condition, Norco utterly failed. Instead it gave them an amalgam of hyper-derivative influences and half-baked 'art' literature with cheap Christ symbology.
What really digs me is how many players will feel 'enlightened' after this when they might as well have been playing Red Alert 3 for their cold war history. I guess I'll still be looking for the game that Norco was supposed to be.