This review contains spoilers
I remember the first season of True Detective and how badly people wanted to unravel a complex mystery that involved the Deep State, time travel, sex cults, and aliens. The first eight or nine episodes teased it... and then it just sort of petered out. It was like being at a club when the lights come on and they herd you out with the "you don't have to go home but you can't stay here" cliche.
Norco is a game for those people - the ones who clamoured for some bizarre, absurdist, larger than life mystery to chase set against a Southern Gothic neo noir backdrop. But Norcp sort of does the inverse, where it builds and builds from slow neo noir potboiler to utterly insane cultist shenanigans, until it eventually ends on this seemingly unsatisfactory but largely personally emotional note.
By the end of this game things have escalated to Southland Tales levels of apocalyptic surrealism. And in such a way that the symbolism has boiled over to a point that feels either very meaningless or meaningful. Like the ending was either written first and everything leading up to it makes sense to the writer or at a certain point they kept spiralling things that they lost track of what they were trying to say.
The deep sense of lived in personality this game has shines brightest in the small details and small areas. Your home and Blake's room; the local street and bar; any time the world map opens and you see the refineries, swamps and highways dotting the distance. By the time you get to plantations and rocket ships in the swamp, things lose that personal touch. Although one still gets the the feeling that this precise level of surrealism could only be born from someone who grew up in this area. Once you're jumping off a spaceship with your mum's corpse things sort rounded into place for me. I can't even articulate what those things are, just the emotionality of it hit me in the gut for some reason.
Kentucky Route Zero this isn't. I think this games loses a lot whenever characters have to talk. The prose is maybe a little too precious. But any text in this game I think is quite poetic. Reminds me a lot of In Other Waters, where the colours and game art also really lift the text up and makes it feels presented as poetically as it is written. I just don't think this games contains any real people outside of Catherine (her sequences are the highlight for me). Everyone else feels like a crude stereotype, which is a shame but not a deal beaker for the game it ultimately ends up being and not what it seems at the beginning.
Norco is a game for those people - the ones who clamoured for some bizarre, absurdist, larger than life mystery to chase set against a Southern Gothic neo noir backdrop. But Norcp sort of does the inverse, where it builds and builds from slow neo noir potboiler to utterly insane cultist shenanigans, until it eventually ends on this seemingly unsatisfactory but largely personally emotional note.
By the end of this game things have escalated to Southland Tales levels of apocalyptic surrealism. And in such a way that the symbolism has boiled over to a point that feels either very meaningless or meaningful. Like the ending was either written first and everything leading up to it makes sense to the writer or at a certain point they kept spiralling things that they lost track of what they were trying to say.
The deep sense of lived in personality this game has shines brightest in the small details and small areas. Your home and Blake's room; the local street and bar; any time the world map opens and you see the refineries, swamps and highways dotting the distance. By the time you get to plantations and rocket ships in the swamp, things lose that personal touch. Although one still gets the the feeling that this precise level of surrealism could only be born from someone who grew up in this area. Once you're jumping off a spaceship with your mum's corpse things sort rounded into place for me. I can't even articulate what those things are, just the emotionality of it hit me in the gut for some reason.
Kentucky Route Zero this isn't. I think this games loses a lot whenever characters have to talk. The prose is maybe a little too precious. But any text in this game I think is quite poetic. Reminds me a lot of In Other Waters, where the colours and game art also really lift the text up and makes it feels presented as poetically as it is written. I just don't think this games contains any real people outside of Catherine (her sequences are the highlight for me). Everyone else feels like a crude stereotype, which is a shame but not a deal beaker for the game it ultimately ends up being and not what it seems at the beginning.