NORCO ANDROID

There are occasional puzzles where you might have to find an item and give it to someone or traverse the innards of a building in the pitch-black darkness by selecting different text prompts. This functions as a journal of sorts, giving you an easy way to revisit information and add new revelations as you uncover them. You'll spend much of the game navigating each panel of the game's gorgeous pixel art, clicking around each scene to interact with objects in the environment, speak to people, and piece together memories and new ideas using dialogue choices in Kay's mindmap. It might be a point-and-click adventure game, but it eschews many of the genre's historic conventions, while still remaining innately familiar.

Mechanically, Norco is quite simple, as everything exists to serve the narrative. Even in its darkest moments there's enough levity to pull you out of the mire.

There's a warmth and compassion that emanates from its characters and prevents the story's inherent despair from becoming too overbearing. For all of Norco's melancholy and sense of hopelessness, it's a genuinely funny game. The Garretts, meanwhile, are a cult-like gang of disillusioned youths who evolve from their early 'Mall Nazis' moniker to become a band of miscreants simply seeking a sense of community in their own roundabout way. Private investigator Brett LeBlanc is a particular highlight his delusions of grandeur undercut by how much time he spends surveying the neighborhood while sitting on the toilet. The oddball cast of characters that accompany Kay on her adventure are all nuanced and empathetically human, whether you're with them for a matter of seconds or for a couple of hours. It's dark and whimsical, and frequently poetic. And the same is true of the other underlying themes Norco deftly tackles, whether it's religion, class divide, gentrification, materialism, capitalism, and so on.Īll of this works because the writing throughout is so wonderful. Climate change is a matter of fact and its effects are palpable. The game never comes across as preachy or condescending when exploring these issues. Many of its denizens have lost loved ones because of incidents caused by the oil refinery, either due to exploding pipelines or the environmental decay that a major industrial operation will inevitably induce. Norco is a town ravaged by frequent flooding and hurricanes. The dystopian elements are, instead, grounded in reality. There's the rotting corpse of a cockroach buried somewhere in the inner workings of the microwave in Kay's mother's kitchen the beat-up motorcycle out back in need of a fuse to get working again motels still equipped with landline phones a hot dog vendor desperate for someone to buy his decade-old sausages and a puppet theatre tucked beneath a busy overpass. Despite this, Norco's authentic mundanity makes it feel more like our current reality than any sci-fi dystopia.

NORCO ANDROID

It's set during some undetermined point in the near future, denoted by the sentient security android in the backyard and a clinical service that lets people upload their consciousnesses to a smartphone app.

Norco's setting and themes mesh the grotesque and magical realism of the Southern Gothic genre with science-fiction nihilism. There's also the matter of Kay's missing brother, who is nowhere to be found, spurring her into action as she embarks on a thrilling adventure across this small industrial slice of Louisiana. Kay arrives with some baggage, then, and it doesn't take long before she's saddled with her late mother's mysterious affairs, which revolve around her sought-after research and strange activity in the days leading up to her death. Kay has been gone for five years, preferring to drift around the United States rather than stay in Norco, despite the outside world being ravaged by localized wars. It provides a fascinating backdrop for a story that centers around Kay, a young woman returning to her childhood home after the passing of her mother-a curious former professor-due to cancer. Now Playing: Norco - Exclusive Gameplay Trailer By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's