I was a little worried Norco wouldn't be very much fun. The first from independent studio Geography of Robots, it's a dark game, a story about a region's bleak, collapsing future. And on the surface a serious one, too, with all its staid point-and-click vistas and dense blocks of prose. Serious is fine, of course. The seriousness of Norco's first act is exactly the type of thing that wins you features in the New Yorker and inaugural awards at Tribeca. It's just this type of seriousness can occasionally slip into something a bit self-regarding, a bit dour. But beyond Norco's initial, slightly po-faced outer layer is something odd and adventurous. Peevish. Occasionally quite funny. A playful spirit bouncing off its sharply political straight-edge.
Still, it takes some time to draw that out. Norco begins with you telling your own backstory, or if not telling then unearthing it, sorting through dialogue options to fill in blanks, as you will for much of Norco's six-ish hours of narrative. A brief, clever little late-game reference to one of my off-hand choices in this opening had me wondering how much this impacts - I suspect not much, and hope not much either, if only because I'm unnaturally keen to have Hoovered up every little drop of Norco's story.
The premise here is a world of industrial, environmental, and societal decay. Norco, Louisiana is a real place, settled on a part of the Mississippi delta surrounding a major Shell petroleum refinery. A kind of non-town named after the New Orleans Refining Company established there in 1911, video game Norco is closely inspired by the real thing (replace "Shell petroleum" with "Shield chemical"), with time skipped forward an unknown number of years to a point where the climate crisis has begun to pull the world apart. You, a rebellious, faceless teenage girl, have returned home to the news that your mother, a mercurial and dangerously curious former professor, has died of cancer, and your troubled brother disappeared. Naturally what follows is a mystery, but it's a deeply captivating one, a draining plughole dragging you down into the toxic muck of Norco's poisoned community.