Norco is a Southern Gothic point & click narrative adventure that immerses the player in the sinking suburbs and verdant industrial swamps of a distorted South Louisiana. Your brother Blake has gone missing in the aftermath of your mother's death. In the hopes of finding him, you must follow a fugitive security android through the refineries, strip malls, and drainage ditches of suburban New Orleans.
One of the best story-based games of the year, with a complex mix of dystopian sci-fi, religious meditation, and a razor-sharp script.
In fact, the only area where it lets itself down is the UI. Games that use a cursor on console are starting on the back foot to begin with, but navigating what you can interact with is a particular nuisance in Norco. The cursor is fond of resetting, so you have to drag it all the way across the screen often, it's very easy to accidentally repeat dialogue...
Norco takes the point n' click adventure to a despair-stained new plane. I've never been so happy to feel unhappy as I did living in this tech-noir graveyard of a world.
This award-winning single-person adventure, set in a run-down refinery town, is full of compelling mysteries
This pairing of humans and the natural world up against a common antagonist, not necessarily as allies but as common victims, makes it clear how intimately Norco is tied to the swamps, valleys and fields that surround it. This interconnection between individuals with little in common on the surface but a shared place and history is where “Norco” locates...
