Adventure game Norco draws on life in the American South post-Katrina

In 2012 I spent a few days in New Orleans while hitchhiking across the American South. The city delivered exactly what I expected: wooden town houses with front porches, trees trailing Spanish moss like sea monsters, jazz bars disgorging partygoers and blue notes into the French Quarter. What I hadn’t anticipated was how much visible devastation would remain seven years after Hurricane Katrina: collapsed buildings, swampy streets, a dirty brown streak marking the high-water line just below the roof of an Evangelical church. The waters had mostly receded, but the scars remained on both the city’s geography and its psyche.

These same scars were the inspiration for Norco, a new point-and-click adventure game that won the inaugural Games Award at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Its name and setting reference the real town of Norco, Louisiana, home of lead developer Yuts, who grew up in the shadow of a Shell oil refinery that exploded during his childhood in 1988, damaging his house. Following Katrina, he wanted to make a work that explored life on the margins in his state, where people try to find meaning in a brief lull between cataclysmic disasters; natural, industrial and cosmic.

In a warring, near-future US, you play Kay, returned from an itinerant life to her hometown following the death of her mother, who was investigating suspicious activities at the local oil company. The game plies players with a steady flow of alluring mysteries: where did your brother go? What did your mum find in the lake? Why is there circuitry hidden behind the face of the Virgin Mary statue in your front yard?

More than anything, you’ll want to learn more about this fascinating world which, despite its robots and biomechanical birds, feels like a deeply authentic evocation of the South, made relatable by its accretion of environmental details and the quirky behaviour of its characters.

Though it seems distinctly retro in the age of epic open-world blockbusters, the humble point-and-click adventure game has given us two of the most brilliant games of the past decade, Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium. These occupy a continuum with Norco, all three offering brilliant writing, memorable characters and a penchant for using magical realism to reflect insightfully on our own world.

Norco’s writing nods to Southern Gothic authors such as William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy alongside genre writers Raymond Chandler and William Gibson. Looking at a vehicle in your garden, you are told: “This truck was your grandfather’s. You remember riding in his lap while he let you steer. The dead wasps that collected behind the seat. The smell of grease, whiskey and nicotine.” This terse, stylish language is studded with sharply observed local vernacular and occasional bouts of impressionistic poetry whose adventurous metaphors only rarely stray into purple prose.

You encounter climate catastrophe, mistrust of the media, apps that prey on poverty and cults that promise to make sense of it all

Several narrative beats are deeply poignant. At one point, perspective switches to Kay’s dying mother, who is using a technology that stores her consciousness to pass down to her children. As she recounts her life to a clinician in vignettes, the player must decide which memories should be saved or deleted. Do you keep the first time she told her husband that she didn’t love him? What about the reflection of the refinery fires in his eyes that night?

If it all sounds sombre, the game leavens its storytelling with plenty of wackiness and wry humour. There is a character whose purest pleasure is listening to Christmas music all year round and a detective who wears clown make-up as a fashion choice. A cat on a bookshop counter will, if stroked repeatedly, purr so ecstatically that it flies into the air, crashing through the ceiling. One memorable scene involves an out-of-town director filming a “bayou cop drama” in Norco. He demands that you, as a local, provide authentic Southern slang. Prank him by saying that you don’t say “murder” but instead say “slather ’em with oyster-flavoured peanut butter” and he laps it up.

The point-and-click gameplay gives Norco a cosy throwback quality, as do the pixel-art graphics which are wonderfully surreal and often painterly. Yet there is also a steady stream of new ideas: turn-based battles, memorisation minigames, a staring contest with a stuffed monkey and a mythical voyage through a swamp to avenge a wronged crocodile. The game’s chief pleasure is its ability to constantly surprise players through its six-hour runtime, particularly as the story strays into wild metaphorical territory in its closing act.

For all its retro trappings and absurdist storylines, this is a game whose concerns remain distinctly modern and frighteningly real. You will encounter climate catastrophe, mistrust of the media, apps that prey on poverty and cults that promise to make sense of all this chaos. Each theme is grounded by the game’s distinctive, flawed and hilarious characters, who find moments of connection and grace despite it all. It makes for a joyous and sobering voyage along the periphery of the great American left-behind.

Available for Mac and PC from Steam, and currently on PC Game Pass