Norco Review: Losing What’s Already Lost

My father suffered a brain-stem injury that was supposed to kill him when I was twelve. The doctors gave him pretty much no hope of survival. They were wrong, he lived, but after that he wasn’t himself anymore. The injury robbed him of most of who he was. There were still hints of the father I grew up with, but it was like being around a specter, an echo of who he had been. It was hard to see him like that, it made me depressed, so as I got older, I found excuses to avoid him. It wasn’t hard. Even before the injury, we had a complicated relationship due to his addictions and struggles in life. He was never the dad I wanted him to be, he never made me and my brother a priority in his life, even if he did just enough to show he cared about us.

When he finally died in 2018, 17 years after that injury which was supposed to kill him, I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel. I’d barely been in his life for a decade, a choice I don’t necessarily regret, but which I questioned hundreds of times in those years and which I’ll question for the rest of my life. A part of me always wanted some sort of closure to our relationship, though I know any hope of that died when I was twelve years old. He wasn’t capable of being what I needed him to be before that and he definitely wasn’t after.

A Complicated Relationship

I promise I’m getting to why I’m sharing this in a review of Norco. You see, our protagonist Kay had a complicated relationship with her mom.  She was never the mother Kay wanted her to be, always choosing strange hobbies, always emotionally distant, not so much a parent as a caretaker. She got Kay and her brother Blake to adulthood, but not much more. Blake has a lot of problems, though he’s been getting his act together a little bit in recent years, while Kay got out of her hometown of Norco, Louisiana, the first chance she had, hitting the road and getting involved in all kinds of causes and situations mostly to avoid going home.

She’s happy to stay away too, until she gets a call from Blake telling her that their mother is dead. Cancer has taken her away quickly, leaving no hope of reconciliation, no hope of mending what was broken, something that wasn’t going to happen anyway but which her death has destroyed any lingering hope of.

Sometimes You Have To Go Home Again

So Kay goes back to Norco, a small area on the outskirts of New Orleans. Back to the shack of a house where she grew up, where her bedroom sits untouched since she last lived there, where the house floods and the carpet is ruined every time they get a significant amount of rain. Back to the streets, she remembers, and the people who remember her, but she’s tried to forget. Her only goal seems to be to connect with her brother, who might still hold her leaving against her. Except he’s not there. There’s no sign of him, and nobody has seen him for a few days. Given his history of trouble and that they’ve just lost their mother, Kay isn’t going to just wait for Blake to show up. She needs to find him.

Norco goes to a lot of other places during its three acts. There’s a lot of commentary on growing up poor, the way computers and electronics are changing our lives, often for the worse, the way the environment is destroying our world. You spend a lot of time with a strange cult where everyone dresses like a Best Buy salesperson and everyone goes by the name Garrett.

A Twist On Reality

The world of Norco has a definite cyberpunk twist, with security robots simply a part of life and some technology that’s a long way from existing. Still, it’s always a world rooted in our own with connections to real issues, and we never get too far from Kay’s family history, which is the driving force of this entire game. Sure, some of what this cult is dealing with is interesting, but ultimately Kay just wants to find her brother and make sure he’s okay. On the way, she gets to explore a world so well realized and lived in that I could practically feel the perspiration on the back of my neck.

I can’t say Norco is a perfect game. I would have simply removed the combat from the game. It’s a strange combination of timing and memorization-based sequences which pop up rarely but don’t really add anything to the experience. Instead, they’re a distraction from Norco’s beating heart, the understanding of the sort of deep-seated pain that only those who are supposed to love us the most can really inflict on us. An understanding which goes beyond Kay and applies to other characters we meet as well, though several plot points involving periphery characters don’t seem to really achieve any resolution.

Conclusion

I’m not sure I’ve ever related more to a character in a video game than I do to Kay. Our experiences aren’t identical, but her pain is mine, or at least it’s close enough that I can feel it. Norco isn’t able to fully give her the healing she’ll always want but never fully achieve, but its understanding of pain, loss, and the need to keep moving are a remarkable achievement which helped me process some of my own feelings as well. Any fan of adventure games should absolutely check it out.

Final Verdict: 4.5/5

Available on:  PC (Reviewed); Publisher: Raw Fury; Developer: Geography of Robots; Players: 1; Released: March 24th, 2022; ESRB: M for Mature; MSRP: $14.99

Full disclosure: This review is based on a retail copy of Norco.