This piece will spoil a mid-game narrative reveal
I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville is the largest city by landmass in the contiguous United States, and reflects much of the rest of Florida in that it is a network of several small neighborhoods and suburbs connected by strands of interstate and forested roads. These converge on a nexus of a relatively small city-center planted firmly on the St. John’s river. For folks entering Jacksonville for the first time, they will often comment on the smell. The “Jacksonville Smell” is actually much better than it used to be: in the late 90s some of the greatest offenders, two paper mills and a sewage treatment plant were shuttered. However, the aging Maxwell House coffee factory and sulfur treatment plants still blanket downtown Jacksonville with an egg-y coffee scent on blustery days. Despite the odor issues being more or less “solved”, it remains a part of the city’s identity.
NORCO, the debut game by developer Geography of Robots, is deeply committed to the idea of industry as an inexorable force in the shaping and identity of a place and its people. In NORCO, players assume the role of Kay, a young woman who left her community of Norco, Louisiana to travel the United States and spend her early adulthood on the road. When news of her Mother’s death and her younger brother's disappearance reach her, she must return to Norco to mourn her mother, Catherine, find her brother, and confront her past.
In an interview with Renata Price of Waypoint, lead writer and developer on NORCO, Yuts, talks about the importance of oral history, the way it inspired some of the writing and the narrative voice in the game, as well as its role in the identity of a space. Truly, a community is so often defined by its people and their stories. To understand a place is to understand its people who have lived and died there. Often, an easy pull for a joke is to poke fun at the person who finds themselves overwhelmed at the profundity of a city also being a “character” in a fictional work, or the concept itself. What’s often lost in this metacriticism is that personification of space comes from the depth of the actual characters. Great character work is formed in contrasts. Given enough, the negative space of setting settles into greater focus.
Serving as the background for the mystery at the heart of NORCO is the omnipresent Shield refinery that looms over the entire area. Clearly a reference to the Shell Corporation’s refinery that exists in the real-life Norco (a “census-designated place” in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, literally a shortening of the New Orleans Refining Company after the Shell Corporation purchased the land in the early 20th century), Shield’s refinery exists in a strained relationship with Norco and its people, providing both jobs and income while simultaneously a symbol (and perhaps, an even more direct culprit) of the climate change and environmental impact that is slowly creating unlivable conditions for the area. The march of technology also means increasing automation not just for the refinery, but for the surrounding area, automating all but the most specialized people out of their jobs.
NORCO isn’t content to simply reflect the way that we currently understand the way that industry becomes part of our cultural history, however. In the beginning of the game’s second act, the Neural Versioning Clinic is introduced, where people can submit to scans of their brain, creating an AI backup of their personality for their families to hold on to. Later, a Task Rabbit gig app is revealed to be a sort of “rogue” version of one of those AIs housed in a massive, sprawling being of a flesh and machine called “Superduck”. Superduck has transcended digital awareness and become something more; its biological components allowing it to create a biological network between all living things in the area. Superduck, while not the main villain or even the main source of conflict in NORCO’s narrative, is the symbolic backbone of the narrative. Much like Superduck exists as metal and flesh, the community exists as both industry and the natural world.
Of course, while much of NORCO’s content would paint it easily as an anti-capitalist game, it provides no big showdown with the oil refinery, or a villain as simple as a gas CEO to be toppled. NORCO is much more interested in the conflicts that stem from the conditions created by decades of natural exploitation. The villains of NORCO are as abstract as they are interesting. How does one protagonist fight their way out of the emotional distance created by a childhood filled with financial stress and house floods brought on by climate change? You can’t punch a drug addiction brought on by the pressure to remain competitive, but you can punch the person with the drug problem. NORCO is very aware of these problems, and asks you to empathize with some truly loathsome people. Not because “they’re good, actually”, but because their actions and attitudes are a product of a huge network of societal and economic conditions, inextricable from the land that birthed them, like the waterways and natural systems that make up what’s left of the bayou.
One section of NORCO involves a shadow puppet show where the puppeteer tells the story of a fisherman who loses his pet alligator after she escapes during a flood. Later, the alligator tells him that, should he bring her the skull of the shrimper who murdered her children, she will allow him to leash her once more. Should the player have the fisherman fulfill her wish, she kills him anyway, stating that she refuses to ever be leashed again. I see this story as a power fantasy – the ability to see so clearly the leash around one’s neck and the opportunity to seize the agency to break that chain. As the Earth warms and income inequality grows ever larger, I should hope that we are all as lucky as the alligator.