💾 Archived View for appl.garden › play › norco.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:29:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-07-10)
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I wanted to play Kentucky Route Zero, but it was too expensive to just buy on a whim, so instead I played this.
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.
Yes, though admittedly this is no Disco Elysium. Norco has some interesting ideas: delapidated Southern US meets AI, cryptocurrency, the gig economy, weird fascist cults, aliens (maybe?), the setting alone is bound to produce something interesting. It has the right atmosphere, soundtrack, and characters (half of the time you play as a middle-aged mother of two, who earns a living by doing oddjobs to earn $QUACK, then stumbles upon a conspiracy - this was certainly interesting). Puzzles are sometimes clever and never too difficult. The main plot is wacky and weird and intriguing.
But... I don't know, for all of the interesting concepts it throws in, the story just isn't *that* special. Plus. I just can't help but compare the game to Disco Elysium, which has similar ~vibes~ but combined with much greater freedom of expression and world-building. Norco is an adventure game which lets you move around across the city, but interactions are pretty basic and only serve the main plot. This game could be condensed into a visual novel without really losing much. I do appreciate that the (very basic) combat was reversed for only a few short and special occasions. Overall, despite the premise, it's good but not great, *8/10*.
It's a 2D point-and-click game, so really not difficult to run on a laptop, that's no surprise. As for compatibility with Linux, it's hard to say because this was right around the time when I started testing the work-in-progress Wayland driver for Wine. The game worked at first, then just refused to work on Wayland afterwards until I enabled virtual desktop in `winecfg`. But I think that's just me making life harder for myself, it would probably work just fine with standard Wine.
Game finished 2023-05-01
gardenapple - 2023-06-23
