Not a pixel adventure, but an obstinate child of “Kentucky Route Zero” and “Disco Elysium”.

The musty, willow-bound swamps of South Louisiana are metastasizing in all directions. For millions of years, these soulless puddles have watched the sun rise in the East, and will inevitably see it dive below the horizon for the last time. Then the swamps will boil, the living creatures teeming in them will turn to ashes, and darkness will descend on the world – viscous and unremitting – in which there is no place for either despair or regrets. The once bustling Earth will be enveloped in serenity.

No one knows when the time will come to pay for thousands of years of other people’s sins, so life is still in full swing. Factories are smoking the sky all over the United States, churning out plastic trinkets, crappy furniture, and sentient robots. Rebels are roaming the Great Plains, eager to use terror to overthrow the unwanted government.

Luddites are looking for the veins of the Internet and chopping them into a shapeless mass in order to doom humanity to information isolation. And the “Big Apple”, along with the entire Eastern seaside, turned into ruins, dozing under a blanket of radioactive ash. This world is plunging into timelessness. His past has lost all meaning, his present promises only bitterness, and his future remains in the shadow of an imminent apocalypse.

Kay has spent the last few years wandering around the United States. She hitchhiked from one dying outback to another, slept in the open air and rummaged through garbage dumps in search of food that had not completely rotted. Despite some inconveniences, all these years Kay was free – from her own memories, the outdated American dream and other people’s hopes.

But every whim has a price, so https://spincity-casino.co.uk/login/ by the beginning of the adventure game “Norco” Kay leaves his free life and returns to his father’s house. If earlier the sad ghost of his father wandered through his rooms, now he was joined by his mother, who until the last pretended that cancer could not break her. But metastases gripped the heart of this restless woman before she met the prodigal daughter.

In essence, Kay returns to what she desperately fled from – the ruins of a family that has never known happiness. And these cold firebrands sleep in Norco, an industrial suburb of New Orleans. A place with a couple of hundred houses that have survived more than one flood and are now reeking of dampness has lost all hope. It is alive solely because of the plant, which is spread across the area like a stinking wound. A little more and Norko will give up the ghost.

"Norco" has a structure familiar to point-and-click adventure games. The locations contain characters of varying degrees of extravagance and optional points of interest about which Kay can express melancholic thoughts. And although the game’s mechanics cannot be called revolutionary, they ingeniously complement and distort the conservative genre.

“Norco” does not have the usual puzzles, and those that do exist are inextricably linked with the narrative and understandable logic, albeit distorted by external circumstances. Therefore, the main task of the game is to tell the story of a huge and strange world through a dying industrial town and a handful of its inhabitants who have never known love.

Situations alternate regularly, almost turning events inside out. Developers juggle with interfaces, presentation of visual and text images, and also regularly introduce new mechanics. As paradoxical as it may sound, despite the severity of the moldy air, the journey through the Louisiana swamps remains fresh and unpredictable until the very end.

Among other things, Norco takes the idea of ​​“High Tech, Low Life” to a new level. In the game’s universe, technology has come as close as possible to the usual cyberpunk – corporations produce intelligent robots, digitize consciousness and are preparing to conquer space. Humanity only needs to take a step to enter a new era in which, for example, there are the heroes of the adventure game “The Red Strings Club” (see. our text).

The beauty is that the wonderful world of the future is always on the periphery. The New Orleans neighborhood in which the action takes place represents the other side of cyberpunk, that very “lowland”. This is a God-forsaken backwater that is drowning in a huge swamp under the weight of its own regrets, and it does not need either high technology or faith in the future. The only thing that is valued in these parts is people crippled by life.

In keeping with William Faulkner’s novels, Norco explores human destinies using the environment solely as a scenic backdrop. It’s not visual images that rule the show, but the irrepressible imagination that permeates the local text. It is in it that all the melancholy of the American South lurks, for which even a hundred thousand years will not be enough to come to terms with defeat in the Civil War and its own decline.

In fact, the game takes place in two planes. One is personified by Kay, the second by her deceased mother. Events constantly switch from one heroine to another, pitting them against new acquaintances and eager to take them into the mysterious corners of the night. What is happening is so rapidly layered on itself that impermanence is perhaps the only unshakable thing in “Norco”.

But Kay, like any decent Revachol detective, leads political debates with his own tie (see. our text), woven from memories. They are reminiscent of a whiteboard in a police station, which is filled with details of an unsolved case, and allow you to refresh the essence of what is happening at any time. And by the end, it surprisingly turns out that almost every insignificant detail is an integral piece of an impressive puzzle.

“Norco” is the obstinate child of “Kentucky Route Zero” and “Disco Elysium”, which is fond of phantasmagoric images and lyrics full of despair. It is vaguely similar to a book in which illustrations are needed only for the surroundings, and the key ideas are hidden between the words, which peer into the echoes of cyberpunk, surrounded by crippled destinies and Louisiana swamps. And this child has neither past nor future – only a painful illusion of the present.