Spoilers for NORCO ahead.
“Call me when you can… Getting worried… Kay? Blake says he hasn’t heard from you. Really getting concerned. Please call… They put me on another round of chemo. Would love to hear from you. Call?”
These are the last text messages Catherine Madère sent to her daughter Kay, the main playable character of NORCO, a point-and-click narrative adventure game by Geography of Robots. Catherine would pass away soon after. Kay, who threw her phone in the Rio Grande, never got to say goodbye.
While playing NORCO, I found myself coming undone at the seams. Even with the sci-fi setting, cyborgs, and strange sentient orbs, the game came eerily close to my lived experience as an Arab/Muslim who once lived in Arkansas.
But let’s back up. NORCO is a game about confronting grief, trauma, and the powers that be by revisiting the past in order to move forward. In the game you play as Kay, who returns to her hometown of Norco, Louisiana following the death of her mother to cancer and the disappearance of her brother Blake. The town is almost completely controlled by the Shield Oil Corporation (inspired by Shell Oil, which controls the Norco area in the real world).
Shield pollutes the town and muscles in on residents’ properties, creating an inhospitable living environment for its population. The town Kay returns to is almost deserted, and the few who are left are struggling to get by. Drug addiction, poverty, and pollution ravage the community. It’s no wonder Kay left in the first place. Despite it all, she trudges forward to find out where her brother went and what her mother was up to in her final weeks of life.
I grew up in a small town surrounded by racist politicians stripping away people’s rights, high schools with slave owners for mascots, and struggling people ravaged by poverty and the opioid epidemic. The issues presented in NORCO are ones I know intimately. With everything so ever-present in my day to day as an Arab/Muslim person, it’s no wonder I left in the first place. As sad as it might sound, I’ve never played a video game expecting to have my experience represented, especially my personal history growing up in the south. For better or for worse Kay is me and I am Kay both in her situation and her avoidance of her problems. The textures, sounds, and realities of my life translated into pixel art left me unsteady.
NORCO, like any good piece of sci-fi, fills its dystopian portrayal of our future with some unique pieces of tech that make us question how we got to this point. One such example is the Head Drive, a way for dying people to store their memories away for their loved ones to access at a later date. Of course, like everything in the world of NORCO, even this seemingly meaningful development is contaminated by capitalism. Malware and strange Internet advertisements corrupt the Head Drive, which in turns corrupts the image of the person we once knew. Despite this it gives Catherine, via the player, the chance to choose her memories. We get to decide which pieces of Catherine’s life should be preserved or erased. How do we want to be remembered? What is better left forgotten? Despite my initial hesitation I couldn’t help but pick to save everything, no matter how ugly or painful. Too much of the pain and tragedy brought on by the system gets pushed down, and it felt wrong to forget it just because it would be easier.
Unlike Kay and Catherine, I’ve never been willing to remember or go back. After I turned 18, I moved away for college and never gave my old life a second thought. I’ve spent most of my life as an adult going out of my way to forget it all: I deleted every old picture of me I have; I remade social media accounts; I even lost touch with family and friends. The list goes on from there. Six years away and suddenly, playing this game, many of the traumatic memories and struggles that I refused to acknowledge came flooding back, much like they did for Kay.
Throughout the game, multiple characters refer to people like Duck and Leblanc, individuals who Kay supposedly should know but can’t seem to remember. Even the robot Million who serves as your companion for much of the game comments at how surprising it is that Kay doesn’t remember Duck. As you enter Kay’s mind map of characters and places, Duck is blurry and unclear. Kay is confused by her own incapacity to recall these important people. When you finally find and greet Duck you see a man on his last legs who has also lost people he cared for, like a man named Reece. When you offer your condolences, Duck says “It’s history. Most days I can’t remember his face, if I’m honest.”
My uncle passed away from cancer over five years ago. I can’t remember the last time I spoke his name. It’s strange how it feels foreign on my tongue, how more and more my image of what he looked like and the things he did fades from my memory. My mind map is blurred, and like Kay, I can’t tell how much of it is my own refusal to remember the pain, and how much of it is my brain’s reflexive defense mechanisms. So many conversations I wish I had done differently, and all I can make out are the things I regret saying or not saying. Most days I can’t remember his face, if I’m honest. But I don’t want to be.
Close to the very end of the game you take Kay through a series of rooms in her childhood home where different people from her past come to her, and both Kay and these characters get to say what they previously couldn’t to one another. In the living room, you sit down next to your mother Catherine and she breaks down. “I wish you’d have come just a little sooner. I thought maybe we’d have breakfast or something. I actually dreamed about it,” she says as she takes your hand. You are given two dialogue options, but one stood out a little more to me.
“I wanted to.”
She smiles. “That’s what I’d hoped. Just that you wanted to.” She hugs you awkwardly and kisses you on the forehead before wiping her tears on her sleeve. As bittersweet as this moment is, you dread your own realization that it’s likely some sort of dream sequence. A wish that can only be fulfilled in your mind. Your chance to hear these words and say the right thing back are gone; these moments have passed.
There are many different endings that can be achieved in NORCO. However should you achieve the “family reunion” ending like I did, where you escape with your brother Blake, you will be greeted with this text at the end of the game:
“You fight your mom’s arm away and kick towards the water’s surface. When you emerge, you see your brother on a nearby island, running like a hunted animal into the night. You swim towards him, claw your way onto the mud, and chase him towards the refinery that burns on the horizon.”
No matter what ending you get, the story always ends with more questions than solutions, as you and other characters try to deal with the situations they find themselves in. NORCO didn’t give me an easy answer to solving grief, trauma, or systemic violence. It only showed me that despite it all, I have to keep running, keep living. To remember the things I’d rather forget, because someone has to. Things feel more and more dire every day, and as bleak as it might all seem, we have to continue being there for each other. Sometimes choosing to heal and facing reality when it would be easier to look away is the resistance that’s needed. Regardless of whether or not the world is past the point of no return, there will always be people who need help. It’s on every single one of us to make existence as livable as possible even when the powers that be continue to set things on fire. Whether it be our pain or our joy, everything is lit ablaze. The least we can do is keep running forward, even if we’re tripping through debris on all fours.
Every regret we have is an instance of grief – a fleeting moment where we mourn the death of a timeline that can no longer happen. A world where our cities aren’t ravaged by capitalism and pollution, or one where we can respond to someone’s texts and tell them we love them before they’re gone. The powers that be will continue to bombard us with more trauma and more regrets, and yet we have to continue if only for the memory of who came before us, just like Kay and Blake. Sometimes it’s all we can do. NORCO refuses to forget the people who are left behind when the worst happens, and neither should we. Who knows what the future holds, but the sun will keep rising and we will continue to grieve and life will go on.
